China Adoption

The Gresham's Story:Steven Curtis Chapman

Our story is a little unique. Pat and I already have four biological children. We had talked about adoption from time to time, but since we were able to have biological children we never really considered it seriously. He and his mom talked about it often, but again we had our own children and at one point "decided" that four was quite enough.

Three years ago my eldest daughter (now 15) attended a Steven Curtis Chapman concert. (In case you don’t know, he is a contemporary Christian artist who himself has 3 adopted children from China) When she came home from this concert, all she could

talk about was adoption. Apparently they did a little presentation during the concert and she was clearly "touched." I was very quick to say "that’s very nice honey, but we can’t afford to do that," and quickly dismissed her enthusiasm as residual emotion from an emotionally charged concert. Little did I know that she began praying about the situation?

Fast forward 2 years later. Getting discouraged after some time in prayer without seeing an answer, my daughter decided to "give it up." She figured that she had 2 brothers and 1 sister already and she knew that her parents were on a budget to make ends meet. There's no way it could ever be possible, she thought. She had no idea that the Lord had already begun to work on Pats heart.

One day Pat felt led to look up adoption on the web during his down time at work. Soon he began to plow through website after website reading peoples adoption stories and about the individual requirements for each country. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months of research. Tax-credits, grants, employee assistance, you name it.....he researched it. He felt that the Lord was leading him to this awesome endeavor, but did not feel led to express his feelings about this to me just yet.

Meanwhile our fourteen year old begins to feel a renewed desire to pray again about her family adopting........

As I reflect on how this all came about, I am amazed at the way the Lord put this all together. I was absolutely clueless as to what was going on with my husband and daughter! As my daughter prayed, and as my husband prayed and researched, I began to experience some things myself. (more...)

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