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Hello Readers! Today and tomorrow the Moody Fiction Blog is hosting a giveaway for the June release Hello, I Love You: Adventures in Adoptive Fatherhood by Ted Kluck! Comment below with your email address for your chance to win 1 of 4 free copies! Winners will be chosen and posted Friday on the blog and emailed for their mailing address. Good luck!

When the Future of Your Family is at the Mercy of Strangers…

There is perhaps no feeling lonelier than that of being a stranger in a strange land — an experience many adoptive parents know well. Touching down in a crowded airport, with tens of thousands of dollars in cash strapped around your waist, to pay people you’ve never met for a baby you’ve never seen . . . . You might have prayed for months, even years, about that moment, but it still often feels like the foreign country is a region God has forgotten, and that He has sent you there in vain.

 For the young Christian couple, perhaps the only feeling more paralyzing and lonely than the one just described is that of infertility. There are pregnancy announcements nearly every week in the church bulletin, and not wanting to “rain on your friends’ parade,” you suffer and grieve together in silence.

Hello, I Love You tells one couple’s story dealing with these feelings of loneliness, as well as the long-time fulfillment that can come from adopting internationally. Through narrative and letters written to each of his children-to-be, Ted Kluck takes readers through the many phases, decisions, and experiences that adoptive couples make. Continue reading / Leave a comment…

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By: Stephanie S. Smith, staff writer for the Moody Fiction Blog

I recently finished reading Hello, I Love You: Adventures in Adoptive Fatherhood by Ted Kluck and one of his marks of writing, I was pleased to discover, is humor.  Kluck has professional wrestling and indoor football on his resume, and looks the part! Yet in his true story of the adoption process he openly admits, “There’s nothing like adoption to make a grown man cry. Repeatedly.”

His story, of he and his wife’s journey to the Ukraine to bring home two boys, is peppered with laughable one-liners and amusing incidents.  In his introduction he writes, “[In this book] you’ll also notice lots of frank, often sarcastic prose about cultural differences–usually with the author as the punch line, as it was my inability to deal with these differences that provided a lot of humor (in retrospect) and anger (at the time).”

I suppose that humor is a good way to cope with an adoption process so complicted and full of setbacks even the agency had never seen anything like it. (P.S. Check back at the blog later in the week for giveaways of this book!)

On a broader note, I think humor can indeed play a redemptive role in story.  I will not call it “holy humor” which sounds too hoky to me, like Christian pick-up lines or church bulletin typos.  Neither am I talking about “holy laughter”, which I just learned via GoogleSearch today refers to a Charismatic phenemonen.

I am talking about laughter as a sign of triumph. Continue reading / Leave a comment…