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

Rebekah Lu

Adopting Hannah changed our lives forever. We were totally unaware of the impact that adoption would bring to our lives. When you stand in the middle of an orphanage and see the sad, lonely faces of babies and children, how could our lives not be changed. We knew that God had a calling on our lives.
We weren't sure if we would be able to adopt again from China since we now had four children, but God opened the door and China said "yes".God is so good.

So 6 months after arriving home with Hannah we started the paperwork again. We only had to wait 6 months for our referral for Rebekah and everything went smoothly.

Rebekah Lu, who is 6 years old now and our second adopted child, was 3 weeks old when she was abandoned. She was taken to the Chongyang orphanage where she lived until we adopted her.  We remember the day she was given to us. She cried and cried and her clothes smelled of smoke. She was 10 ½ months old.

Rebekah is a joy to our family and is also very smart. She loves playing dress-up, having tea parties, dancing and riding her bike.
posted at 5:43 PM

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