The Beginning

"Two's a good number," we used to say. We were busy raising our two boys, not knowing that God had additional plans for us.

Molly has always had a soft spot in her heart for kids. She at one point thought about foster care, but she didn’t want to get attached to the kids only to have them taken away.

Molly and I had always thought it would be kind of cool to have a girl, and we’d joked over the years about adopting, but it seemed like we were pretty established with our two boys.

On May 1, 2007, unbeknownst to me, Molly - who never reads the newspaper - had read the weekly “Child in Need” feature in the Statesman Journal about a child in foster care who needed an adoptive home. She thought to herself, “I wonder if we could do that.” She wondered how adopting would work with our family and how the boys would do. The featured child was older and had other issues that wouldn’t work with our family, but the seed was planted, or, more accurately, was sprouting.

Molly and I hardly ever attend conferences together for work, but we were both going to a two-day executive training session at the academy the next day.

While we were there, I ran into a friend of mine who is now a captain with the Tualatin Police Department. Jeff and I had been cadets together for OSP in the late 1980s, and we’ve run into each other every so often over the years.

We were doing the usual catching up; you know, “How old are your kids now?”, etc. He said that in addition to their two boys, they’d adopted a girl from China.

On one of the next breaks, Molly and I were both talking with him again, and I asked him to tell us the story of adopting their daughter.

After we returned to our seats as class began, little did I know that Molly was already jotting down “pros and cons” about adopting a child.

We spoke a little about it off and on over the next couple of weeks. But God was working in both of our hearts, and it was becoming apparent to both of us, separately, that we were being called to adopt.