Shannon Bream Explores ‘God’s Will’ in Adoption with Children’s Book Authors
By Movieguide® Contributor
Fox News host Shannon Bream is talking about adoption with Jackie Darby and Aixa de López, co-authors of a new bilingual children’s book, “Whose Am I?”
Both have first-hand experience with adoption.
As a baby, Darby was “abandoned in a rat-infested dump in Seoul, South Korea.”
“But God sent a missionary nurse, I like to call her my angel, who found me, rescued me and took me to the local orphanage,” she revealed. “From there, I became eligible for adoption. On the other side of the world, I believe that the Lord was nudging the hearts of my parents to adopt. So, they began the process and were assigned three different baby girls, but all three died before they ever made it to the United States.”
“On the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, about an hour after it went across the airwaves, my mom received another phone call from the director of the orphanage asking if they would reconsider a fourth baby girl,” she continued. “At first the answer was no because they no longer felt like it was God’s will. But after a few weeks, they changed their mind and decided they would try it one more time. I was the fourth baby, and on a cold winter day in February, I flew into Chicago O’Hare.”
De López has experienced the other side of adoption.
“Well, my husband and I are pastors at a very large church in Guatemala, one of the largest in Latin America,” López began. “We got married and had two uneventful pregnancies, a girl and a boy, and so, in any circumstance, that’s like hitting the jackpot. We were living the perfect family life, if you will.”
“But the Lord kept reminding me of when we were younger, we had a conversation, my husband went through cancer, and although he didn’t receive radiotherapy, it’s something that the Lord used to even consider talking about adoption when we were dating. And I said, ‘If we ever have difficulty conceiving biologically, my choice wouldn’t be to spend to many years in treatment, I would go for adoption in a couple years,'” she continued.
“The Lord was so patient with us. Even though we had a girl and a boy, the Lord had remind me of that and started, as Jackie uses the word every often, he nudged me into going to serve in a very private way,” López added. “I started praying about going into an orphanage to serve in a very regular pace. He opened a window at an orphanage near my home, and I started going on weekly visits. Even though adoption didn’t happen in that orphanage, he used those interactions with real little girls to open our family up to the possibility.”
Fast forward to 2014, the Lópezs became a family of five, and then in 2015, they adopted once again.
Darby and López’s book “dives into the heartbreak and beauty of adoption that may cause questions about identity to arise and where they should find their true identity.”
In “Whose Am I?” children meet “two characters whose lives are intertwined due to a strong bond formed by their adoption stories: Darly, a pre-adolescent girl with a thousand questions and feelings surrounding her story, and Jackie, her mentor and good friend, who has a beautiful and powerful testimony to share with her. Throughout their interaction, we learn that Jackie was abandoned in a dump and miraculously found by a missionary nurse who took her in an orphanage, which is contacted by a foreign couple wishing to adopt.”
Movieguide® previously reported on actor Kirk Cameron’s passion for adoption:
Kirk Cameron’s new movie LIFEMARK portrays the powerful story of adoption, and the father of six reveals why this movie was so near and dear to his heart.
“Think about this. My wife was one doctor appointment away from not existing,” Cameron said. “And our four children were also this close to not existing. And if my wife hadn’t been born, neither would our two natural-born children.”
His wife Chelsea Noble who he met while working on GROWING PAINS, was adopted herself, and that was a major factor in choosing to adopt four of their six children as he mentioned previously.
“Chelsea and I waited six years before we started having kids and we got talking about how it what that might look like. Chelsea and I started talking about the subject of adoption. And this came up pretty naturally because my wife Chelsea is an adopted child,” he explained. “And so this was something that was always a part of her life and something that she’s always wanted to do.”
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