by TLC Nielsen
Just as Laura and her husband's kids were launching out on their own, God put a call on their hearts to adopt more children. Laura Stewart is a speaker, chef, and author as well as a parent of many decades.
Welcome to the Extraordinary Ordinary, Laura Stewart!
Q) When you and your hubby started a family, how many children did you think about having?
A) I met my husband in my freshman year of college. When we talked about our future, we hoped God would bless us with 2, maybe 3 children. After we married, I sometimes joked that I loved children so much I'd have a dozen if I didn't have to endure pregnancy morning sickness. We never truly imagined we'd end up with 7 children.
Q) At what point did your love of food and writing enter the mix of daily life with kids?
A) I come from a family of good cooks. I never intended to make it a career. When our first set of kiddos were becoming a little more self reliant, a couple things happened. My husband's cook for his monthly board meetings retired and a local restaurant was looking for someone to make tamales for them—my cooking career began.
Although I always loved playing with words, I would have never called myself a writer. We went through a very difficult season after we adopted our children. Through a set of circumstances, I felt like the Lord asked me to write a book. God used writing to help me feel hope. I haven't finished it yet, but I still hope that finishing it is part of God's story for my life.
Q) When did God bring adoption into your family equation?
A) God has an amazing sense of humor! I caught the desire to adopt in Sunday School as a young child. My husband always knew I wanted to adopt and, althought he wasn't 100% opposed, he wasn't excited about it either. I understood. We had three biological children. We didn't have the space for a larger family. We didn't have the finances needed. But my desire was still very strong.
I genuinely believe God called me to adopt. So I prayed for the first 15–20 years of our marriage that God would either take away my desire to adopt or share it with Terry. Neither happened. At age 40ish, I gave up and quit praying about it. At age 45, I was helping at a church event and one of the ladies started talking about adoption. I told her I had always wanted to adopt. We talked and she challenged me to pray about it one more time.
Now, two of our children were out of the house and the youngest was about to propose to his girlfriend and leave home for school. It took a while to work up the courage to tell Terry I was praying about adoption again. He laughed, but agreed to pray too. God answered Terry's prayer (which he admits was half-hearted) very loudly. At age 45, we started foster care classes and God sent us a 1, 2 and 3 year old.
Q) Where did you experience the most challenges in juggling being a chef, writer, and parent?
A) Within a few months of adopting 3 of our children, a change in government administration led to my husband losing his appointed position. We continued to watch our world crumble out from underneath us with one devastating cirumstance after another hitting our family. In the midst of it, God sent us another child whom we adopted. Then family friends who also fostered kiddos needed help, so we took in two of the children and kept them for a year until our older son and his wife adopted them. Our newest adopted daughter had a sibling who needed a home as well.
We also learned about a lady in our church who was in an abusive situation, and we invited her and her four kiddos to stay with us until a hearing for a restraining order happened. At one point, we had 7 children under the age of eight and a family of five living in our four bedroom home. All this while our roof leaked, we had plumbing issues, our air conditioning died, our business was failing, and we were facing possible foreclosure.
There were dozens of other circumstances at play with personal health issues, my dad being diagnosed with Alzheimer's, car accidents, being robbed . . . Additionally, the kiddos in our care had some very serious issues. The family living with us had no idea what a normal family looked like and that multiplied our already overwhelming chaos. In looking back, I don't know how we had enough food for everyone, let alone how we survived.
Even after the number in our household shrunk, our life continued to implode. I cried a lot, I whined and raged at God a lot. I kept waiting for Him to swoop in and save us. Instead, He quite literally held us together. He gave us peace that made zero sense. I learned to trust Him like never before. We grew in our faith. We learned how to lean into Him even when what we wanted to do was run far, far away. In this very long miserable season, writing became an outlet for me. It kept me sane by helping me process my feelings. I frequently found the Lord quietly speaking to me as I wrote. As awful as life was, He also made it a very sweet, precious time of learning to know Him better.
A) God's timing always seems to be vastly different than mine. That is a pattern you see over and over again in the Bible. God promised Abraham a vast number of offspring and waited for many, many years to give him Isaac. God gave Joseph dreams and it was more than 20 years before they came to pass. Hannah wept and prayed for a child for years. Elizabeth was barren until she and Zechariah were old. Israel waited for the Messiah for hundreds of years.
None of us like waiting. I hated it, but I know that God used that time of waiting to work in me. I know the difficulties we endured changed us. I gave my life to Christ at a very young age. We have loved and served God all of our married lives. It wasn't about saving us, but about making us more like Christ and more dependent on Him. I still don't fully understand His sense of timing, but I have learned to trust it.
Q) How do you and your hubby divide up the workload in your family?
A) Our household has been full and chaotic. We have homeschooled all of our children through at least part of their education. It is simply too much for one person. I am so grateful for my husband. He is such an amazing individual, always having the wisdom to see that we have to work as a team to be successful.
We also taught our children from a young age that our household was too big for just one or two of us to take care of. We have always worked as a family team. We do have some more traditional roles at times—I do most of the laundry, most of the cooking while Terry handles most repairs, moving . . . But we are both willing to step in and help in any way that makes our family successful.
Q) Who surprised you the most in this journey into adoption?
A) Due to our age and the age of our biological children, we got a lot of skeptical looks and a lot of "why would you do that?" type of questions when we began pursuing adoption. Several people told us we didn't need to do that. It was disheartening at times. Thankfully, God made His request very clear and we were able to stay focused on what He had asked of us.
Thanks for letting me interview you, Laura, on the Extraordinary Ordinary blog!
Find out more about Laura on Facebook and on Instagram. Listen to one of her posts here.
Thank you for visiting TLC's Extraordinary Ordinary blog, where folks with out-of-the-ordinary adventures share their stories! Please leave a comment.
