So if you have made it to the blog then you obviously know that this is about our family’s process of adopting our daughter from China. While a main purpose of this blog is to provide all of our family and friends with updates on where we are in the process, I (Aaron) realized that some of you may not know why we are adopting. So this will be my first post on this blog (or any other blog for that matter) with some of my reasons for adopting.
Let me start out by giving you a little background about me. Growing up, I always knew that I wanted to eventually get married and have children. However, I was never really around children until I got into high school. During my Junior year, I had my driver’s license but I didn’t have a car. So my parents decided that on days when I had to stay late at school I could drive my mom’s car to school and then I would go pick her up from work when I was done. At the time my mom worked at an elementary school where she was a teacher’s assistant for the Special Education teacher. Most of her day was spent working with two children in particular who were mentally disabled and one was a little boy named Matthew. When I would go pick her up I would usually get there early and wait for her to be finished. After a while I would try to help my mom out and this eventually turned in to me volunteering several afternoons a week with these two children. Matthew got to the point where every day he would ask my mom where I was and why I wasn’t there. I volunteered at the school and watched Matthew grow up for several years. My mom still occasionally talks to Matthew’s mom and to this day he will still ask about me sometimes. For the next several years I didn’t have much interaction with children. The closest I came was playing bass in a worship band for the children’s service at our church.
One of the last things I did before I moved from Virginia Beach to Maryland was to go on a mission trip with my church. The trip was to Atlanta and the purpose of the trip was to work with a church for homeless people in Atlanta. While we were there, we attended church on Sunday morning where we got to serve homeless people by providing them with clothes and toiletries. We also worked at a house that was going to be used to get homeless people back on their feet by providing them with a place to stay while they started new jobs. We also were going to be helping the church at one of the housing projects in Atlanta. At the projects we were going to be setting up a computer lab for the children in the projects to be able to use and we were also going to be running a summer camp for the kids while we were there. I was fine with helping at the church on Sunday morning and working at the house. I was really excited to be able to set up the computer network because that is something that I feel more comfortable with.
However, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to helping at the summer camp. I was asking myself, what do I have to offer these kids, how am I going to relate to them? I was asked to help with 4 and 5 year olds with one other person and I was more than willing to let her do the work and just tell me how I could help. The first couple days went fine and I was even able to make the kids laugh, but one day one of the little girls got really upset at me and left. I don’t remember why she got upset and left but the rest of the day I was pretty upset myself. That night God took the opportunity to point out something obvious but hard to hold on to. If I was so upset and saddened that one little girl that I had met only days earlier was mad at me then that is just a small taste of how he feels about all of the people that he created to love him that don’t even know who he is. Of course the next day the little girl returned and had a great time and everything was fine. I may have thought that I was going on that mission trip to help others and teach them about God’s love but in the end I was really going there so that God could teach me something far more important and valuable than anything I could have done in Atlanta.
When I first started dating Sherry, she was living in Pasadena, MD and I was in Virginia Beach, VA, so we would have to travel the 4 hours to see each other every couple of weeks. On one of my trips to Maryland, Sherry was going to be babysitting her nephew Sam and niece Laney. Since we only got to see each other every couple of weeks, I had no problem offering to spend the evening with the 3 of them. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal and we would just get to hang out and watch kid’s shows with them or watch them play and Sherry and I would be able to hang out and talk. Little did I know that my night was going to be spent sitting in front of a computer with a 5 year old Sam sitting on my lap telling me about a couple hundred of the Lilo & Stitch experimental monsters for an hour or two. It was only a couple of months later that Sherry and I got married and Sam and Laney were now my nephew and niece also. We lived about 5 minutes away from them for a couple of years and got to see them at least once a week. They both acted like I had been their uncle forever. I got to experience both good times and bad times with them. But I will always remember that almost every time I would see Laney she would run to me, saying Uncle Aaron right before she would give me a great big hug.
Before long some of our friends were having children and I can remember being in the hospital looking at my friends’ baby and hearing the question “Do you want to hold her?” Up until this time I had plenty of chances to hold babies and was always more than happy to say no thank you. But on this occasion I decided that I should. I’ll be honest, I was pretty scared. I had never held a baby before (at least not that I can remember) and I was afraid I was going to hurt her. Of course, nothing bad happened, the baby was fine, and so was I. I still didn’t offer to hold her very often but a little at a time I became more comfortable with it.
More to come .... Sherry's Story will be next, and then we'll post Our Story!
Posts
