Renewed Hope - Blain & Miriam

We are so thankful for the ABBA grant playing a part in our adoption journey!!! We have been a “waiting family’(waiting for a birth mom to choose us) for local adoption for over a year now and it has been a hard wait! We have been married for 6 years and have a 3 year old daughter who we had through the gift of surrogacy and have been anxiously awaiting to add to our crew. We knew early on that I would never be able to become pregnant but we still had high hopes for a house full of kids and have always had adoption on our hearts. We both felt a pull towards international adoption but it just wasn’t a feasible option for us when we initially started with our agency.We started taking the first steps in our adoption journey in March 2018 and had our home study completed and approved over the following few months. We went ‘live’ as a waiting family for local adoption in September2018. We have now been waiting in the local program for over a year but have continued to have our hearts stirred towards international adoption. Receiving the ABBA grant not only renewed our hopes in this time of waiting but will allow us to apply for international adoption in the near future!!!God certainly could still have a surprise waiting for us in the local program, but we are now actively pursuing adoption from Vietnam.We are continuing to learn about this beautiful country and work through the next set of paperwork and are so excited for what the future may hold.We would love to add a few more kiddos to our family and would be overjoyed with whichever routeGod has planned for our next child to join us. Continued prayers for God’s guidance as we take further steps towards international adoption, as well as His peace and patience would be very much appreciated!