An Adoption Story - The Herring Family

We felt like, you know, God called us to adopt. And I felt like that through my wife, you know. He brought me her, and she was passionate about adopting. Graduated at Auburn, actually in the summer, and then played my senior year. And we got engaged that spring. I would have had kids, like, immediately. Which my mom and dad had a lot of trouble. So I was very worried about that being a possibility with us. After a year of trying, I knew. I said, okay, we need to go and just talk to a fertility specialist. They talked to us about a couple different options. Ended up going the route of in vitro. My whole life growing up, my mom always said, you know, we had so much trouble, and we wanted more kids. And if I could go back, I would have adopted. And so that just, like, stuck with me. And I didn't want to waste years and years and years continuing to try. After one round, my doctor said, come on, let's do it again. And I was like, no, I think we're good. I think we're going to go the other route. And, I mean, God just provided and gave so much comfort. Because that was a hard time. I can't imagine it any other way happening the way that it did. Because, obviously, Maddie, our oldest, was our first we adopted. And, oh, I mean, it was just the best blessing we could have ever gotten. We spoke with a ministry out in Seattle. A former or a current teammate of mine had kind of pointed me in that direction. And he was a source for me to go to. He was a friend. He was a teammate. And he had adopted three of his four kids. And they had gotten into adoption kind of the same way as us. You know, God kind of chose them. And then once he opened that door for them, they saw just what an unbelievable blessing it was. And so we applied for the home study and got that process going. A couple weeks later, we have our first appointment of her coming to our house, which we're so nervous, you know. Kicking laundry under the bed. We're like, oh, is it cleaning up? Throwing things in closets, just to give it the appearance that we actually are fit to be parents. And that a child could live in here and actually survive. I think the thing that's scary, I mean, to me, is just becoming a parent. You know, and I wasn't a dad. So I didn't have any kids. So it was just like, you know, this is just changing everything. And it just blew my mind from the moment the doctor came in there and handed us that baby girl. I mean, it was unbelievable. I mean, and there was no doubt. We were able to get pregnant after we had Maddie. But what I think is the coolest thing is, you know, whether God gave us our child through us conceiving them ourselves or through adoption, there's no difference. There's no difference between Maddie, between Reese, between Isaiah. They're all ours. They were all gifted to us from the Lord. We want Maddie and we want Isaiah to know that God picked them out of millions and millions and millions of children. I mean, it was a miracle that they landed in our house. And it's a miracle that Reese was conceived and given to us by God. So regardless of how they got here, they're all a miracle and they're all ours. When we were trying to get pregnant, I really want to get pregnant. I realized that other friends were getting pregnant. It was so easy. And I thought, I mean, I'm a woman. That's supposed to be like the easiest thing to do. I mean, like get married. And then, you know, whenever you wait a few years and you try to have a baby, you have a baby. You know, that's the way your body's supposed to work. And it wasn't that way for me. To be at that point, and then fast forward, I can now see that God had a plan. In the midst of it, you want what you want now because your heart yearns for a child. Keep just being faithful because God's going to be faithful. If He's called you to adopt, He's going to be faithful. It's worth the wait. It's worth the fight. It's worth the valleys in this process because the blessing at the end, Maddie, in our case, or Isaiah, I would do anything. I would have waited for decades for those kids. If God's calling you to adopt, then answer the call. And that's what's so great about Agape and these ministries that are out there. They're teaming up with individual moms and dads and birth moms. And they're putting families together. There's a lot of people that have everything it takes to raise a child except the finances to adopt. There's no excuse. That should not be the case. As Christians, we're called to protect widows and orphans and provide for them. And that's exactly what Agape and the other ministries that are out there are doing. If you feel called to adopt or to help out with adoption, then answer that call.