Meet the Poehner Family

A Journey of Faith, Waiting, and the Family God Built
Justin and Megan Poehner

In 2011, my husband and I met on a blind date. What began as a simple meeting quickly became a love story that we believe was written by God. We dated for eight months, got engaged, and just four months later were married. From the very beginning, we dreamed of becoming parents.

Soon after marriage, we began trying to grow our family. Month after month turned into years of waiting.Each cycle brought hope, and each negative test brought heartbreak. We endured countless doctor’s visits, questions, tears, and disappointments. Over time, infertility became not just a struggle, but a deep grief we carried quietly and daily.

But even in the pain, God was not absent. He was forming something deeper in us, something we could not yet see.

In 2019, after years of waiting, we began praying about foster care with the hope of adoption. We attended our first FaithBridge class full of expectation. However, we quickly learned that the heart of foster care is reunification. In that moment, we were devastated. We had to make a choice, walk away or trust that God was leading us into something greater than we understood.

We almost left.

But we stayed.

Something in us, what we now recognize as God’s gentle leading, kept us in our seats. As we listened, our hearts began to shift. We realized foster care was not about our plans being fulfilled, but about saying yes to God’s call to love children and families in the middle of their hardest seasons. We decided to move forward, completed the training, and prepared our home with open hands and open hearts.

Then came the waiting.

Waiting for placement. Waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting for the moment our lives would change. Every call brought a rush of emotion, hope, fear, anticipation.

In March 2020, the call finally came.

We received our first permanent placement, a precious two-week-old baby boy in the NICU. We were entrusted with his fragile beginning and given the honor of loving him through it. For eight months, we were his parents in every way that mattered. We prayed over him, cared for him, and loved him deeply.

When the time came for him to be reunified with his biological family, our hearts were broken. Our home felt empty in a way we had never known. Yet even in that sorrow, we held onto gratitude, for the privilege of loving him, and for the belief that God loves him even more than we do. To this day, we are blessed to still have a relationship with him. We still consider him our son and our children’s sibling, forever part of our family story.

Our house was quiet again, but not for long.

We soon received a call for a little boy named Alessandro. He was a beautiful two-year-old who needed a home, and in November 2020, we welcomed him into our family. From the very beginning, he was ours in every way love defines.

In the middle of that joy, God surprised us again. In June 2021, we found out we were pregnant with our daughter. After years of waiting, grief, and prayers, life suddenly felt full in a way we had once only dreamed of.

But our journey was not without difficulty. Our daughter arrived, almost three months premature, via emergency C-section on December 10, 2021. Just days later, on December 13, 2021, Alessandro’s adoption was scheduled to be finalized.

While I was still recovering in the hospital after giving birth, we sat in that hospital room and finalized our son’s adoption via Zoom. In that moment, our family became legally and spiritually whole in a way only God could orchestrate, one child welcomed into the world, and another officially made ours forever.

For a brief moment it felt like our story had reached completion.

But God was not finished…

In May 2024, we received another call, this time for Alessandro’s half brother. Without hesitation, we opened our home and our hearts once again. Since that day, we have been loving him, caring for him, and walking toward adoption for him as well.

This journey has not been easy. It has held grief, exhaustion, uncertainty, joy, and stretching beyond what we thought we could carry. But through every season, one truth has remained: God has a plan. He has been faithful in every placement, every goodbye, every miracle, and every new beginning.

We know now that our story was never just about infertility or adoption alone. It has always been about surrender, about trusting that God’s plan for our family is greater than anything we could have written ourselves.

And today, we stand in awe of what He has done: a family built through faith, formed through love, and held together by grace.