Stepping Out of the Comfort Zone

It sometimes amuses me how God takes us and thrusts us out of our comfort zones. Public speaking, you see, is not my comfort zone. Give me a room full of kids, and I can teach them all day long. Give me something to read in front of a large crowd of adults, I’m okay. I even did drama with a group from our Baptist Student Union when I was in college (but that was out of my comfort zone, even then). Asking me to stand up and talk to a group about a particular topic...somewhat stressful. But when you marry a pastor, occasionally those moments come up when you are asked to speak in front of a group. Recently, I was asked to speak to our Ladies’ Ministry group at church, and agreed, as long as I could speak on a topic near-and-dear to my heart--adoption. And when our local MOPS group was in need of someone to speak for National Adoption Month, I offered to share my talk with them, as well.

So as I have done the same basic presentation twice now, I thought I would share some of it here. My talk is broken down into several topics. Those include:

* Our Personal Adoption Testimony
Our marriage and life before kids
How we decided to adopt
Our decision to move forward
The Paperchase
Referral
Our Trip to China

* Current State of Adoption in China

* Adoption-Friendly Language

* Those Weird Questions & Comments

* What can you do for a family who has recently adopted?

* How can you get started in the adoption process?

* What can the average person do?

Over the next few days, I hope to blog about these different topics. However, instead of doing a post to share our adoption testimony, I will refer you to our Adoption Voyages site. We use this as our sample site for our Adoption Voyages service, so if you followed our original website, you may notice that it looks a bit different. But here it is...

Our Adoption Story