Busy airports are a hallmark of the Thanksgiving holiday. As countless strangers brush past each other, it is easy for one face to blend into another and for each story and each destination to become little more than a footnote in your own travel plans. Were you to sit down with any of these travelers, you would no doubt hear countless tales – like those of the grandmother on her way to see her beloved grandchildren, the Marine heading home to surprise his wife, the businessman finally taking time out for his family – and so many more. Each is worthy of its own telling. However, if you happened to find yourself struggling through the heavy traffic and long lines of Miami International Airport this past Thanksgiving holiday, you might just have chanced upon Shawn and Lauren Waller, a young couple from Hobe Sound, Florida with a Thanksgiving story unlike any other. You see, on November 23, 2021, Shawn and Lauren were not making their way to a family get-together in some frosty northern state. Rather, this year their plans took them to an orphanage in the heart of India to meet and bring home their new daughter, Jubilee.
My friendship with the Wallers began seven years ago before Shawn and Lauren were married – but only just shortly before. However, even long before their marriage began, the Lord was preparing their hearts separately for the journey they would finally make together this year. As Lauren shared on their site www.walleradoption.com, “Shawn’s story begins in 2004. In his freshman year of college, the Lord brought him to repentance and salvation when confronted with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. While attending college to become a physical therapist like his dad, the Lord gave him a heart to see others come to know Christ, both in this country and abroad. As he was considering medical missions as a means to do that, the Lord directed his heart to take a short trip to Brazil. During his time there, he was brought to the favelas, or slums, where he saw many children living in the streets suffering from malnutrition, starvation, and poor health. It seemed a dark place with no hope. While he couldn’t physically bring the children back to the States, he brought their faces and their stories home with him in his heart. This was the first seed that God planted deep inside him prior to meeting me.”
Still pre-Shawn, some years later in 2011, Lauren made her own international missions journey to Purani Khondi, India where she and her team would “share the matchless treasure of Christ with children [they] had never met.” Of her own story Lauren says, “What we encountered far surpassed any of my expectations. It was clear that the Lord didn’t only bring us there to work on others’ lives — He had work to do in ours. At these children’s camps is where the Lord really started teaching me of the value of children and the value of every human life. Each child is made in the image of God and is a life worth loving (Genesis 1:27). And those gorgeous, eager brown eyes begging for more melt even the hardest of hearts. For the first time, I began to have the desire of having my own children.”
Tragically, only three days after this trip, Lauren found herself unconscious in a hospital bed after enduring a horrific car accident. As she put it at the time, “…life was fleeting and the thought of children further.” Even so, the Lord is gracious, and after a long and difficult recovery, Lauren was restored to her family and friends, and three years later she married Shawn – the love of her life.
Lauren’s accident, which involved a traumatic brain injury, continued to have consequences even years later. Infertility was a real possibility, and Lauren’s memories of her life-changing trip to India were “dim, unclear, and a distant, faded, partial-memory.” Even so, the desire for children was still strong. As Lauren explained, “…with infertility front-and-center, the strong desire for children, and India still on the mind — however dimly — adoption quickly became an option.”
A subsequent pregnancy and then miscarriage, drove home the point to Lauren that she did indeed want children – both biological AND adopted. The Wallers named their unborn child Anaya, which means “God Answered.” Though they will not meet Anaya face to face until Heaven, the baby’s name proved very appropriate. As Lauren explained, “God answered so many prayers with the fleeting life of Anaya. He answered our prayer for a child — however brief. He answered the prayers for the desire of a child. He calmed my fears of ‘will I have a desire for my children? Will God change my heart?’ God answered.”
In the midst of the recovery and heartbreak from the miscarriage, Shawn began researching adoption options. Ultimately, the Wallers targeted India as the place from which they would adopt – the place where Lauren’s longing for children first began. In addition to this, India has the largest orphan population in the world – over 30 million. To put that number in perspective, it outdistances the population of the state of Texas by more than a million people. Additionally, life is brutal for the children of India. Baby girls are often buried alive just for being born female, and children are abandoned on the streets and put in orphanages for the most trivial details. For these reasons, India was the only country the Wallers considered in their adoption journey.
So on Christmas Eve 2019, the Wallers submitted their pre-application for adoption. They decided to work with Lifeline Children’s Services through the process, but they were warned to be ready to play the long game. According to Lifeline’s estimates, the adoption process from India could take anywhere from two to three years.
A little over thirteen months later, on January 31, 2021, Lauren shared on walleradoption.com that they had finally been matched with a prospective little girl. At first, because of their own expectations and ideas of what they could handle, they decided to decline the opportunity. However, after spending several days reviewing both her file and that of several other children, they decided they wanted to take a closer look at this little girl. And yet, more roadblocks popped up. More families were interested in the girl – and these families had been waiting longer. The Wallers knew they needed to wait, pray, and trust in God’s timing and provision. And the words of a dear friend brought great comfort, “No one is going to adopt your child.” Whether it was this child or another, the Lord had already decided whom the Wallers would adopt – and as Lauren would share on her March 12, 2021 post, “We know who she is!”
She was actually the same girl they had been connected with previously, and the Wallers were elated. As Lauren also wrote that day, “What came before this post was the longest, shortest, most challenging, most emotional, most amazing, and about-any-other-superlative-you-can-think-of- est month ever.” One of these amazing things was connecting with a new friend who actually speaks their little girl’s language – something spoken by only 6% of India. (How great is our God!) Long before the process began, the Wallers had decided they wanted to name their little girl Jubilee, which means a season or occasion of joyful celebration – and the Wallers certainly had a lot to celebrate, but the work was not done yet.
What followed were several more months of paperwork, dealing with officials and regulations in multiple countries, and a home study. Then came October 2021. In that month, Jubilee became their child verbally, they received Article 23 (which validates the adoption in the United States and other Hague Convention Countries), applied for emergency Visas, received her birth certificate, and her passport. All that was left was to plan the trip and go get Jubilee!
With all this excitement, and despite the whirlwind of their lives at the time, Shawn and Lauren were gracious enough to sit down with me for an interview just about ten days before they left for India. Having already built plenty of background for my article through their website and our personal conversations over the last almost two years, I decided to begin our interview with the present. I asked, “How has the Lord sustained your faith through this long process?”
Shawn shared first, “When you think about the Christian life, we are called to wait on many things.” Shawn is no stranger to waiting – waiting on a spouse into his late 20s and now waiting on a child into his late 30s. However, during his season of waiting he has been admonished by Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor. No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly.”
Shawn knew he needed to live his life uprightly and accept Christ as his helper and portion, and trust that the Lord ultimately knew what was best for him. This season of waiting prepared Shawn for the long international adoption process. He added, “Things don’t happen in the time I want them to happen, but God knows better than I know.” This reality forced the Wallers to lean on Him, which in turn strengthened their faith through the process. With so many things going on behind the scenes that they were unaware of, it was gratifying to know the Lord held every detail firmly in His hands.
One of those details came to the forefront when they saw a video of Jubilee for the first time. As Lauren recounts, “We saw this little girl who was way past walking age, but wasn’t walking. But we saw her trying so hard. We saw her get up – fall down – get up – fall down… probably six or eight times before the video ended. All with a huge grin. I saw some things in that video that I was concerned about, but Shawn saw that great determination. Seeing that determination and her willingness to try, we said, ‘We want that girl!'”
As mentioned earlier, Jubilee’s file was, at the time, under review by another family, so the Wallers had to wait to see it again. That family actually fell in love with her and very much wanted to adopt her. However, because the father was in the military and deployed, they did not feel right about moving forward with her until he was back home. They had to say no, and the file came back to the Wallers – who had also fallen in love with her and were ready to become Jubilee’s parents.
Since that time Shawn and Lauren have been able to have video chats with Jubilee, including one on her birthday. Jubilee is still trying to process as much as a five-year-old can the idea of adoption and who Shawn and Lauren are, but these brief chats have been very encouraging for the Wallers. I asked if Jubilee spoke any English, and Lauren responded saying, “We have actually heard her speak more English than Marathi, but that is a total of five words.” This language barrier will be one of many challenges to overcome, but the Wallers are excited to take them on. As Shawn put it, “We’re basically starting at zero and working our way back up.”
With all the anticipation, paperwork, video chats, phone calls, etc. it might seem like Jubilee has been a part of the Wallers’ lives for years, but, at the time of our interview, Jubilee was not home yet. Fast forward to a little over a week later, and the Wallers were finally on their way to India – a journey beginning on November 23 in Miami with a flight to Newark Liberty International and then overnight to New Delhi, India nonstop. Once in New Delhi, they got their bearings and rested overnight in a hotel. Then it was back to the airport for another flight to Jubliee’s state of Aurangabad and an airport where people literally get dropped off by camel. Shawn joked that he might just show up at the orphanage by camel, but it is a four hour journey just by car – so maybe not.
Finally, after almost two years since the adoption process started in 2019, on Friday, November 26, 2021, the Wallers made it to the orphanage in Parbhani and met their new daughter face to face. As Lauren shared on her Facebook page, “Introducing Jubilee Arti Elizabeth Waller. The Lord is abundantly kind, and we are smitten.”
The Wallers spent a total of two weeks in India. After meeting and picking up Jubilee, they returned to New Delhi for embassy, medical, and exit permit appointments. They also spent time bonding as a new family and doing some sightseeing. Finally though, it was time to return home, and on December 8, 2021, the instant their plane touched down on US soil, Jubilee officially became an American citizen!
Not only that, but she became Shawn and Lauren’s daughter in every way. As Lauren explained, “We’re even on her birth certificate!” This again is the perfect picture of the Gospel. Though as sinners we are born into the wrong family, through Christ we are adopted into God’s family and our names are written not simply on an earthly birth certificate, but in the eternal Lamb’s Book of Life. I very much look forward to seeing this gospel picture unfold in the lives of the Wallers.
Shawn, Lauren, and Jubilee are all safely back home in Hobe Sound now. They were welcomed back by their church family with balloons, banners, singing and prayers of gratitude to the Lord. Everyone was excited to see them and elated to meet Jubilee. We will catch up with them again in a future article of The Believer’s Byline and hear all about their amazing and certainly miracle filled adventures in India. For now though, one thing is certain, and it is bringing great joy to the many people who love Shawn and Lauren – The Year of Jubilee has begun!
References
Scriptures have been taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE ®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
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Copyright © 2021 David Scott Fields II. All Rights Reserved.
