The Alderman's Story
Savannah and I met at Clearview Baptist Church in Franklin TN in 2014. I was pursuing a career in the music industry and Savannah was a first year student in Belmont University’s Occupational Therapy doctorate program. We met in a young adult small group and while I was initially attracted to Savannah, she was far too focused on her studies to notice me.
It wasn’t until a few months later, my band was leading worship for the students at Clearview and Savannah decided she would give the rugged musician a shot. We began dating and quickly fell in love throughout the Spring and Summer of 2015.
One of the things that connected us early on was we both had a heart for adoption and wanted that to be a major part of our family’s story. Adoption was discussed pretty seriously on the third or fourth date and that conversation made the relationship much more serious. Savannah and I got married in June 2016 and left Clearview Baptist to help with a church plant in Spring Hill TN. I started as the worship director and Savannah helped with the worship team as well as the children’s ministry. In June of 2018, we had begun praying about starting our family and knew that we wanted to start with adoption but we were not sure from where. We had just purchased a house in Tennessee and we had both been asked by Lifeway to travel to the country of Taiwan for ten days to put on an international Fuge Camp for missionary kids in southeast Asia. Savannah and I both grew up going to Fuge as students (my first trip to Nashville for Fuge my freshman year of High school was a large part of the reason I wanted to live in Nashville) and we also worked for Fuge as staffers. When we were asked to be a part of the international trip we were very excited and it was an easy “yes.”
We traveled to Taichung City on the western coast of Taiwan and while we were leading worship and recreation and bible study for these missionary students, God began to open our eyes and we began to fall in love with the country of Taiwan. Neither of us had ever been to Southeast Asia but the culture, the food, the scenery, and the people immediately drew us in. While we were there, our contact and driver for the week was telling us her story of adopting their youngest from Taiwan and Savannah and I felt confident this was where God wanted us to bring home our child from.
When we returned to the states, we prayed and fasted for a month and once we felt we had the green light from God we began the process in August of 2018.
In the Spring of 2019, we had finished our homestudy and we were waiting for a referral to be matched with and we were also considering “waiting children.” These were children who were a part of a sibling group, were older, or have some type of disability and are not usually selected as quickly for direct matches.
Savannah was looking over the list of waiting children one day and came across the faces of three sisters. She sent me their picture and I immediately felt like we should pursue them for adoption. After adjusting our paperwork and requesting to be matched with them, we finally heard the wonderful news that we had been matched with our daughters in October of 2019.
At that point, we were being told it would be possible for us to travel to Taiwan to bring them home in late Spring of 2020 so we cranked through the paperwork and did everything in our control to bring our girls home as fast as possible. Little did we and the rest of the world know that our process would be delayed almost six months because of Covid 19.
After what felt like an eternity of waiting, we finally received our travel dates in September 2020. We left in October, spent two weeks in quarantine, a week exploring the country, and then, during the fourth week, we finally met our girls and got to bring them home.
Our daughters are a daily reminder of the Lord’s provision and faithfulness to us and are the greatest joy in our lives. Since they have been home, life has been an ever changing adjustment but they have been flexible and resilient through every change and curve ball life has thrown at us.
The latest of which was moving to Orlando which is where I am from! I had an opportunity this past Spring to go full time with a company in Seattle and be 100% remote which allowed us the opportunity to live anywhere, We had been sensing God calling us away from TN for a few months but in June he confirmed for us that we were being called to Orlando to send our daughters to ICS and join the team and community at City Awakening. We are so excited for what God has in store for us here and cannot wait to serve the city of Orlando alongside all of you!