Back in mid November Sam and I were asked to give talks in a special sacrament meeting of our congregation specifically about adoption. It was a heady experience for both of us to sit with our thoughts and all we have learned and been through in the last ten years since we adopted our youngest two kids from Ethiopia. It was a REAL struggle to contain my emotions both as I was writing my talk and as I delivered it. It was seriously hard. I’m really proud of time and authenticity and vulnerability I put into this piece and so I wanted a place for it to land on the interwebs. Here then is the entirety of my talk on adoption:

On January 26, 2010 Sam and I Ieft our five-year-old Sophie and six-year-old Simon to board a plane at SFO. We then traveled nearly 9000 miles to a continent we had never stepped foot on and to a city and country we knew little about: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the east coast of Africa. Four hours after we landed, we met our youngest two children for the very first time. Sadie was 10 months old and Sebastian was 8 months old.

The journey leading up to this moment of meeting our two new babies did not begin a year and a half prior as we went through the complicated process of an international adoption. It was not three years in the making when we discussed the actuality of adoption. It wasn’t even ten years in the making when we initially decided to grow our family through adoption. For me, this journey to Ethiopia began all the way back in 1990 when I was 15 years old. This was when my first inkling of an enormous leap of faith took root.

One night when I was 15 I had a dream that both saddened and comforted me. In the dream I was in my 30’s. I was pregnant and so happy. Then suddenly my baby passed away and my arms were empty. I remember now so clearly those feelings in the dream of sadness and despair. A short while later, someone placed a baby in my arms and just like that I had adopted. This was now my child and I was its mother. My arms were full. I woke up from the dream crying, feeling so overwhelmed with feelings and images that were foreign to my 15-year-old mind. I held on to those feelings when a few months later I received my patriarchal blessing and knew without a doubt that one day I would adopt. I didn’t know how or when; at that point in my young life I didn’t even know someone who had adopted or was adopted. But the impression to adopt was so strong that I knew it would come to pass. Years later after significant fertility challenges I would give birth to Simon and then Sophie. I quietly tucked that dream of adoption and those impressions away for later. I became pregnant a third time and just like in my dream, lost that baby. I was devastated. Nearly three years after that loss, Heavenly Father connected us to our two children born to mothers on the other side of the world. Not one but two babies were placed in my arms, carried on my hips and woven into the final fabric of our family. We were now a family of six and our two new babies were welcomed with all the love, support and excitement you can possibly imagine. A leap of faith that had rooted at the age of 15 became realized twenty years later in a more full and spectacular way than I could have ever imagined.

I believe that the act of creating a family is always a leap of faith. For many, this simply begins with the leap of faith to marry. Next it is how to build a family; does pregnancy happen easily or is it fraught with infertility struggles? Does fostering children become the path towards creating a family or is it through surrogacy or possibly adoption? If adoption becomes the chosen path, is it through domestic adoption or international adoption? There is no one right and best way to build a family; each of us in this room is the product of a different family unit and all of us have created our families through a variety of ways. There is a beautiful quote by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller which reads “It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons”. I would further amend that to read “mothers and daughters, brothers and sisters”.  Family is not determined by matching skin color or inherited traits. It IS determined most importantly by love, by heart, by commitment, by shared purpose and by hard work.

So what exactly is a leap of faith? It is having trust or confidence in a direction you have never walked before. It is literally stepping off the path you were on and walking into the unknown with a degree of certainty that you are on the right track even if you are unsure of the next steps. Adoption and indeed all versions of parenting and family building are leaps of faith. Hugh Piccock of the Quorum of the Seventy once said that, “It will be a rare decision indeed when all of the data in perfect clarity is apparent before the decision is made. Some of our greatest growth comes from the mind stretching exercise of filling in where information is not available and weighing that which is incomplete. Sometimes, there must simply be a leap of faith”.

A leap of faith is not blind or irrational. It is a leap strengthened by time, thought, careful consideration and eventually certainty. We read in Hebrews 11:1 that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. As I said before, I have experienced no greater leap of faith in my life than the building of our family and particularly, the journey to bring Sadie and Sebastian into our family. Our four children were all hoped and prayed for and yet we did not know how, when or from where they would come to us.

A few days after we landed back in the US with our babies, I needed to go shopping to pick up more clothing for Sadie. I drove to the store with Sophie and Sadie in the backseat, Sophie excitedly tending to her new baby sister. As I parked the car I was suddenly overwhelmed with fear. I was so nervous about how people would react to me, a white woman pushing a black baby in a stroller. Would someone say something unkind to me? Would I be judged for adopting? If my new baby cried or was upset while we were in public would I be thought less of for not being able to soothe her? Would the three of us be judged or questioned for how we all fit together? This was my first time out in my community with one of my new babies and I was literally paralyzed by fear of the unknown. All of my worries about not being enough for my new baby daughter came to the forefront of my mind and completely clouded my confidence. After sitting nervously for several moments I knew that I needed to just get out of the car, load Sadie into the stroller, take Sophie’s hand and GO. Just get on with it. In a way, it was both a small and large leap of faith just getting out of the car and walking into the store with my two daughters. And you know what? That day in the store, Sadie and Sophie were the star attractions. Every single person in the store came to coo at my baby daughter, asking her name and how old she was, congratulating me on our adoption, congratulating Sophie on becoming a big sister, asking questions about what Ethiopia was like, marveling at the beautiful site of two sisters. It was like the universe telling me that once again, this leap of faith was going to be alright. It would be bumpy and there would be challenging times…but we were going to be just fine. We had leapt and landed and it was going to be alright.

A leap of faith always lands with a ripple effect. To every action a reaction, a consequence not only for you personally but often for those in your orbit both near and far. In the case of adoption, the leap of faith exists in two parts; the part of the birth parent and the part of the adoptive parent. For a birth mother to make the agonizingly difficult decision to place her child into a home and a family she herself cannot provide calls for a tremendous leap of faith on her part. The strength and fortitude of a birth mother can never be underestimated nor overlooked. She is literally placing her child in the arms of another to be cared for and loved and raised in a way she herself cannot do. What an incredible leap of faith. There is a beautiful quote I have long admired which reads “A child born to another woman calls me mom. The magnitude of that tragedy and the depth of that privilege are not lost on me”. The leap of faith for an adoptive parent is different but no less challenging. They pledge to bind themselves to their child they did not give birth to, perhaps born in another country under very different circumstances than they are accustomed to. The new relationship that forms between parent and child sits on top of loss, vulnerability and pain. The adoptive parent cannot remove that loss but must work to build new pathways of safety, love and health where loss is still a part of the equation. The leap of faith for the adoptive parent requires an understanding that it may take time for their child to bond to them, to feel the fabric of family fully realized. This can be an overwhelming process. Despite these challenges on both ends of the adoption equation, I always tell people that adoption is not hard. Parenting is hard. Being a good parent, a great parent is REALLY hard. Regardless of how your children come to you, parenting them is a daily leap of faith, an exercise in patience, humility, resilience and most importantly, love. The ripples of this adoption leap of faith fan out to touch extended family members, friends, co-workers and complete strangers as conversations happen that would have never been realized before, ideas form from new places of understanding and empathy take root and an example of how a family can be formed are discussed and pondered by those in your midst. A leap of faith always lands with a ripple effect.

In July 2010, five months after we returned home from Ethiopia, we sealed Sadie and Sebastian to us in the Jordan River Temple. Our four children were all present for this special ordinance that tied us to each other for all eternity. During this beautiful ceremony I looked at Sam and each of our children and knew that we were now a complete family; everyone was present and accounted for. I knew that this family arrangement had been ordained in heaven long before any of us came to earth. I also knew that I had made promises to both Sadie and Sebastians birth mothers before we came here. I had promised that we would find their babies and we would become their parents and raise them with all of the love and support and structure that they would need. I believe that we bound ourselves to one another and that Simon, Sophie, Sadie and Sebastian were always going to be brothers and sisters raised together by me and Sam. This was always going to be the arrangement; we just had to take the leap of faith to make it happen.

There are children throughout our country and around the world in need of parents, in need of families. Within our own country there exist many opportunities to either foster children or adopt…or a combination of both. Around the world there are thousands upon thousands of children waiting and in need of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. Children need the structure, love and security of a family, of parents. In these countries, while the first and best option is always for a child to remain with their birth family, sometimes due to poverty, political instability, illness or extreme lack of resources this is not possible. There becomes a tender and vulnerable gap where children are then placed and where adoption comes in. According to UNICEF, there are approximately 153 million children classified as orphans worldwide. Each day an estimated 5700 more children become orphans. Further, there are roughly 400,000 children in the United States foster care system today. These numbers are sobering to read and overwhelming to think about. Please let those numbers sink in for a moment.

Proverbs 3:5-6 reads “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not into thine own understanding. In all thy ways, acknowledge him and He shall direct thy paths”. Heavenly Father began to direct my path towards my children when I was 15 years old. He had a plan for me and Sam and for our four children. He knew the obstacles we would face and the miles we could need to cross in order to bring all four children into our family. He gave me just enough information at a time to lead me down the path to adoption. I never had the full complete picture; just enough to keep walking. The greatest lessons in my life have been learned in being a mother. I have learned additional hard won lessons in being a mother to children I did not give birth to. I have learned about loss, answered very hard questions without happy answers, had my heart stretched and pulled and expanded, woven braids and cornrows into my daughters hair that I never thought I would master, and have witnessed the full meaning of Martin Luther Kings famous phrase that dreamed one day “little black boys and little black girls will join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers” within my own family. Some of you sitting here today have felt a stirring in your heart about adoption. Some of you have wondered, prayed, questioned and discussed whether this is something you are called to do. You may have seen our family or families built like ours and thought, “I wonder if I could do that”. Pay attention to that stirring in your heart and to those thoughts that come into your mind. Those feelings, that stirring is not manufactured from your own mind; these are impressions given to you by your Father in Heaven. If you are called to it you will be strengthened for it. There are so many reasons, opportunities and moments in life to say ‘yes’, to walk off the path that feels comfortable and well trod onto one that is unknown. It is my prayer that you may open your heart to the possibility of a tremendous leap of faith.