In August 2003, five families from around the U.S. traveled to China together to adopt our children through HOPE for Children. We arrived in Changsha, the capital city of the Hunan Province, early Sunday afternoon.
What we did over the next two weeks bonded our families together for a lifetime, beginning with a small, impromptu worship service in one of our hotel rooms (there were no dry eyes left in that room!), followed by receiving our children (four girls and a boy) together as a group in the hotel conference room just a few minutes later.
Since that trip, we have stayed close. Every other summer we have done adoption reunion vacations together, from Atlanta to Tennessee to Kentucky. While on our reunion trips, we would dream about someday taking our children back to experience their birth country. God richly blessed our dream and in July 2016, our five families, joined by four other adoptive families, traveled back to China on an amazing Lotus Travel Heritage Tour!
We explored Tiananmen Square and The Forbidden City together. We climbed many of the thousands of steps of the Great Wall. We beheld the Terracotta Warriors of the First Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang in Xian. We tried our hand at Chinese calligraphy. We created paper cuttings instructed by one of China’s most famous peasant painting artists, Pan Xiaoling. We stayed in a farm village in Hu County, joining the villagers for their traditional evening dancing party at the local park.
We got a bird’s eye view of the giant pandas and the smaller red pandas at the Chengdu Panda Research Center. We floated on bamboo rafts down a branch of the Li River in Yangshuo. We were taught how to cook some traditional Chinese dishes and even prepared our own lunch! We watched the young gymnasts at the Changsha Gymnastic School and even did a little tumbling of our own. We visited a tea farm and participated in a traditional Chinese tea ceremony. And these are just a few of our many adventures!
But most dear to my heart, and the hearts of all the parents, was watching our children and our families develop and deepen their relationships with each other as we enjoyed the many wonders of China.
The finale of our trip was a visit to the Hunan Provincial Adoption Center, the Yuoxian Orphanage, and each child’s finding spot. We were warmly welcomed by the directors and staff members and shared with them how deeply grateful we were for each of our children, both adopted and biological, and how very much we loved each of them. Throughout the entire trip we talked and laughed and cried together as we watched God once again work mightily in our lives and the lives of our children.
It was obvious that God was with us every step of the way, bonding us even closer together by his great love, as one big forever family! To God be the glory, now and forever! 
