Coming into our first home study day we had very little idea what to expect.  We knew that there would be lots of personal questions, but that’s about the extent of it.  Well it turned out that we were right about the personal questions, though we were unaware of just how personal the questions would be, there were also lots of questions about what type of child we would want and a house walk through.  With all that said here’s how it went down.

We sat on one couch in our living room while Stephanie (our social worker from Antioch) sat on the other one.  She opened up her computer and explained what was going to happen – in a very basic way – then she asked her first question: when did you become a Christian.  This was sort of a relief for me since I’ve been answering that question on applications for the better part of the last decade.  Jen explained her path to the Lord and I explained mine – with an excursion into the rat nest that is faith in my family with all the gory details of conversions from Roman Catholic to Protestant, people being disowned, removal from wills, youth pastor defections and church splits. My story took a little while to get through, but we managed.  With that done we went into what we would expect of our child in respect to faith and how we could foster a desire for Christian faith in the child.  Then there was the question about how we met and got engaged as well as the questions about dispute resolution and decision making.  These were all pretty simple, especially since we answered all of them on our homework that we submitted a few months back.Then came the question I had been dreading — have you ever had a problem with pornography?  Ugh!  I don’t like talking about my struggles in this area.  I’ll openly admit to it, but I’d rather not talk about it – heck I’d rather not think about it.  So we discussed it for the better part of a half an hour.  As much as I don’t like to discuss it, I understand why we had to and why it’s important for them to know about it.  Thankfully I’ve been through Celebrate Recovery and I’m doing well in this area, so it wasn’t as stressful as it could have been.