For The Least Of These You Did For Me

Welcome to our family's blog. We are the Duryea family and we have seven children. You might be wondering why we chose this name for our blog. Well, to begin with we have three beautiful biological children and three beautiful children from China. I'll share our journeys to China to bring home our beautiful children later. For now, I'd like to share why we chose this name for our blog. The Lord showed me this verse when we were first seeking adoption. The Lord chose to grow our family through adoption. However, the Lord has also opened our eyes to the needs of orphans , especially in China. We consider "...looking after the orphans and widows in their distress..." James 1:17, as a way of life for us, a calling.

As I read through the many stories in our adoption agency's storybooks, there are countless stories that begin with "...after many years of experiencing infertility, we started the adoption process and are now a forever family"

If you are one of the countless couples that have experienced infertility, let me share with you the wonderful way of starting a family and at the same time providing a home for a needy orphan. God loves you and cares about you. "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." Jeremiah 29:11. If you are feeling hopeless, let me promise you that the Lord hears your cries. If you haven't ever trusted in Jesus and put your hope in him, do it now. Your life will be better than you could ever imagine. I never planned or dreamed I would go to China (3 times) and have this wonderful family. My plans surely would have never been as wonderful as they are today.

I had endometriosis for many years, yet I was able to conceive and have three beautiful children. After Sarah was born in 1998, I experienced severe problems and had surgery. However, I was unable to conceive, probably due to the scars left by endometriosis. Like many of you I had emotional scars as well. Even though I already had three children , I still felt called to have a larger family. Many months, tears, and prayers later we considered adoption. I heard about the plight of baby girls in China and the one child policy that left them abandoned. As we were praying about this, David's family in St.Louis was having a first time ever family reunion. I knew this wasn't coincidence, because David's cousin, a single mom, adopted two girls from China. One was 5 years old and the other was 9 months. This gave us the opportunity to meet them and talk to his cousin about adoption. When we came home we saw an advertisement for an adoption seminar in our area. We attended and were ready to start the paperwork to begin our adoption for a baby girl from China. Our lives would never be the same again.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Nathan Gouchang

Well after adopting our two beautiful girls, Hannah and Rebekah, I knew that God was speaking to my heart again. We could either say no to God's calling and instead fill our lives with all kinds of material stuff that moths and rust will destroy anyway or listen to our hearts and the call God has placed on our lives. How could we turn our backs to the cry of orphans and think only of our selfish desires.

So, we had to make a decision. Do we want to adopt or save our new house that we just built. We couldn't afford both.  When we started down the road to building our dream home we never knew that adoption would make such an impact on our lives. We were your typical American family, living the typical American dream. However, we are Christians and God doesn't call us to live like everyone else in American. God doesn't call us to live a comfy, narrow minded life, that when we accumulate all our wants and desires we say "is this all there is" or "what did I do with my life". He calls us to live beyond anything we can think or imagine. A life full of eternity in our hearts.

We weren't sure if we could adopt from China again, but the Lord opened the door again. China was just opening their special needs program and they were using our agency as a pilot for the program. When we called Zhou from our agency to see if there was any way we could adopt again, the agency had our family in mind to be help began this program. (Our friends, the Hedden's were the other family that the agency had chosen). God is so Awesome! We were traveling with our very special friends who we met while we were in Rebekah's travel group!

The agency had a 2 year old little boy with a repaired cleft lip/palate. Remember when we were adopting Hannah we saw 2 toddler boys with repaired cleft lip/palate at her orphange. We flew to China and on July 29, 2007, Nathan was placed in our arms. He was 2 ¾ years old when we adopted him and only 19lbs.   We discovered that he had a parasite. Nathan also has a severe language delay and cognitive developmental delays.  Nathan's speech is progressing but requires a great amount of speech therapy.

He is a happy little boy, loves baseball, riding his bike and dogs. He enjoys being home and schooled by mom. He is such a blessing and brings joy to our lives.
posted at 6:59 PM

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