First Post

This will be our official spot for those of you who would like to follow our adoption process. We are so excited about this. We sent out the following letter to our friends and family, and I thought I would post it here just in case we left anybody off.

Dear Friend:

Matt and I wanted to take the time to write to you and make sure that we brought each of you up to speed on what God has been doing in our lives. To some of you this may come as a complete surprise and others of you may have heard us talk about this already. We are writing to you because 1) we wanted to share something with you that we are very, very excited about, and 2) we need your prayers during this time.
When Robert (Matt’s father) passed away 4 years ago, the verse in James that talked about caring for widows and orphans was constantly on our minds. We meditated on what that scripture meant for us as far as Matt’s mother was concerned, and the Lord brought it to both of our minds continually. And it was only then that we began to look at the second character in that verse: “True religion is this that you care for widows and orphans.“ As we prayed, God would not allow us to forget that portion. So, we began to pray about what that was supposed to mean in our lives. Before we knew whether or not we could have children, we wanted to know if God was calling us to adopt. And he confirmed to us that he was calling us to adopt at some point.

After that confirmation, we laid that verse aside for several years. We had Josh, and then 8 months later, I was pregnant with the girls. Again, not a time to think about adoption. However, 6 weeks after the girls were born, I began to be bombarded with messages about adoption – every movie I watched, even down to being put on hold on a phone call and a message coming up about adoption. I approached Matt and told him that I was surely going crazy – this was some weird twisted form of baby blues, but asked if he would please pray about it, and Matt spent the next two days praying about it – and he came to me and said – “Yeah, it’s supposed to be now.” We spent the next month going through the Bible and reading what God had to say about adoption. Neither Matt nor I were prepared for the scope of Scripture in both the Old and New Testaments on the subject. And we realized that adoption is dear to the heart of our Father. For both Matt and me, realizing that was a defining moment in our journey. We realized that we were being called to adopt just as much for us and the body of Christ as we were being called to adopt for the sake of the child that God would bring into our lives.

So, the official journey began. We originally thought that we would adopt a child from overseas. It seemed to be a way to meet the vast need because of the number of international orphans. However, we then realized that to adopt overseas would cost a minimum of $32,000. If God was calling us to adopt now, then, since we had just bought our first house and Matt had just finished school, we knew we would have to borrow to even begin the process. Neither one of us felt like that was the route that God wanted us to take. So, we began to look into domestic adoption. As we prayed about what child the Lord would have us adopt, our greatest desire became to fill the need that is there, so we are so excited because we will probably be adopting a child of a different ethnicity than our own. This will present its own unique challenges as we seek to partner with other couples of our child’s birth race in order to teach our child things about his birth culture that we may not be as familiar with, but we also see it as a beautiful picture of the family of God. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, black, brown, or white. We count it as such a privilege that our earthly family will be able to present a small picture of the diversity that exists within the family of God.

So, why are we writing to each of you again?
1) You are our friends, a part of our lives, and we wanted you to be a part of this process with us even if the craziness of the past few years of our lives has put some distance between us.
2) I’m sure that as you’re reading this you are probably thinking that we are crazy for doing this right now. Please know that we understand that, and we have questioned the timing of this many times. And each time, the Lord has given us clear scriptural confirmation that we were to continue this process at this time. Please feel free to ask us about this in more detail, we’d be happy to share the Scriptures God has used to confirm this to us.
3) We need your prayers through this. This is frightening to us, and a major leap of faith. We do not know how God is going to provide all of this for us financially, emotionally, or physically. But, we do know that we have a big God. And we want you to be able to be amazed with us when he does provide for what he has called us to do. We wanted to let you journey with us as we see his faithfulness revealed in tangible ways.

We know that this process and journey that we have started on makes no logical sense from the standpoint of the age of our children, our financial situation, etc. But, we can’t wait to see how God throws the logic of this world into chaos and shows that he is in control.

So where are we now? We have filled out mountains of paperwork and paid in the first installments of money to the process. We have discovered that even though domestic adoption is less expensive, it is by no means cheap. We will be spending a minimum of $15,000 over the next year, maybe two. This is a major leap of faith for us, but where God is leading he will provide. The next step of this journey is that we will have a home study conducted; the first meeting (of three) is on April 7. After that, we will post our profile on the Bethany Web site and copies of our profile book will be shown by our social worker to potential birthmothers. And then, we wait. We could have a placement a month after that, or a year after that. It just depends. Also, when we do have a placement, the child will not legally be ours for 7 days because in NC birthmothers have 7 days to change their minds after signing the paperwork to terminate their parental rights. However, if we have a placement, and the birth mother does not change her mind after 7 days, we will have a new Lytle to introduce all of you to at that point.

I know this letter has been long. We love you all, and we hope you will pray for us as we take this journey.

Love in Christ,
Matt, Karen, Josh, Kathleen, and Karissa Lytle