Choosing a Country- Blog Buzz

This week's blog buzz question is How do I choose a country? With so many options, how do I even begin to narrow it down? Where do I start?

I think this is an awesome question and it is what I was asking myself for the last 6 months. Where do you start? Pray. I had some criteria for where we wanted to adopt from and I laid it out to God telling him what I wanted.... now I didn't get everything I wanted, but now looking back that's ok. For me, it's more that just which country is the cheapest, shortest travel, shortest wait time. I mean those things are definitely factors but I wanted to honor my child's country and her heritage. I asked God to show me a place where Paul and I could unite as a couple to be passionate about. I asked God to show me a country that had a true need for international adoptive parents. I asked God to show me a country that needed a Savior. I asked God to show me a country that had MANY opportunities for us to serve the people in Christ's name. God showed me Ethiopia.

So for a few weeks, after many prayers, Ethiopia kept popping up. EVERYWHERE. It was not the nice Latin American country I had hoped for so I decided to ask Paul what he thought. He was totally fine with adopting from Africa ( I kinda had hoped he wouldn't be so I could again focus on Latin America.) So then we decided to go to a Gladney Seminar to find out about all of the countries and their criteria before we decided to officially pick one. Now Gladney doesn't have ALL the countries but they have a lot and they definitely have the big ones. As we sat in the seminar, every other country did not work for us. EVERY ONE except Ethiopia. It was like it was a perfect fit. I stared at my sheet of papers with x's next to each country and how Ethiopia seemed to shine on the page.... I couldn't seem to deny it anymore.

Now I am in love with Ethiopia and couldn't even dream about adopting from anywhere else.

So what do you do? Go to different agency websites, compile a list of countries and criteria, pray, and figure out which one best fits your family. I hope that you remember that this is a country that you should honor for the rest of your child's life. Will God show you a country? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet He will put an incredible peace in your heart when you find the right one:)

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