Beau and Natalie Fournet
Natalie and I have been married for almost fourteen years, and we’ve got four great kids. For us adoption has been a topic of conversation going back nearly twenty years. But it took seventeen years before we would finally experience the actual blessings of adoption in bringing our third and fourth children (Beck and Deshi) home from Ethiopia.
Between 2001 and 2005 we experienced unbelievable joy through the birth of our first son (Caleb) and our first daughter (Hannah). And in those same years we also experienced the pain and loss of four other children through early pregnancy losses. We wrestled through the pain and sorrow of these losses with our community group and through Shiloh (Watermark’s ministry for those experiencing infertility and miscarriage). As we moved through our grief we found the Lord increasing our desire and conviction to add to our family through adoption.
We excitedly launched our formal journey into adoption in April 2007. Like most of our friends who have adopted, we read some great books, talked together endlessly, prayed a lot, and spent a lot of time in discussion with our community group. After a great deal of time in that phase, it was time to make some more specific decisions; our first two decisions were where and how we wanted to adopt. This was definitely a different set of decisions than we had faced with the birth of Caleb and Hannah!
Given my shared leadership in Watermark’s ministry in Africa, it was “obvious” to me that we were supposed to adopt from Africa. This wasn’t so “obvious” to Natalie, so we spent some time considering other options – domestic adoption, several countries, etc. We reviewed booklets, scanned countless websites, and met with some great families with diverse adoption experiences. We ultimately reached a point of oneness, having decided to adopt from Ethiopia. That answered the WHERE but we still needed to decide on the WHAT.
As we entered the summer of 2007, Caleb was five years old, and Hannah was four years old. We chose not to disrupt birth order with our first adoption, so we set an upper age limit of three years old. We adventurously decided to tell our agency we would take up to three kids, and wanting to maximize the surprise (as though there wasn’t enough excitement), we told our agency we had no gender preferences.
With these very important decisions made, we started the daunting paperwork process. Wow. Way more paperwork than we expected. But we made it through the paperwork. By the fall of 2007, we were on the waiting list with our agency, anxiously waiting for a referral. There were a couple other families with our agency waiting for a sibling group, and they received a referral very quickly. So by Christmas 2007, we really thought it could happen any day, but God’s perfect plan called for a longer wait. By God’s grace, we trusted in Him throughout our wait, knowing that God was using the experience for our good and His glory. God graciously used this wait to grow us in our trust in our Father who gives us all we need, when we need it. This truth was the greatest truth imparted to us in this process.
Everything changed on May 21, 2008, my thirty-fourth birthday. On that day, our agency called to share great news. They asked us to parent twin one-year olds, a boy named Beksisa and a girl named Yadeshi. We can’t describe how excited, overwhelmed, and humbled we were. We remember learning of our pregnancies, being told that Caleb would be a boy, and hearing that Hannah would be a girl. Those were highlights in my life, and May 21, 2008 was every bit as unbelievable. This began several days of celebration and several weeks of somewhat frantic preparation for twins!
By this time, two of the other couples in our community group (Cary and Sarah Tucker and Wes and Brandy Butler) began the process of adopting from Ethiopia, so they got to celebrate our referral in a way that brought further anticipation to our group as we all prepared to bring our children home. As a community we all prayerfully and very anxiously entered together a season of waiting. And our season of waiting was especially long as our adoption required eleven scheduled hearings (way more than the normal!). During this additional thirteen month wait from referral to final approval to bring home Beck and Deshi, our anticipation was strong and constant, growing our affection for them and our burden to be godly parents for them. More broadly, this was a good picture and reminder for us that we should continually look to the Lord with anticipation for Him and a burden to be all He calls us to be.
Our entire family, community, and even blog followers spent those 13 months praying for Beck and Deshi, as we waited for the day that we would pass court in Ethiopia and be allowed to travel and bring our children home. We were blessed with lots of updates through our agency, which often included pictures of the twins as they grew from 11 months to 26 months when we finally met them. We placed the pictures in frames all over our house, at work and in our children's rooms.
After 13 months of waiting for "the call", we were finally given permission to travel to Ethiopia! And on July 4, 2009 our entire family landed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and held Beck and Deshi, now nearly 26 months old, for the very first time. It was an indescribable moment to say the least! To travel across the globe, to have the Lord place two of His precious children in our arms, to snuggle in bed for that first night with two scared little children (we were a little nervous ourselves), to grow together as a family.....it was completely amazing and absolutely life changing for all of us! A process the Lord started in our hearts nearly twenty years prior and brought us to fully pursue in 2007 had reached a life changing moment on the sweetest July 4th ever!
Nine months have now passed since that memorable day in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Parenting Beck and Deshi has been a fantastic experience, one we are incredibly grateful to the Lord for providing us. It has not been without challenges, both challenges of parenting children from hurt places and challenges from the process exposing our sin as parents. Caleb and Hannah have also experienced the joys of the adoption and their own unique challenges. But as Christ’s brother James describes, it has been a challenge that is sweet in taste and refining to our walk with Christ. We have come through this process as better parents, spouses, and followers of Christ.
