Burton Family Adoption
Donation protected
Something crazy happened this September. We aren’t quite sure how, and trust me we tried to stop it, but somehow it still happened. Sadie turned 5. Our tiny little bit of baby girl is now all legs and long blond hair and starting to read. I am blown away.
Something else happened, but more gradually, over the last year. We are no longer in the stage of life where people ask if we are going to have any more kids. That first year after Sadie was born, I would give people the death stare and dare them to ask the question. The second year, people would ask and I would just shrug because I still wasn’t ready to think about it. The third and fourth year, people would ask, but it was mostly people I was just meeting. But this last year, no one asks.
As you can assume by the title, No, I’m not pregnant. Some of you might know that, while with God all things are possible, with this man and woman it is not very probable. What a lot of you may not know is that God has been working in Jeff and myself from before we even met to open our hearts towards adoption. While we were dating and working our way through the important topics after marriage, we talked about kids a lot. I didn’t want as many as I grew up with, but I wanted at least three or four. Jeff was nervous to commit to any number but said he did want kids. The one thing that we did agree on was that, even if we could have biological children, at some point we wanted to pursue adoption.
That sounds all well and good until you actually start thinking about the process. Having a biological baby is a fairly simple decision, and sometimes not even a decision. Once it’s started, that’s that. But deciding to adopt is work. It’s complicated. It’s expensive. And it’s very easy to NOT do.
Over the last four years we have talked briefly, once in a while, about adopting. But Jeff had just started a new job. We were working on getting out of debt. We were living with Jeff’s parents, for 15 months. We just bought a new house. Our kids were finally big enough to get themselves dressed, and I didn’t want to start over again. We weren’t at American mainline yet, so our income wasn’t high enough. We are in the middle of a pandemic/world crisis. The excuses went on and on.
But in the middle of this pandemic/world crisis, God started doing a work in our hearts. He started pulling us closer to Him, and He kept pressing on our hearts that there was more, that we were missing something. We looked in a lot of places for that “more”. Jeff was convinced it meant we needed to leave New Jersey. I was convinced we most definitely did NOT need to move. But I was searching too.
Towards the end of summer two things happened. One, God impressed on our hearts the need to be willing to follow Him. I wasn’t willing. I wanted to be, but when God started asking me to be willing to do hard things, I was really struggling to be willing. Jeff was struggling with the same thing, so we started to pray that God would help us to be willing for whatever He had ahead of us.
The second thing that happened was the opportunity for us to take a trip out to the Missionary Training Center for Ethnos360 in Missouri. Some friends of ours are missionaries on staff at the MTC and they told us they could use some help around the mission. God opened the doors for the time off and provided the finances, so we packed the kids up and headed out. It was not at all what we expected. We were able to help them, but God did a whole lot more spiritual work on us than we did physical work for anyone else.
Over and over during that trip, we heard the message that God gave Moses at the edge of the Red Sea. MOVE FORWARD. We talked to people at the MTC who reminded us that Jesus called us to GO, whether in our neighborhood or into the uttermost parts of the earth. We heard multiple messages on the radio, in church, and in our daily devotions on the same exact passage in Exodus. We talked and cried and prayed and agreed that more than anything we wanted to be willing to go wherever God was calling us. But there was no clear direction as to where that would be.
About a week after we got home, after more discussions and conversations that all ended in “I don’t know”, God pushed both of us to the same place at the same time. It was time to MOVE FORWARD. And this time He was clear and said, ADOPTION. This was the first time in over 11 years that we have both been ready to discuss this at the same time. And as we were talking, we were both giving the same answers and finding the same information and God kept saying, “Yup, this is what I’m trying to tell you. If you need something else to help you know for sure, here you go.”
So we are saying “Yes” and moving forward. At the end of September, we contacted an adoption agency and started the process towards an international adoption. Adoption is still all those things that stopped us before. It is still work. It is still complicated and expensive. But we serve a God who is bigger than all of that. And to be honest, I can’t wait to see what He does.
This is a big step of faith for us. Adoption is expensive. We are looking at anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000 depending on which country we end up working with. God has given us His peace as we start the process and He is stretching us way beyond our comfort zone. Neither of us like to ask anyone else to help us do something that God has called us to do, but I have been reminded that this is just pride. So we humbly ask that you partner with us in prayer, and we thank you. And if God leads you to be part of our journey financially, we thank you. If you have ideas for fundraisers, please let us know!
Most of all, we thank you for being a part of our lives and for loving our family so well!
Love,
The Burton Family
Something else happened, but more gradually, over the last year. We are no longer in the stage of life where people ask if we are going to have any more kids. That first year after Sadie was born, I would give people the death stare and dare them to ask the question. The second year, people would ask and I would just shrug because I still wasn’t ready to think about it. The third and fourth year, people would ask, but it was mostly people I was just meeting. But this last year, no one asks.
As you can assume by the title, No, I’m not pregnant. Some of you might know that, while with God all things are possible, with this man and woman it is not very probable. What a lot of you may not know is that God has been working in Jeff and myself from before we even met to open our hearts towards adoption. While we were dating and working our way through the important topics after marriage, we talked about kids a lot. I didn’t want as many as I grew up with, but I wanted at least three or four. Jeff was nervous to commit to any number but said he did want kids. The one thing that we did agree on was that, even if we could have biological children, at some point we wanted to pursue adoption.
That sounds all well and good until you actually start thinking about the process. Having a biological baby is a fairly simple decision, and sometimes not even a decision. Once it’s started, that’s that. But deciding to adopt is work. It’s complicated. It’s expensive. And it’s very easy to NOT do.
Over the last four years we have talked briefly, once in a while, about adopting. But Jeff had just started a new job. We were working on getting out of debt. We were living with Jeff’s parents, for 15 months. We just bought a new house. Our kids were finally big enough to get themselves dressed, and I didn’t want to start over again. We weren’t at American mainline yet, so our income wasn’t high enough. We are in the middle of a pandemic/world crisis. The excuses went on and on.
But in the middle of this pandemic/world crisis, God started doing a work in our hearts. He started pulling us closer to Him, and He kept pressing on our hearts that there was more, that we were missing something. We looked in a lot of places for that “more”. Jeff was convinced it meant we needed to leave New Jersey. I was convinced we most definitely did NOT need to move. But I was searching too.
Towards the end of summer two things happened. One, God impressed on our hearts the need to be willing to follow Him. I wasn’t willing. I wanted to be, but when God started asking me to be willing to do hard things, I was really struggling to be willing. Jeff was struggling with the same thing, so we started to pray that God would help us to be willing for whatever He had ahead of us.
The second thing that happened was the opportunity for us to take a trip out to the Missionary Training Center for Ethnos360 in Missouri. Some friends of ours are missionaries on staff at the MTC and they told us they could use some help around the mission. God opened the doors for the time off and provided the finances, so we packed the kids up and headed out. It was not at all what we expected. We were able to help them, but God did a whole lot more spiritual work on us than we did physical work for anyone else.
Over and over during that trip, we heard the message that God gave Moses at the edge of the Red Sea. MOVE FORWARD. We talked to people at the MTC who reminded us that Jesus called us to GO, whether in our neighborhood or into the uttermost parts of the earth. We heard multiple messages on the radio, in church, and in our daily devotions on the same exact passage in Exodus. We talked and cried and prayed and agreed that more than anything we wanted to be willing to go wherever God was calling us. But there was no clear direction as to where that would be.
About a week after we got home, after more discussions and conversations that all ended in “I don’t know”, God pushed both of us to the same place at the same time. It was time to MOVE FORWARD. And this time He was clear and said, ADOPTION. This was the first time in over 11 years that we have both been ready to discuss this at the same time. And as we were talking, we were both giving the same answers and finding the same information and God kept saying, “Yup, this is what I’m trying to tell you. If you need something else to help you know for sure, here you go.”
So we are saying “Yes” and moving forward. At the end of September, we contacted an adoption agency and started the process towards an international adoption. Adoption is still all those things that stopped us before. It is still work. It is still complicated and expensive. But we serve a God who is bigger than all of that. And to be honest, I can’t wait to see what He does.
This is a big step of faith for us. Adoption is expensive. We are looking at anywhere from $25,000 to $35,000 depending on which country we end up working with. God has given us His peace as we start the process and He is stretching us way beyond our comfort zone. Neither of us like to ask anyone else to help us do something that God has called us to do, but I have been reminded that this is just pride. So we humbly ask that you partner with us in prayer, and we thank you. And if God leads you to be part of our journey financially, we thank you. If you have ideas for fundraisers, please let us know!
Most of all, we thank you for being a part of our lives and for loving our family so well!
Love,
The Burton Family
Fundraising team (2)
Shayna Burton
Organizer
Newfield, NJ
Jeffrey Burton
Team member
