Several years ago I shared my love of words with you in a testimony for the Witness. I’ve lived what seems like at least 8 lifetimes since then.

Six of those lifetimes were those of babies that spent the entirety of their worldly existence inside of me and now are waiting for me in heaven. I ache to hold them and know someday I will. I am profoundly thankful they will never know even the pain of a scraped knee. They will never be lonely or brokenhearted. I can never let them down, as all mothers inevitably do in this broken world. And while my heart here breaks when I think that I’ve never handed my husband a child of his own, I know they have constant lap time with their Daddy in heaven.

As my children went one by one to heaven, I kept begging and pleading, “Why, God?” I hate it, like I hate all death and sin. Many people never get an answer to why bad things happen in their life, and that is ok. The Potter need not justify Himself to the clay.

But in His grace and mercy, God has shown me answers to so many of my questions about all I’ve been through in my life. I can now tell you with 100% certainty that it was because of them—my adopted girls, Talitha and Gabrielle.

Everyone asks why we chose to adopt. I can tell you that we aren’t special people with a special calling. We are just like any other parents. We love our kids but we lose our tempers. We post cute posed pictures and Hallmark moments on Facebook and snicker privately at the embarrassing ones. I homeschool in pajamas, and my kids eat frozen chicken nuggets that they sometimes microwave themselves.

We aren’t victims of infertility. We aren’t settling for other people’s broken children. The Lord is giving purpose to our pain and years of seemingly random experiences to teach our children not to be victims but to overcome their past through the love of Christ. Ephesians 2 gives us clear marching orders. “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

We are foot soldiers slipping and sliding in the mud on the treacherously beautiful battlefield of this broken world, and like everyone else we are trying to follow the orders of our Captain. We didn’t really choose to adopt. That is the way God made us parents. We are children of a Father in heaven who speaks of His relationship with us as being adopted as legitimate heirs and co-heirs with His son Jesus Christ.

We also live in a community of adopters. When I came into the RPCNA about 25 years ago, I had the distinction of being related to no one in the denomination, and I wasn’t close with my biological family. All of my life story since has starred members of my church family. They have been there when I am laughing or crying or celebrating holidays or just hanging out. They gave me my first car and comforted me when I crashed it. They introduced me to my husband. They hosted my wedding, hosted showers when I brought my babies home, and held me when I didn’t bring home the babies I expected to.

What’s more, in our closest circle of friends, there are at least 15 legally adopted children, not including the dozens of foster children who have moved on, yet remain in our hearts and minds.

When I was a flailing 20-something, Dr. Calvin Troup asked me what I expected my life to look like in 20 years and then told me to do the things that would prepare me for that. All I ever wanted to be was a mom, and I was frustrated with God that I wasn’t a wife. Calvin was one of a group of people who saw my gift for teaching and mothering and pushed me to foster it.

While I was at Geneva College, I heard Mary Graham give her incredible testimony at a chapel service, and it felt like she was speaking directly to me when she said, “Somewhere out there might be children who will one day call you Mom or Dad.” It quickened my heart. Though it would be 5 or 6 years before I met my husband, my daughters were both born within a year of that assembly.

In that passing of time, I became a teacher, worked as an advocate for children and adults with special needs, had my heart broken and healed, and had several health crises when I had to submit to the Lord’s will for my life. I had dreams dashed to pieces and found love that I never dared to dream could be real. I learned to trust God’s hand to guide my life and His people to be a part of it.

Every second of that was preparing me for my daughters.

After many months of adoption training and paperwork, our first matching process began. It was short and odd. We were appalled at how much the process seemed like shopping online. We filled out questionnaire after questionnaire. Choose a race. Choose an age. Choose a sex. What if they swear? What about special needs? What if they aren’t potty trained? During one of the interviews I finally said, “Look, we have friends who have both perfectly typical biological children and biological children with exceptionalities. They didn’t get to pick. We trust God to grow our family. Bring us children and we will raise them.”

We moved ahead and were approved over 100 other families to be the placement for a 9-year-old girl. In stepped our church family, and within a week our spare room was full of so much stuff that I wasn’t sure where we would put said girl. Also, in that week, we found out she would be spending 90 days in a treatment facility before she came to us. We were dismayed, but not deterred, and got permission to begin visits with her.

That same afternoon, our adoption agency called and asked us to do a few days of emergency respite for another 9-year-old girl, Talitha. My husband and I agreed. “Well, what if it ended up being a few weeks?” they asked. After several such calls, we agreed to receive this second little girl as an adoptive placement, having had to make the sobering decision that this might be our only child because social services would never allow her to live in a home with other children and Tali would never agree to have siblings. That Lord’s Day at church during a baptism, I thought of my babies in heaven. I sobbed as I realized that, had any of our babies lived, we would not have been allowed to have Tali.

Tali was placed with us on Sept. 4, 2011, and we were told the adoption would most likely be shortly after the new year. The information we got at placement was that she had been abused, liked ham sandwiches, and that her birthday was the same as my husband’s.

I wish I had known that, in addition to the abuse she suffered from her birth family, Tali had been abused and neglected by the child welfare system that was being paid to save her. I didn’t know to ask if she had witnessed a mass shooting or about the night terrors that incurred. I didn’t know that the smell of sauerkraut and pork chops cooking could send someone into a blind rage for a week, or that unnecessary medications could melt a young brain so much that a child would be unable to walk or recognize the daddy she loved so much.

What I did know, from the first time I looked at Tali, was she was meant to be mine. Love for her would carry us through a two-and-a-half-year custody battle, 6 school placements, broken bones and windows, and the shattering of every dream I’d ever had for my child.

Life for us as an adoptive family has never quite looked like it does in the commercials. At first we struggled to be respected as Tali’s parents because someone else had legal rights, but we had the horrendous responsibility for all their bad decision making. After Tali was hospitalized and overmedicated, teams of elders at our church helped us keep her safe during PTSD flashbacks she often had in large groups of people, like Sunday worship. Even when we finally had the legal right to make all the decisions, sometimes there were no good ones to make. Do we stay home all the time, or risk instability to make memories to replace all the horrible ones from the past? How much grace can you show a child who has been trained to take advantage of it? How do you untrain them to refuse love?

Roles in an adoptive family often have to look different for a time, and God was pleased to use our natural personalities as He built our family. Because of the abuse Tali suffered at the hands of men, I ended up being the primary disciplinarian in the beginning and we let Michael be “Daddy.” He is gentle and compassionate and loves without reserve. Every person we have ever had working with our children eventually tells me they wish they could clone a Daddy Fulk for every child on their caseload.

There is one incredible providence that should not be overlooked. In both Tali’s and Gabby’s adoptions, we had case workers on our team who were not only excellently trained but also Bible-believing Christians who understood our family’s goals and desires and translated them to a child welfare system that was suspicious of our motives. In case you have ever questioned Geneva College’s mission to train servant leaders to show God’s compassion and righteousness in the marketplace, let me tell you about Geneva graduates Jessica Judy and Heather DiBenedetto.

Christ saved our daughters for us through them.

Jessica Judy looked for professionals who shared our values and found the placements we wanted for Tali. Then she made unwilling people pay for them and uncooperative schools support them. She went outside the bounds of her job as a service coordinator and was our driver, go-between, translator, Tali’s cheerleader, and my best friend.

As the Lord remodeled our family, He also granted our dreams: Seeing Tali run a triathalon. Getting the unprecedented permission to homeschool a foster child and watching Tali fly through 2 years of curriculum in about 8 months. Hearing her giggly sense of humor come to life after years of mind-numbing meds cleared out of her system. By far the greatest dream became a reality on adoption day when Tali asked, “So now can we have brothers and sisters?”

In our second adoption, the matching process brought heartache, but the Lord was there, proving again and again that in our weakness He shows His strength. When a promised adoptive placement fell through after 4 months and I was sobbing, my 12-year-old child took the lead, confidently assuring me, “Well, that means God still has our sister out there somewhere.” He did. God’s plan began years earlier, when my husband met Heather Moore DiBenedetto at Great Lakes-Gulf Presbytery youth events. Not long after Tali had come to live with us, we ran into Heather again at an adoption matching event.

Then in 2015, after our failed placement, I scheduled Tali to run in Adoption Connection’s 5K fundraiser to cheer her up. I called Heather, who was working for Adoption Connection, to see if she would be there, thinking we could have lunch. She called back, saying she couldn’t have lunch because she would be out of town, but wondered if we would like the sister she had for us!

We were in love with Gabrielle before we met her, and she even asked us to adopt her the first time she came to our house; but she was afraid to hope for people to love her. We were one of many families who promised a forever home to her, and she was jaded after a failed adoption and many failed placements. Her losses had hardened her, and she knew how to work the system to get what she wanted. But then Gabby met Tali.

The Lord used Tali’s experience of our steadfastness to witness to Gabby, and so Gabby dared to believe. There were many ups and downs. In every one of those occasions, Heather was our translator and vouched for us. She was also a safe haven for me. Where I needed to vent and show my real fear, she understood that my fear didn’t define my faith or my actions. In faith, she convinced us and others to forge ahead when pausing would have sunk us and Gabby. She convinced the county to let us cyber-school Gabby at home, which again is unheard of. As a result, since Gabby was placed with us on Sept. 11, she has received straight A’s in school, is off all of the 5 unnecessary medications she was on, and has lost over 70 pounds. She and Tali finished the Adoption Connection Forever Family 5K together this year as sisters.

Not only has Heather’s hard work for the Lord impacted our family, but she has a regular impact on the people in the system she works with. On a daily basis she walks with integrity before them and speaks out against unrighteousness even at the cost of damage to her career. She reorients the thinking of others in the system to the gospel.

Our county worker sung Heather’s praises every time we spoke to her. That case worker asked me once how it was I knew I could love Gabby no matter what she said or did and I told her, “It’s because I’ve learned how to love people who hurt me.” In the world of psychology, I am told this is called codependency, but because of the fertile ground Heather had prepared in this woman’s heart, she saw that what I meant was sacrificial love. She saw Christ.

As far as we are concerned, our story still has room for many more words. On the way home from Gabby’s adoption day, the girls decided they want a brother. When I told them it would have to wait till we could get a bigger house, they tried to build another room out of K’Nex toy pieces!

It’s these moments.

When they are able to be kids with big dreams full of magic.

When they see what they’ve accomplished and don’t believe they did it.

When they forget to “not love” you and hug with all their might.

Those are the moments when we are Christ’s hands and feet, and the words in His story become ours.

See adoption from the other side in an article by Heather DiBeneddeto, https://rpwitness.org/articles/comments/a-familiar-name-and-perfect-timing

Author Michelle Fulk and her family attend Grace (Gibsonia, Pa) RPC. She is a wife, mom, puppymom, teacher, and writer. She loves to feed people. Photos in this article are by Bethany Hardwig, hardwigphotography.com