Love Endures
Love Endures - Our Adoption Story
Donna VanLiere
When I was a child I wanted to grow up and become an actress and have three or four children. That was my dream.
Shortly after graduation I married Troy VanLiere. Four years into our marriage, I got pregnant and was sick every day. Then one morning I wasn’t sick anymore, and I knew something was wrong. I went to the doctor and discovered that I had lost the baby.
Two years later, we sat down with a noted physician, and without any hesitation, he said, “You have a 10 percent chance of having children.” Troy and I went to lunch following that appointment, and I cried throughout the meal. I thought that all my childhood dreams of having children were gone.
I would soon learn that infertility is a very lonely road. At the time, there was a 16-year old girl pregnant in our church. The next year, there were two 16-year-olds. At one time, there were four baby showers listed in the church bulletin. Knowing that our names would never be listed there was the greatest sadness in my life.
I learned how to give myself shots in the leg as part of our medical treatment. At the end of each round of shots, Troy was supposed to give me a shot in my hip muscle. He was terrified. We went to the doctor’s office so he could learn how to do it.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“You’ll do fine,” I said.
“I’m going to pass out.”
“You’re not going to pass out. You’ll be fine!”
The nurse brought us into a room and showed Troy which muscle to give the shot in and said, “Be sure the needle is right there in the middle and not off to the side, because you could hit her sciatic nerve and paralyze her.” All I could think was, Thanks a lot lady! He’s already a nervous wreck!
He stuck the needle in my hip muscle, and I could feel the saline solution travel all the way down to my toes. I stood up and said, “Gee, I don’t feel so…” The next thing I knew the nurse caught me before I hit the floor. When I came to, I was mad. I became painfully aware of the fact that teens could get pregnant easily, but we couldn’t. I wanted to know why. I was determined to find some answers, so I began to study the Bible with a vengeance.
All my life I was aware of Psalm 37:4, which says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” I felt as if God had abandoned me because I wasn’t receiving the desires of my heart. Women all around us could get pregnant, but I couldn’t.
I prayed, “Lord, fix my body. Fix Troy’s body.” But the more I read the Scriptures, the more I realized that sometimes our dreams and plans have to die. Instead, I started praying, “Lord, fix my heart.”
One day I came across the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters, thought As soon as Jesus gets here, He’ll make Lazarus well. But that was their plan and their way, not God’s way. God was saying, “Be patient. I have a better way. I’m orchestrating something so incredible that you’ll never believe it.”
Months later, I read in Psalms 113:9 that God “settles the barren woman in her home as the happy mother of children.” I looked for the word biological, but it wasn’t there. The Bible said that the barren woman would be a happy mother of children. Period. It was then that I knew that Troy and I were being lifted up as adoptive parents.
I prayed, “I know You have a child for us, but if we’re going to adopt You must provide the money.” Adoption can be expensive and I knew we didn’t have that extra money just lying around. But Ephesians 3:20 tells us that God is able to do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.”
Sometime later, our phone rang. It was someone for whom I had done writing years earlier. He said, “Donna, are you still writing? I’ve got some huge projects coming up.” I had more freelance writing work than I could keep up with that year. Checks were coming in that paid off every one of our adoption bills. I often tell people that if God wants a child in their home to believe that He will provide a way to bring that child to their home!
We waited 22 months and in March 2002, Troy and I traveled halfway around the world to the Guangxi Province in southern China to bring Grace Zhenli home. Zhenli means Priceless Gift in Chinese, so we think of her as our priceless gift of God’s grace. We fell in love with her long before we ever met her, because we knew that God had a plan for Gracie’s life and He had a plan for our lives. We also knew that we had been called to be adoptive parents.
When I embraced Gracie for the first time I said, “We’ve been waiting for you.” We put a clean diaper and a pair of little pink pajamas on her, and held her close to us. It was as if God was saying, “This is the better way that I was talking about.”
In July of 2004, we traveled back to China to bring home Kate Meili. Meili means beautiful gift, and everyday I’m reminded of that truth. When they handed Kate to me, she held her arm in front of her face. My heart sank. I had heard that when babies are abused they’ll put up their arms to shield their faces. We discovered that Kate’s sleeve was wet from sucking on it; she did that to comfort herself. She would wake me each night in China because the sucking was so loud. By the time we left China, however, Kate was no longer sucking on her sleeve; she had finally found someone to comfort her.
I wanted everything to go according to my dreams and plans, but God had a better way. I cannot imagine our life without our girls. If I hadn’t slowed down to seek God’s plan, I would have missed two of the greatest blessings of my life.
Proverbs 13:12 says that, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick; but when dreams come true at last, there is life and joy.” We will be traveling to Guatemala to bring home a little boy either very late this year or early 2007.
Although it started out as our deepest pain, Troy and I often tell people that adoption has been our greatest joy. It isn’t the dream I had hoped for as a child. It is so much better.