THIS IS NOT MY HOME: A Story About International Adoption

By Steve Thompson

After spending twenty-five years building a multiracial family, Steve Thompson realized he needed to share his story with others.

Building on a daily journal he had written during a trip to Russia, he reveals the similarities between adopted children becoming part of his family and Christians becoming a part of God’s family.

When he and his family went to Russia to adopt two children from an orphanage, he thought how they were about to join a super blessed home. But then he realized that for them, the notion of home was not so simple.

As he and his family continued their adoption journey, he saw parallels between his own adoption as a child of the King and the adoptions he was undertaking. The more insights he gleaned, the more he felt called to write this book.

Join the author as he shares powerful lessons for anyone who is considering or going through the adoption process as well as anyone looking to grow in faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9798385009039

Steve Thompson

Steve Thompson is a fully time-served welder with 25 years experience in all aspects of welding and a particular expertise working with exotic pipework such as stainless steels and copper alloys. In 1989 he joined a newly-formed company intending to specialise in mould, tool and die welding repairs. He found there was little information on the subject, so he started to collect together notes, materials and diagrams on the techniques which made the job easier. The book has grown out of this process and its practical and accessible style is a direct result of Steve's first hand experience.

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Copyright © 2023 Steve Thompson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.westbowpress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 979-8-3850-0901-5 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-0902-2 (hc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-0903-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023919000

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/30/2023

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Call

The Process

The Journey

The Beginning

The Ending

The Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

During the time that we were preparing for our international adoption, I became intrigued by the concept of home. We were about to go get two children and take them out of the orphanage that we had horrible impressions of and bring them to our super blessed home. But one thing that I had not really thought about before was that the orphanage was their home—at least right now it was. And the idea hit me that the orphanage was not their home, just like this earth during my lifetime is only the temporary holding cell for me while I am waiting for my Father to take me home. And the seeds for this book had been planted.

As I continued to walk through this adventure that you are about to read about, many ideas kept coming to me that seemed to be parallels between my adoption as a child of the King and the adoptions that we were undertaking. I began to feel that in the same way that we had been called to adopt, I had been called to write down what I learned and compile this book. Now, what I cannot understand is why I was called to write this book instead of Jenny, my wife, a former employee of a library and a person that probably loves books more than she loves me. But, after twenty-five years of being under this calling, I have finally completed the task.

In the beginning of this adventure, I had decided to write down in a journal everything I thought and experienced during our trip to Russia. When we returned from Russia, life suddenly began to take a turn in so many different directions that the book fell off the shelf and never was written. Then I remembered my journal and decided to at least type that from my handwritten notes. Upon completion of that task, the rest of the book became officially born in my head. All I needed to do now was type what was in my head.

One day, before I could really get a good start on the rest of the book, our computer crashed. We didn’t really lose anything major, but we did lose my progress on this book. So I started over again and was really not getting it done very fast. I wanted to blame my lack of progress on living life, but the truth is, laziness had become a major character flaw for me. So when I mentioned my book to a brother at church, Stanley Anderson, he asked me, Do you believe that God is calling you to write it? When I replied positively, he promised to hold me accountable and make me write it. And whenever I started procrastinating, I would get a text from him asking me how the book was coming. So, thanks to Stanley, here we are.

Another reason that it took me twenty-five years to write this is that I just recently realized that when our entire lives totally changed from what we had expected to continue forever to the new lives that we eventually embraced, we had experienced the same type of change that our two children from Russia had experienced. It was another lesson God taught me that took me twenty-five years to learn. So partly because of laziness and partly because of me being a slow learner, I am finally accomplishing what I was called to do many years ago.

After writing this book, there are three prayers that are prominent in my future. First, I pray that after reading this book, some people may be inspired to consider adopting an orphan in an international adoption. Despite the many setbacks that you will definitely endure, there is no limit to the positive results of your endeavor. Not only would you get to be someone’s hero, but also you will be shown the blessings of God in ways that you could never imagine.

Second, I pray that after reading this book, some people would be inspired to recognize that this is not their home. And if they have never allowed the actions of Jesus Christ to satisfy the debt of their sins in this world and made sure that they have been adopted by God to spend eternity with Him, then this might help them to pursue that eternal home.

And my third prayer is for the vast majority of the readers of this book. For those who are already believers and are adopted children of God but will definitely not be undertaking an international adoption, I pray that you will enjoy reading our story. And in a sort of unexpected way, you will feel like you are also a part of our family because one day, we will all be together with our Father in our eternal home.

THE CALL

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F o r as many years as she could remember, Jenny had always known that she wanted to adopt a child. And now she was feeling it again. She was thirty-six years old and was thoroughly enjoying her life as a mother of three. But God was putting a desire in her heart for another child—a child who was born into a much different world from hers and would never experience the joys of family. Her scripture verse that kept rolling around in her mind was God sets the lonely in families (Ps. 68:6 [NIV]).

But before I tell you this story, I need to give you some background information. Jenny was born on November 12, 1961, to Roy Ellison and Trudy Allen Jones. She had two younger brothers, Glenn and Todd, when her father was killed in an automobile accident. Not long after Roy’s death, Trudy married Stanley Bell, and they had another baby boy they named Stan. Stanley was a very strict father, and Jenny and her brothers grew up scared of him. Despite the occasional turbulence, Jenny and her brothers were sent to a small Methodist church in their neighborhood. Although they made good friends there, they didn’t let these friendships flourish because of the fear that their father would embarrass them.

I was born on April 21, 1959, to Larry Edison and Molly Anne Price Thompson. I had a younger brother named Sid and a younger sister named Tracy. My parents were very good, honest, and hardworking people who had an ambitious drive to succeed and be among the leaders of the city. When my dad took over ownership of his employer, the success they had been chasing appeared to be in their grasp. However, the stress of running a business and the debt that was used to keep it going took a toll. We had periodically visited our church, but it always seemed to be for reasons other than spiritual ones. So I basically grew up never really caring about church.

During high school, I was a manager for the football and basketball teams. This gave me a chance to be around athletics despite my very small and not very athletic body. As a part of the football team, I chose to participate in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes primarily because the meetings were like free dinners. At one of these meetings, a football player from Furman University was the guest speaker, and he invited us during the closing prayer to accept Jesus Christ as a personal Savior. So I did. The decision was real, but I didn’t really grasp all that it meant.

While Jenny was in high school, she attended a youth rally that was held at a Baptist church. Now this event was specifically held to target youth who needed salvation. Despite her very loyal church attendance, the idea of salvation had never really been presented to her. She decided that a call to make Jesus her personal Savior was one she should respond to, and, again, the decision was real, but she didn’t fully grasp all that it meant either.

During my college years, while attending Clemson University, the small Methodist church that Jenny attended, made the house across the street from my home its parsonage. The Reverend Frank Buddy Morris and his family moved there, and I became friends with his two daughters, Denise and Donna. As a result of these friendships, I began to attend that Methodist church. Being regulars in the church for about a year, Jenny and I became friends who attended Sunday school together.

After missing a few opportunities to go out after youth events, the day finally came when we decided to go eat at Burger King. I would like to say this was the first time I asked Jenny to go on a date with me, but the truth of the matter is that we were the only two from the youth group to take advantage of this opportunity. But Jenny took advantage of this date to work on getting me to fall for her. Well, it worked, and I chose to ask her to accompany me to an event that my summer employer had out at the lake.

After the date at the lake, my employers expressed their approval of her, and I began to think that she and I could become a couple. My ambition to succeed that had developed during my childhood made their approval an important factor, although it really should not have been. We began to date each other exclusively while I completed my time at Clemson and graduated with a degree in financial management. Then I began my career with the same firm of certified public accountants that had been my summer employer, Elliott Davis and Company.

During the next several months, I placed a high priority on studying for and passing the CPA exam, the next step on my ladder of success. It helped that Jenny began to attend Columbia College that year and lived a couple of hours away. I would study every night after work, and on the weekends, I would spend time with Jenny. I had reached the conclusion that she would become my wife once I passed that exam. In February, I received my grades that indicated I had passed all parts of the exam, and on Valentine’s Day, I popped the question.

Unfortunately, I did not understand the importance of this event to her, and I really messed up by not making something bigger out of this. This was an early indication that there would be times when I needed to let her determine what was important instead of me. But we did go get her a ring that she could show people.

Jenny and I got married in that small Methodist church on August 1, 1981, when I was twenty-two years old and she was only nineteen. We were very active as a young couple in the church. We would often go out on Sunday evenings with the older couples in our church. Our first apartment was one side of a duplex that was located beside a railroad track. There were so many trains using that track that we had learned to not hear the loud noises they made or feel the house trembling every time they went by.

After about a year there, we moved into another house that we were renting. While living at that house, I began to attend Full Gospel Businessmen meetings with our friend Dean Goss. He was our church’s music leader and had sung at our wedding. During these meetings, I began to learn more about the Holy Spirit. He was the part of the Trinity that the churches I had been attending had never really explained. As I was praying one night in my living room, I asked the Holy Spirit to teach me what the Bible meant. After that night, I began to read the Bible enthusiastically and could not put it down.

After about another year, Jenny and I bought a lot and had a friend build us a house on it. Watching the house come together over a three-month period, I began to see the wisdom that my better half had as she made most of the decisions about details in the house, including the floor plan itself. The time spent watching this house being built was very rewarding.

We moved into that house in 1983, and in April 1984, we decided to start a family. And nine months later, our eldest daughter was born. Unfortunately, she was born on January 4, a date that delayed for one year the annual tax deduction that I should have been taking if I’d had any talent as a certified public accountant.

During the past two years, I had been growing spiritually primarily because of the amount of time I was spending reading the Bible. But I also had started listening to contemporary Christian music that contained valuable ideas and truths from the Word. One Sunday morning, while listening to Twila Paris singing We Will Glorify, I thought that her name was really pretty. After discussing it with Jenny, we both agreed that it was the perfect name for our daughter. So our first daughter was named Twila Paige Thompson.

A year later, we decided to add another child, and our son was born after nine more months. This time, we had done a much better job of tax planning because he was born on December 6. To the CPAs I worked with, I had redeemed myself. Jenny and I agreed that the name Adam would be the best name because God chose it for his first male. Taking the name Harris to honor Jenny’s much-loved great-grandmother, he became Adam Harris Thompson.

Our perfect little family of four had been created in our perfect timing. Jenny was a full-time mother, and she was doing such a great job that our two children were almost perfect. And I had been promoted a couple of times and seemed to be successful in my career. We had decided to change churches a couple of times as our spiritual growth had led us to churches that were more compatible with our always-changing values.

About six years after Adam was born, our perfect little family of four was a living testimony of the blessings of godly living, and everything was completely under our control. But without my permission, God decided to change things for us. For the first time in our lives, we would not be in control. After celebrating Jenny’s thirty-first birthday, we took a little risk and began a new journey that I had not planned. And nine months later, we had another little girl.

We again chose to resurrect an old family name that we both had somewhere in our heritage. The name we chose meant beautiful, and we coupled it with a good Christian value to name her Callie Faith Thompson. She was born on August 10, 1993, a little over a month after I had left the CPA firm and taken a position with my largest client, the Velux Corporation.

As she grew older, Callie taught us many life lessons. One of those lessons was that despite Jenny being the perfect mother, the fact that our first two children were naturally compliant types had more to do with her success in controlling their behaviors than her talent as a mother. Also, she taught me that as a father, I was not authorized to negotiate any decisions with her mother that affected her. Her mother would make those decisions without my approval, and, usually, Callie was the one telling her what those decisions were.

And that brings me back to the summer of 1997. The subject of adoption had come up before, but I had always just laughed when it was mentioned. Why would we adopt when we make such perfect little babies ourselves? That was what I always said. So one night while we were out taking a walk in our neighborhood, she decided to mention it again. But this time, she approached it very seriously and with as much humility as I had ever seen.

She said that God had been tugging at her heart about something, and she didn’t want to tell me what it was. She was very afraid that I would again reject her idea, and she wished that it would just go away. But the desire that she was feeling only got stronger and stronger, and she could no longer withhold it from me. She mentioned once more that she felt like God was calling us to adopt, and she only wanted me to pray about it. That would help ease the burden for her. So I agreed that we would pray about it.

Later that evening as we prayed together, I began to seek the direction I needed to make a decision. We prayed intensely about the subject on Sunday night, followed by another intense night of prayer on Monday—and again on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. I was thinking we would