Brooklyn was the Rineharts’ first daughter adopted from China. Brooklyn Rinehart (9) with her father, Joseph. They struggled first with getting some critical paperwork through, then found out that Bethany - the little girl they had been matched with for two and a half years - had gone into a coma from encephalitis brought on by a respiratory infection. The couple started the process again, but it wasn’t as easy this time. God confirmed the same thing to Joseph one night while he was on a flight. “We weren’t in Texas very long, maybe a year, before I said to my husband that I think we’re supposed to adopt one final time,” she said. That meant they’d have to move from Washington State to Texas. “She’d been home three months, and my husband’s job offered him the chance to get into management,” Rinehart said. Sure enough, nine months later, they went back to China and brought home Brynlee, who’s now 11. She looked at her husband and said, “We’re going to be back here really soon.” Then, in the place in China where they met their daughter, Brooklyn, who’s now 9, Rinehart said God impressed something new on her heart as they prayed with other adoptive parents. “In that waiting time, because God’s timing is perfect, the daughter we adopted first became available and we were matched with her,” Rinehart said. She and her husband started the adoption process, which moved quickly at first, then slowed for a variety of reasons. For my husband and I, it was like an instant knowing - that’s what we were supposed to do.” “She pulled up a photo of some little girls in China who had Down syndrome. “She said, ‘From the moment I heard you say that, I knew exactly what I wanted to show you,’” Rinehart said. So that’s exactly what they did, and their social worker’s reaction surprised them. “So I said, ‘Let’s go tell that dream to our agency.’” “I told my husband, ‘I can’t let go of that dream,’ and he said, ‘I can’t let go of that dream either,’” she said. Their life went through a series of job changes and house changes, and while they continued to soften more and more on adoption and even looked into it, everything felt too busy for that to work.īut the Rineharts couldn’t shake the feeling that God was calling them to it. In the years that followed, things only got more chaotic. Then as she and her husband both felt “God’s tug” on their heart for foster care, they decided they were too busy to take children into their home instead, they decided to start giving financially to foster care ministry. First, after two of her grandchildren developed special needs, she circled back around to the belief they might be why she’d had the dream. Rinehart said she found ways to brush it off. “But the dream kept happening over and over, and this child was calling us Mama and Daddy, not Nana and Papa or anything like that,” she said. Rinehart was taken off guard by the dream, and she figured it must be God preparing her to have a grandchild with special needs - she and her husband already had six adult children. And she opened the door to our bedroom and called us Mama and Daddy.” Joseph and Brenda Rinehart say ‘don’t be afraid for God to turn your life upside down.’ She had black hair and a little soup-bowl haircut, and she had Down Syndrome. “And around that time, I had a dream of a little girl walking down the hallway of our house. “That’s where we were in life,” Rinehart said. She and her husband, Joseph, were also leading networking groups and involved in a variety of other things in their community and church. She was starting her doctoral degree, working as a health care administrator and serving in a variety of professional roles. In 2012, Brenda Rinehart was busy - really, really busy.
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