During a mission trip to Russia in 2000, Joey Hawkins began to feel God “pressing” upon him to welcome a new child – by adoption – into his home.
While helping other American volunteers construct a church building in Pastova, he had the opportunity to visit nearby orphanages, and he “fell in love” with the children he met. He was especially inspired by a child named Anya, and he felt as if God were “speaking to me in a thundering voice” about adopting a child. He couldn’t wait to talk with his wife, Gena, so he called home to share his excitement.
Joey and Gena Hawkins and their children (from left): Brett, Lagen, Hunter and Ike.Gena, who was holding down the fort with three boys – all under age 7 – responded, “God hasn’t told me anything yet.”
“It took us about six years to come to agreement before we felt it was God’s timing to move forward,” Joey said. “I would have given all I had for the chance to bring Anya home, but she wasn’t the one God had created for my family. [Our adoptive child] had yet to be born.”
As time passed and they prayed about the idea, one thing that concerned Gena was whether another child would fit into their family’s busy lifestyle of back-to-back kids’ league baseball games and church youth outings. (Joey is minister to students and singles at Honea Path First Baptist Church.)
She also worried about the financial responsibility of raising a fourth child. Then, one Sunday morning, she heard her Bible study teacher say: “If God is asking you to do something, God will provide the resources.”
“I needed to hear that,” she said.
By September 2006, Joey and Gena both were ready. They were sure “it was God’s timing to move forward.” In November they contacted Celebrate Children International (celebratechildren.org), a Christian adoption organization based in Ovieda, Fla. Two weeks later, while searching the organization’s website, they came across a photo of a newborn girl in Guatemala. With a sudden, profound certainty that defied explanation, “we knew she was our child,” said Gena.
They called their case worker and set into motion the complex machinery of the adoption process. For the next 11 months, they rode an “emotional roller coaster” along a plunging, twisting track of bureaucratic red tape. The process included an unending exchange of paperwork, the involvement of intergovernmental agencies and embassies, the temporary suspension of Guatemalan adoptions in the U.S., and lost DNA samples.
“It was a very long, grueling process,” Gena said, “but it taught us to trust in God – because he was all we had. Nobody else could help us when the DNA was lost. There was nothing tangible for us to hold on to. We had to totally turn it all over to God.”
Months before the adoption process would be finalized, Joey and Gena began thinking about what they might name their child. They couldn’t agree, so they began praying that God would provide a name. One morning while he was getting ready for work, Joey had an inspiration – why not take the first two letters of his first name (Larry) and combine them with the first three letters of Gena’s name? She “fell in love with it,” Joey said, and the name “Lagen” was chosen.
On Oct. 9, 2007, Joey and Gena brought Lagen to her new home in South Carolina. Today, she is a happy, healthy, “opinionated” 3-year old child who loves to sing “Jesus Loves Me” and enjoys going to gymnastics class. As important as her budding individuality, however, was her easy assimilation into the Hawkins household as kid sister to brothers Brett (16), Ike (14), and Hunter (12). “It’s just like she’s always been a part,” said Gena. “We are so blessed God has chosen us to be her parents.”
Joey and Gena plan to take their daughter to Guatemala someday to show her where she is from, and they hope to meet her biological mother. “We want to say thank you and to show her that Lagen is happy and healthy and smart,” Joey said.
Gena said they often tell Lagen of “how God chose her for us.” She said that if someone asks Lagen where’s she’s from, she will say she came from Guatemala but that she was “born in my daddy’s heart.”
In the 10 years since Joey was on mission in a foreign country and saw God’s eyes in the faces of children living in a Russian orphanage, his conviction that Christians should take literally the scriptural instruction to care for widows and orphans has taken root deep inside. “If only a small percentage of all Christians would adopt a child,” he said, “there would be no orphans in the world.”
After they chose a name for their daughter, Joey and Gena thought the name “Lagen” was unique. But one day they discovered it in a book of babies’ names. The name is of Indian origin (and their daughter is of Mayan Indian descent) and means: “One who arrives at the appropriate time.”
It’s a long journey from Eastern Europe, to Central America, to Upstate South Carolina, but it is a journey Joey and Gena Hawkins say they are glad to have undertaken. And they are thankful for God’s appropriate timing in it all.