This was the first difficult decision we made in our adoption process. There are many agencies out there that do international adoption. How do we choose the right one?
We knew we wanted a Christian adoption agency and we began to look at the websites of several recommendations. This process was helpful in educating ourselves on the process of adoption but we didn’t feel we were making any headway into narrowing down our decision. I decided to reach out to a friend who has successfully completed an international adoption for advice. Her words were simple yet wise.
“Pick a few agencies, call them, and get a feel for how the conversation goes. Don’t spend too much time worrying about finding the “right” agency. People have good and bad experiences with every agency out there. God will lead you where you’re supposed to be.”
So that’s what we did. We chose three agencies and filled out their information forms and emailed them. Then we waited to hear back. In that period of waiting we prayed. Our prayer was that God would give us one door. That we would have a clear direction as to which agency we were supposed to choose. After about a week, we only heard back from ONE agency. Lifeline Children’s Services. It was clear to us that God was leading us in the direction of this agency and we are grateful for His gift of clarity. We never did get a response from the other two agencies.
At this point in the process we now believed two things: 1.) that we were going to adopt internationally from India and 2.) that we would adopt through Lifeline Children’s Services. So the next step was to set up an informational call where a Lifeline representative would speak to us and give us an overview of the process and answer our questions. God continued to provide clarity because the woman we spoke to “happened” to be the director of the India program. We began our application that same afternoon.
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If you would like more information on Lifeline Children’s Services you can visit their website here.
If you’re curious about adoption in India you can go here to see Lifeline’s page about adoption from India.
If you’re interested in more information about international adoption in general, this site has all the basics, including statistics, for each country.
A Full Table 