Justin and I have some exciting news, we are adopting!!! We are so excited for this next adventure and can't wait to bring home sweet baby Lowder! Below is a bit of our story and why adoption is how we plan on starting our family.  Please stay tuned for updates and special fundraising events we will be doing. Thank you for loving and supporting us as we take this next step in our marriage!

Justin and I have been married for about 5 months and we are very excited to have a family. When Justin and I first got engaged in April we talked about when we would want to start trying to have kids, because I have some health issues I told him that I needed to know about a year in advance so that I could get off of some medication and that would take about a year to do so. Justin and I both said that within a year we would like to start trying so I immediately went to see my cardiologist to talk with her about weaning myself off of some medications. She told me the risks of pregnancy, including some extra risks with my heart, but said that we could try. I was so excited. She gave me some goals and sent me on my way saying she would contact me later. I told Justin that all sounded good and I would start doing as she said so that in a year, we could try and have a baby. About a week later I received an email from my cardiologist that simply stated that even though my heart was doing so well and was working at 100% again, the risks were too high to get pregnant. Looking at my cardiomyopathy, the chances of myself and the baby surviving the pregnancy would be slim to none In the off chance that we both did make it through, I would be in no condition to be a mother because my heart would not be able to handle, not only pumping for two, but child birth. This would most likely leave me with a permanent cardiomyopathy problem. My heart, with all the problems it has had, had never hurt the way it did when I received that email. I had the man of my dreams desiring to start a family with me once we were married and now I had to tell him that my doctors suggested against it shortly after telling him we could try. Going backwards about 2 years, when I was originally in the hospital with my diagnosis, the first thing they told me was that I would not be able to have my own children given my condition. At the time I was single, 22, and had goals of moving to Africa, adopting and being a full-time missionary with Child Evangelism Fellowship. I was more devastated that those plans were no longer an option because I could not live somewhere I would not have easy access to a cardiologist. At this point, not having children was the least of my worries. Once Justin and I had met, a lot of what I was originally told had changed because my heart was functioning at 100%; the doctors couldn't believe it. Before I went to Missouri for 3 months to complete school, my team had told me that they believed pregnancy was an option. Now, back to our plans today.

About 2 months ago we posted that things were finally moving in our adoption process with Ethiopia, we were so excited to be turning in paperwork and finally start our official waiting time. About a week and a half after we posted that I received an email from our agency that had an attachment email they had received from the department of state urging families that hadn't yet turned in their dossier for Ethiopia and were ready to, to not. It said that relations between the US and Ethiopia hadn't been good and that they believed that the adoption door for the US and Ethiopia was going to close more permanently for an unforeseen amount of time and encouraged for families to pick a new country. With having finally gotten some good news that gave us hope that we were moving in the right direction, this hurt. There was a lot of wondering why God didn't want us to have kids, why He didn't want me to ever go back to Africa, and wondering if we were supposed to be parents at all.

We took a week and decided to talk to our agency about other options and other countries, or what just waiting would look like. Since we sent in our initial adoption application in January the mention of India has been constant. Our agency has brought it up over and over again, I have received and read so many adoption articles that all had to do with India. Obviously we didn't think anything of it, we were set on Ethiopia. After talking to our agency India came up again as a really great option as they are a country in great need of adopting families.

Right now there are an average of 50,000 kids needing to be adopted in India and only 3.2% of them are being adopted a year. We went home from our meeting and told our families what we were thinking and spent some more time in prayer.

I had an image in my head of what our family was going to look like, what our kids were going to look like, and it wasn't Indian. But then I looked up Indian kids, and looked up statistics and was rocked by the realization that nothing in my life has been as planned. The things that I have planned out for my life, in what I thought was what God wanted, weren't. And this isn't any different. I looked at pictures and statistics and saw children that needed a home that had parents that wanted them desperately, prayed for them relentlessly and loved them endlessly before they even knew their name. And those are all things that Justin and I can and are dying to do. We were still praying on this decision this week when it was released that as of midnight on November 8th any families that did not have their I-604 form filed would no longer be permitted to complete their adoptions from Ethiopia.

This was our finalization that God had bigger and better plans. We are choosing to believe that like most things, God has bigger and better plans for us then we even thought possible. So with that, we have made the hard and exciting decision to switch our adoption country to India.

India as a country has a 2 year marriage requirement for international adoption, so we will be filling all of our paperwork on August 28th. Our agency informed us that the process is MUCH quicker and we will likely have a referral and be in India with our kids by February/March of 2019. That is only a year and a half away!

Please be praying for us and with us as we make the changes we need to start this process. We are sad for the door that has closed but so excited to see what God has planned and the door He has opened. Also please be praying as we now have a much shorter amount of time to raise and save the money we need for our adoption costs.

Like always, we are so thankful for the love, prayers and support you all have given us this far on our journey. We can't wait to continue sharing our journey with you.

-The Lowders