This Thanksgiving, there is no better story about family than Jim and Stacey’s story, “Pure Joy.”
As you will read, adoption and life in general can be very unpredictable, and sometimes the things least expected are the greatest gifts of all. Jim and Stacey will be celebrating Thanksgiving this year with their adopted son Dylan, but also their 1-year-old baby, who was the biggest surprise of their lives.
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Sixty high school students, part of a church youth group retreat north of Columbus, Ohio, sit in an auditorium on a day in late January 2010. Addressing the group are Jim and Stacey, who currently stand apart from one another.
The theme of the weekend retreat was “pure joy.” How do you find joy in your life, and how do you keep it? And when challenges present themselves, how do you utilize that joy to make it through the times that are most difficult?
Jim and Stacey had certainly encountered challenges to their own joy in the past few years, ever since they decided to start their family, they said into the microphone. Months of waiting for Stacey to become pregnant quickly turned into a year and a half with no results. Then they decided to pursue infertility treatments, which also lasted around a year and a half.
Jim saw the emotional and physical toll the infertility treatments were having on his wife, and after one final attempt at in vitro fertilization, the two had had enough. They decided to get away and took a road trip from their home in Columbus to Cincinnati. During the car ride, Stacey asked her husband a question that would change their lives forever.
“Jim, what are your feelings about adoption?”
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To read the rest of Jim and Stacey’s amazing adoption story, please read “Pure Joy – Jim, Stacey and Dylan’s Adoption Story.”
