This morning my wife and I were abruptly woken by someone pounding on our door…at 5:30 a.m. I shuffled out of bed, grabbed my glasses and went downstairs to see who it was at our door. I spoke through the door, which was double locked for those concerned, and asked who they were and what they wanted. It was a guy I’ve never seen before and he wanted to come inside and sleep. He looked like he might be high or possibly homeless – or I suppose both. I told him no, then he offered to pay me $5 and again I turned him down. Then he asked for socks, so I grabbed a pair of socks and through them out a window for him – I wasn’t about to open the door for him. Then I asked him to leave and he did.

He probably wasn’t violent or dangerous, but I was cautious nonetheless. I always feel conflicted about these types of situations. Christ tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves and that he is the “least of these”. Where do you draw the line between being faithful and cautious. It’s not like homeless and/or poor people suddenly became dangerous in the past century. I’m sure there were some who were dangerous in Christ’s day. I’m pretty sure we did the right thing and we’ve subsequently prayed for the guy, but is that all just rationalization to make ourselves feel better about turning him away?

I could go on and on about this, but I think the point is out there. How and where do you draw the line between compassion and caution?

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. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since anything has been written about the adoption, so in this post I’ll try to update you with everything that has happened since I last wrote about it.

The PRIDE weekend was good.  I went in feeling a little nervous about what kind of people would be in the group.  Fortunately my worries were unwarrented. The people in our class were some of the nicest people – all of whom cared greatly for children and really wanted to be parents.  We covered a lot of stuff over the course of the weekend. I could barely start to tell you everything that was covered, all I can tell you is that there was a lot of scarey stuff that, oddly enough, made me want to adopt a child out of the foster system even more.  I can’t believe some of the stuff these kids come out of — and worse yet that the parents actually think it’s acceptable or worse yet the parents have no idea what’s happening because they’re too drunk or high or delusional to even realize.  The part of me that feels compelled to rescue people is so strongly activated that I actually ache for the kinds in the foster system. Anyway… the weekend was good and left Jen and me much more dedicated to adopting. Read the rest of this entry »

For a while now Jen and I have known that we wanted to adopt a child someday. A little less than a year ago we decided that it was time for us to start pursuing that goal. We looked around at several agencies, Jen read a couple of books and finally we ended up settling on Antioch Adoptions as the organization we wanted to adopt through. We put in our application, had an interview and were accepted into the program.  This weekend we start the process officially with the big PRIDE weekend.

We are hopefully going to be keeping you posted through this blog on both how this weekend works out and how the rest of the process works.

It’s odd how vacations, which are supposed to be these terribly relaxing times, always start with a mad rush to get out of the house.  From what I understand, once you have kids that rush never ends, but alas I don’t have kids yet.  We left last night to go on our summer vacation and that rush was in full effect.

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