Our Adoption Story Part 1

In three weeks we Oshmans will be celebrating Rebekah's 2nd Gotcha Day.  In adoption lingo a "Gotcha Day" is the day parents get to bring their waiting child into their family.   On February 27, 2010 Rebekah became our forever daughter.  In honor of that day, for the next three weeks I am going to retell our adoption story.  It is one filled with both grief and joy, waiting and hurrying, love and sorrow.  It is, above all, a story that God Himself wrote and continues to write.

As I recount these memories I have the added blessing of asking Rebekah about her heart and thoughts during each milestone.  I pray that our conversations and the resulting blog posts will draw us closer to one another as mother and daughter, will draw us both closer to the heart of God, and perhaps bring you closer to our family as we share these memories with you.

Part 1

Rebekah was born in 1997 in Bangkok, Thailand.  That was the same summer I went on a mission trip to Kenya and Mark returned from a semester of college in Europe.  We were married in 1999.  We had no idea our fourth child was already in the world.  God did.  On our wedding day she was probably entering the terrible twos.  As we baked in the sun on our honeymoon she probably clung to her momma's back while she made and sold fried bananas, a trade her birth family still maintains.

As is the custom in Thailand, Rebekah was given the nickname Deer.  She was the fourth daughter of her mother. Her mother and father moved from Bangkok to Nan--their birthplace--in northern Thailand sometime before Rebakah was four.  As a four-year-old Rebekah was orphaned when she lost her both her mother and her father.