Throughout our adoption journey, I’ve connected over at Waiting to Belong and found great resources and encouragement there. I’m so grateful for the work that they do at Focus on the Family to encourage adoptive families – including bringing Dr. Karyn Purvis to our area this fall! Join us at the conference? (I can’t wait!) You can find more information here.

Today I’m so privileged to welcome Wendy Kittlitz of Focus on the Family’s Waiting to Belong initiative to my little corner of the internet! Wendy is an adoption advocate, and I invited her to share her heart and answer the question – what do you want us to know about why you care about adoption?

Wendy’s daughters making her a Mother’s Day cake!

What I want you to know about why I care about adoption…

As a child, I felt alienated from my family. Though I lived with my biological parents and siblings, I struggled to feel like I belonged, like I was loved, like I mattered. How I wished that one of my friends’ families would adopt me!
Mid-way through my adolescence, I had an experience that, ironically, intensified those feelings. I was invited into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. I was adopted into God’s family and it has profoundly changed my life.

This, for me, will always be the foundation of why I believe in adoption.

Since this experience, I have become an adoption professional, helping unite children with forever families. I have become an adoption advocate, educating and helping families navigate the world of adoption. More significantly, I have become an adoptive parent, blessed beyond description with the beautiful daughter God gave me and my husband to join our biological daughter to form our family.

Adoption most often emerges out of brokenness. Someone is pregnant in difficult circumstances, maybe poor or without support. Young parents may be unable to care for a child or a parent dies. Couples yearn for children but experience infertility, some never getting pregnant, others suffering multiples miscarriages. Children who should have been cherished are neglected, abused, or abandoned. It has often been said that in an ideal world, adoption would not be necessary. Every child should be loved and wanted; every parent should have enough money and support to raise their children and every couple who desires a child should be able to birth their own. However, the reality is that we live in a fallen world and life often falls short of what is ideal.

To me, adoption is about redemption. It is about facing brokenness and yet finding a way to touch those involved in healing ways. Children get a second chance to experience the love and care they deserved but could not receive from an addicted parent; babies are received by a couple who longs to give them everything while a sorrowful birth mom finds comfort in the knowledge that she has given her baby all that she hoped for him but cannot provide herself at this time; couples whose empty arms mirror their broken hearts experience the joy of welcoming a child into their family instead of facing a lifetime of childlessness.

I believe that we were all created with the need to be intimately connected. When this need is not met in the families into which we were born, I think God gives the possibility of second chances. For some of us, marriage is a second chance to be part of a family that is more loving. For some, adoption gives a second chance to parent or be parented. For those who choose to do so, accepting God’s invitation to be adopted into His family gives us a second chance to find the connections we were made for.

Wendy

Wendy Kittlitz is the VP of Counselling & Care Ministries at Focus on the Family Canada. She has worked as an adoption professional, serves on the board of a Haitian orphanage and is mom to two teenaged daughters.

This is part of a series of adoption stories on “What I want you to know about…” I’m so excited to introduce you to beautiful people with remarkable journeys – adoptive dads, adoptees, international adoption, and birth family. Praying that we’ll receive their stories with open hearts, and that somehow, through this sharing, ultimately some very special people will have their voices heard and children will find the loving families they deserve. If you’d like to share your story, please contact me about linking up.