David
&
Kelly
ABOUT US
We are both life-long Ohioans. Kelly was a Middletown Middie and David was a Lima-Bath Wildcat. After graduation in 2004, Kelly headed up towards Lima to attend pharmacy school at Ohio Northern University. At the same time, David moved to Columbus to study engineering at The Ohio State University. We met in 2011, when Kelly had just completed her residency at Nationwide Children's Hospital and David had recently finished grad school. We were both attending Veritas Community Church and happened to fall into the same group of friends for the summer. As the weeks passed, we both started to notice something special about each other. Our first date was the day before David moved to Indiana for his new job. We decided to just go for it and start a relationship, and as they say... the rest is history! After about 19 months of long-distance dating and engagement, we were married in April 2013.
From the time we met through the first year of our marriage, life was near perfect. David struggled to find full-time work in Columbus, which was hard, but it also allowed us to get more involved in our church and make up for all that time as a long-distance couple! Just about everything seemed to be going even better than we had hoped.
And then, in the fall of 2014, we decided it was time to get pregnant.
Month after month passed by with no positive pregnancy test. We tried everything from natural family planning, to functional and nutritional medicine, to fertility treatments. With each failed attempt the cloud of shock and loss hanging over us grew darker and darker. It seemed that, although everything around us was changing and growing, we were left paralyzed and hopeless.
Finally, after a year of infertility, Kelly was diagnosed with an enlarged thyroid, due to hypothyroidism, and borderline adrenal fatigue. We were relieved to finally have a “reason” for why we couldn’t get pregnant and for the other symptoms Kelly had been struggling with (depression, anxiety, and fatigue). We began to realize that God had not abandoned us in our sorrow, but was remaining faithful to His promise to be near us in our weakness and brokenness. Although the path to physical healing would likely be slow, we had reached a turning point in our emotional and spiritual healing.
While the part of our hearts that longs to have biological children still yearns, another part of our hearts has been growing. Before infertility, before marriage, and even before we knew each other, God was working to soften our hearts towards adoption. We believe in the “theology of adoption”, that God chose to sacrifice Himself so that He could conquer our sin and make us co-heirs with Jesus Christ – adopted Children of God! Our desire to adopt is simply a response to the grace and love that we have been shown by our Father in Heaven. We also believe that God cares for the vulnerable, including women with a crisis pregnancy and unborn children. That is why we are doing an open domestic infant adoption. We are so excited to provide a loving option for a mother who wants to choose life for her child!
When we used to talk about adoption, we assumed that we would have biological children first. However, God had different plans to grow our family in a special, non-traditional way. We are officially approved to adopt, and are waiting to be matched with a birth mom.