The Daniel Family>>The Perfect Match

“Family” is not a one size fits all term, as is evident in this sweet group. I asked Jennifer to share her story, and I hope that you will all get as much of a blessing out of it as I did.

“I want to start out our story by giving God all the glory for blessing us with these two children. I would have never planned my life this way so I am thankful that The Lord did not let me have my way. Jacob and I always planned to adopt. We just thought it would be on our time table. We had discussed adoption as an after thought– Definitely something we would do but definitely after we had biological children. Jacob and I had been married six years when I became pregnant the first time, and it was an exciting time for us. I miscarried at 14 weeks. This was a devastating journey that The Lord took us on for the next two years of our marriage. It was all for God’s glory that we miscarried. I miscarried again the following year at 8 weeks. At this point, God used the death of our second child to help us totally surrender to the call of adoption. We applied through Holt international’s Korea program. We felt God leading us to this country and we fell in love with the Korean people. We submitted our application to adopt in March of 2009 the same month and year Jonathan was born in Korea. We did not know about him until 6 months later when we were matched with him. After another 6 months of waiting to travel to Korea to go get our son we got a call that we could go. We traveled to Korea two days before Jonathan turned one. We stayed in Korea several days and were able to return home with our son Jonathan on his birthday. We have been home three years and honestly at times I forget he was adopted. He is so much a part of us I can’t remember a time when he was not with us.

Fast forward a year or so… Jacob and I had decided that we wanted to apply to adopt again once Jonathan turned three, which was fast approaching. We had completely given up on getting pregnant again and just trusted that The Lord would grow our family through adoption. We found out we were pregnant with Joshua in November 2011. I honestly thought I would not carry him full term because of past experience but God had other plans. We saw several doctors, including specialists, because of my past miscarriages. At about 14 weeks the doctors all said the same thing to us: Joshua has a serious heart condition that will need immediate surgery and he most likely has Down syndrome. The news deflated a lot of our joy at first, but God truly spoke to us about Joshua and reminded us that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made by Him. Joshua was created perfectly to bring God the most glory. Joshua was born one month early on June 26, 2012. Joshua is a beautiful perfectly created child that happens to have had a serious heart condition and a 21st chromosome. Joshua had open heart surgery at 3 months old. He recovered well after several scary issues with his lungs and has been growing stronger every day.”