Adopting from South Korea

Rachel, at Hunt for Rachel was also kind enough to do a guest post on adopting from South Korea. Go check out her blog. Her son melts my heart! Thank you so much Rachel for writing this beautiful post.

Choosing international over domestic adoption was a pretty easy choice for us. We don't know why exactly, but we just knew that international was right for our family. We were open to adopting from any country when we first started looking into the process, and we actually chose an agency to work with before choosing a country, rather than finding an agency that would help us adopt from a specific country.

We read through all of their information about all of the countries they worked with, and quickly realized that we did not meet the criteria for all of the countries (for example, for some of the countries we were not old enough, for some of them we had not been married long enough, etc.) so that really narrowed down our choices. We looked at the countries we did fit into and started to seriously consider which we thought was best for our family.

For us, it came down to Ethiopia or South Korea. We prayed and talked and prayed some more, and for some reason (well, we know the reason now - his name is Matthew!) our hearts continued to be drawn to South Korea. We liked how predictable the process seemed to be (though we knew that it could change or things could happen after we started an adoption) since the program had been in place with our agency for many years. The timeline when we first started seemed SO long, but looking back now we know that everything happened exactly as it needed to for us to end up with our precious son.

Cost was also a factor in our decision, although we tried really hard not to make that the only factor, knowing that God would provide (and He did, in ways we never imagined!). South Korea seemed to be on the lower end or maybe the middle of the spectrum as far as cost (compared to other countries our agency worked with).

Overall, as I look back now I can see that God truly led us to South Korea, not through some flashing neon sign (although we would have liked that at the time!) but rather through prayer and discussion and making logical decisions about what was best for our family.

We now sometimes wonder where our next baby will be... :)