Saturday, September 13, 2008

God is AMAZING!!  

Back in July, we were in Eastern Europe in the country we hope to adopt from.  We go several times a year to do mission work but this wasn’t just another trip.  We went with the expectation of God to speak to us and show us where He was working and how He wanted us to join Him in that work.  We sought Him and pleaded with Him to show us.

For the past several years, we have felt called to something more than just going on trips and having “limited” impact (not that anything God does is limited...we just felt that we were to have a larger scope).  We didn’t know if He wanted us to move there as missionaries, stay stateside and continue to raise money and travel periodically or what.  We had felt for some time that we were supposed to think about adoption.  We’ve thought about it, but frankly the financial needs for adoption seemed way out of our reach (which they are out of OUR reach, but not God’s).  So basically, we just said, “God, show us and we’ll follow You know matter how crazy it sounds.”
He has definitely given us a passion to help orphans and specifically orphan with special needs and more specifically orphans with Down Syndrome (our youngest child, Eli, has Down Syndrome).  

God spoke and said it’s time.  So on our journey back home we knew what God was saying to us and we started praying and asking Him to confirm.  We stayed in a “guest house” that has been built to be used as a conference center and when the man who owns it found out what we were thinking about, he said for us to come stay there when we were in country (knowing it was to be over a month) and there is NO CHARGE.  Wow!  This man, who is a believer and a man we trust completely, went on to tell us about a Christian attorney he knows who does adoption work.  I told him I’d like to contact him sometime and he picked up his phone and called him.  The man speaks English.  So we have a legal contact we can trust if we need him.  Within a couple of minutes, God had begun the confirmation process.

We got home and continued to pray.  We started trying to put money aside to get our home study started.  We called a handful of places that do international adoption home studies and couldn’t ever get any of them to call back.  We knew it was going to cost between $1,000 & $1,400 for the study, but God had provided the money so we were ready.  Yet, no one would call back.  I finally emailed one more place and they contacted us immediately and then the social worker contacted us the same day and was at our house the next evening to start the home study.  And she charged a much lower price and she is a Christian who has helped hundreds of families adopt from overseas.  WOW!

But it doesn’t end there.  While we were staying at the guest house, there was a missionary who lives there and helps this family with their ministry.  She emailed me 2 weeks ago and told me about some friends of hers who had moved to the States and they emailed me almost immediately and then referred me to Reece’s Rainbow . Suddenly, God had revealed the boys to us and implanted them into our hearts.
We don’t know what else God will do, but just last Sunday, the church where I have served for 15 years had a big anniversary bash for me and my family.  They gave us $2,000 on a money tree (and they didn’t know about the adoption at that point).  A dear couple gave us $2,500 for the adoption as soon as they found out.  We’ve had people give us a couple of hundred dollars since then as they found out and just wanted to be part of rescuing our boys.  We got 2 grants for the boy’s adoption expenses through RR.  So the insurmountable mountain of cost (WITHIN TWO WEEKS) dropped from $27,000 to only needing about $11,000.  Still overwhelming but nothing to God!   He has done great things.  Every day we realize other things that we will need when the boys come home, but we know that God will provide these things and dollars.  He is so amazing!

What next?

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