How It All Began

Hello, everyone! This is John and Mel! If you are reading this, it means that you have a vested interest in our journey towards adoption and starting a family. Thank you for coming to this site. Your support through even reading our story is a huge encouragement to us. Our story is simply the story that God Himself is writing in our lives, and we have come to believe whole-heartedly that His story is good, that His plans and purposes for our lives are good, and that He is a God who can be trusted. Although the story He is choosing for us has had its challenges, we have learned to fully embrace it and count it a privilege to share the coming weeks and months with each of you.

Our goal in maintaining this blog is to keep you informed about each step in our adoption process. We realize that there are many of you that want to know the nitty gritty details, and although we truly love to talk about what’s happening and how we are feeling each step of the way, we also recognize that it would be unrealistic to keep each one of you as informed as we would like relying only on face-to-face, phone, or email contacts (and let’s not forget Facebook, all you FB junkies out there!) That being said, we have no idea how often we will update this blog. In a busy week with lots of activity, we might update it several times. During longer waiting periods where there’s not much happening in our adoption process, you may not hear from us much at all. So feel free to check in on us as often as you like, and we thank you in advance for the grace that you will give us when our updates seem far apart.

So let’s get started at the beginning of our story…

We have been married for over 9 years and have always desired a family. LONG story short, after trying to conceive a child ourselves with no success, we were tested for all of the typical causes for infertility and learned that we are both completely healthy, being officially diagnosed with “unexplained infertility.” (We still joke about thanking the doctors for that diagnosis). After learning about our diagnosis, we were at complete peace. We knew a peace that truly was beyond our understanding. We had always talked about adopting someday. We were realizing that it might be even sooner than we thought, but we did not know what the timing of our next steps would be.

During the past 2½ years since our diagnosis, lots of things have happened. John was able to finish graduate school and now has a Masters degree in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary. Mel traveled to Peru, Louisiana (twice), Ecuador, the Middle East (twice), Senegal, Mali (three times), Mississippi (twice), and Cambodia on cross-cultural short-term teams. Three of those trips we were given the privilege of serving together, which was incredible. Needless to say we’ve been busy, and God has obviously had His own unique plans for our life.

But now… FINALLY!… we believe that God has given us the "green light" to pursue an adoption and grow our family. We are still deciding on major questions like:

• State-side adoption or International?
• Which agency will we use?

Please be praying for us as we attempt to answer these questions in the coming weeks. Once we answer those, we will be able to take the necessary steps towards meeting our first little Hendrickson.

There is so much more that we could write, but maybe we’ll save that for Blog #2. We love you all and appreciate your prayers and support soooo much! We would never be at this place were it not for you and your constant displays of love for us. Feel free to forward this blog link to anyone you feel would be encouraged by our journey.