As many of you know we’ve always wanted a family, and we found out a few years ago that Mike is unable father children. We’ve wanted to receive the family that God gives us, rather than ‘making’ it happen by our own will. The Lord promised Abraham a family, but Abraham and Sara were unwilling to wait for God’s timing and took it into their own hands; that didn’t turn out very well.

So, we’ve waited until we saw the Lord clearly providing for us; and we now feel that this is happening. And we’re very excited about it.

We are going to adopt!

A lot of our friends have adopted, so now we get to share in those experiences. 🙂

Our adoption is a bit different from most others, because we are going to adopt an embryo.

Here’s how that works: couples like ourselves create embryos by in-vitro fertilization; most of these embryos are implanted into the mother; some are not implanted and are frozen; families then choose to donate those frozen embryos to couples like us.

This means that Olga will give birth to our adopted child.

We’ve just finished our home study and are now waiting for the adoption agency, Nightlight, to match us with a donor family. We expect that sometime in the first half of next year we’ll transfer the embryo into Olga.

One possible outcome is that we might have twins, since multiple embryos are transferred in order to help assure that pregnancy will result. We’ve always wanted twins, so it would be great if that were to happen.

If you’d like to know more about the program you can visit here.

The Lord continues to surprise us and lead on a very interesting path. We’re very thankful for His guidance and provision.

Here are some specifics for people who want to know more:

We’ve wanted a baby, and the best we thought we could hope for was to adopt a newborn. We never imagined that we could give birth to our adopted child. God can do more than we can ask or imagine.

We plan to give birth in Russia, but we will do the transfer (implantation) in the US. We are currently looking for a fertility clinic in Georgia (or maybe Texas?) where we can do the transfer.

The donors will be a Christian family which has decided to donate the embryos rather than destroy them. We’ve written a family profile and letters addressed to potential donor families so they can learn about us. Nightlight will share our profile with potential donors to find a good match. We will know the donor family and will keep contact with them after the birth.

If you’re inclined to pray for us, here are some requests –

* for patience; this is taking longer than we would like (but that’s fairly normal for adoptions)
* for the Lord to direct the timing, there’s a lot to be done between now and the transfer
* for no complications, since Olga will be in Russia for most of the pregnancy
* for wisdom about which fertility clinic to use
* that we’ll prepare ourselves well

Another pressure is our visa situations – Olga can be in the US only 6 months out of a year, and Mike can be in Russia only 6 months out of a year. We have to very carefully plan our time in the US for the transfer and our time in Russia for the birth.

Perhaps the Lord will provide a long-term home for us, but we are committed to waiting for Him to make that clear. I (Mike) would love to have a house of my own where our family can grow, but we don’t need that now and may not ever need that. We trust that God will provide what is needed when it’s needed.

Please write if you want to know more. We’ll certainly keep you updated as we come to the milestones ahead.

And please pass this along to anyone you think might be interested.  It’s hard to get the word out since we have so many friends in so many places.

Soli Deo Glori – to God alone be the glory.

Mike and Olga