Getting Closer........

We are getting closer! Our home study is nearly completed! After a big push last week, which included having our home visit, we have provided all of the necessary information to our social worker. Now we wait for our FBI background clearance to arrive and our file can go on to immigration for approval. We are in the ballpark for that to happen soon........we are hearing that the background clearances are taking about 4 weeks, and we will hit the four week mark this Thursday. Once our file gets to immigration we will likely be looking at a 6 week wait for approval.

We were at the spina bifida clinic for Lilly's annual appointment today. We got to meet with her neurosurgeon and I told her about Susanna. She struggled a bit to believe that Susanna has gone 6 years without having closure surgery, but we assured her that indeed she has waited that long! She said that she would be able to do the surgery once Susanna gets home..... that was great news, because I think a part of me was afraid that it would be too late. She is also willing to look over her information and help us create a plan to get her home safely. After reviewing her medical file again there is much going on with our sweet girl. It is hard to think of having to wait another 8-10 months to get her home and start helping her heal. We are hoping that our doctor will provide us with a letter to include with our immigration paperwork that may help speed up our process. It would be wonderful if the agent assigned to our case could see how critical it is that we get her home soon in order to address her hydrocephalus and complete her closure surgery........and that they would be willing to speed up our approval process.

I love the giggle!

Would you pray with us that we get our background clearance soon and that we are able to expedite our immigration paperwork? That God would move mountains to get Susanna and Will home and that all will be accomplished in His perfect timing......

Let's Be the Light!

"You are the light of the world. 

A city on a hill cannot be hidden.

 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket,

 but on a stand,

 and it gives light to all in the house. 

In the same way, let your light shine before others, 

so that they may see your good works 

and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."

Matthew 5:14-16

Last week my husband and I took our daughter Delaney to a Kari Jobe/Chris Tomlin concert. As we worshipped, one song Kari sang really hit me deep. "We are the light of the world. We are the city on a hill. We are the light of the world so we've got to let our light shine." I felt the presence of God so strongly and a powerful awareness that we MUST encourage each other to be the light to the world around us! The truth is that Jesus is the light in us, without Him there is no life changing light. We have to be humble and be willing to be emptied of ourselves so that His light can shine!

We adopted our son Noah when he was 10 months old. He came to us from Florida on a ventilator and with a medical file that literally scared the mess out of our pediatrician. On paper every one told us there wasn't much promise. Yes, we were scared. This was all new to us. We were already in the process of bringing our daughter Lilly home from eastern europe and the timing seemed ridiculous. But God. He knew we needed Noah as much as he needed us!

{With Lilly and Noah at the hospital soon after his arrival }

When he arrived at the local children's hospital via medical flight we waited in the ER as they prepared the room he would stay in for the next seven weeks while we trained on his equipment. The nurse who was checking us in started the conversation with these words, "You are crazy." Now, this wasn't a light-hearted "Oh, you crazy people.....what are you getting yourselves into?" She was serious and her words went right to my heart. (I am a big believer that words give life or they bring death, but that is for another posting!) We often had to fight the fear that came from words spoken by others. BUT, Noah's story fascinated people. We had doctors and nurses come to our room to hear it...and honestly to stare at the crazy people with 7 kids! Now, I wish that I could say that in all of our telling of his story (which we love to do) that I put God center stage, that I emptied myself of myself and shared the love of Jesus with boldness. But the truth is that I didn't do that faithfully. It grieves me to admit that I worried about offending people. How gracious that He continues to give us second, third, and fourth chances! I don't want to waste any more opportunities to shine His light. To share His story! May we encourage each other to share with boldness of the Great Love that drives us to love those who society pushes to the margins!

In his small booklet, "Risk is Right",  John Piper writes about the first three centuries of the Christian church who faced persecution under the Roman Empire. Every Christian who believed faced the very real threat and possibility of death. Yet the church grew. That always amazes me!

Piper writes, "In fact, it was the Christ-exalting love that the Christians showed in spite of the risk that stunned the pagan world. The Roman emperor Julian (AD 332-363) wanted to breathe new life into the ancient pagan religion but saw more and more people drawn to Christianity. He wrote with frustration against these "atheists" (who did not believe in the Roman gods, but in Christ):

'Atheism [i.e., Christian faith] has been specially advanced through the loving service rendered to strangers, and through their care for the burial of the dead. It is a scandal there is not a single Jew who is a beggar, and that the godless Galileans care not only for their own poor but for our as well; while those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.'

It is costly to follow Christ. There is risk everywhere. But this very risk is the means by which the value of Christ shines more brightly."

May God allow us to be part of such a scandal! Let us show the world the love of Jesus by the way we love......and when people ask us why we would do such things may we share our stories with boldness.......leading with the God parts and NEVER listening to the counsel of fear to leave them out, otherwise our stories become merely interesting......and cease to be life changing!

Our Noah today! We LOVE to share his miracle story!!

Where I Discover I'm NOT A Cool Cucumber!

So, this go around I was going to be the "experienced" adopting mom and be cool as a cucumber through the whole process. There are SO many time variables in international adoption and many of them are completely out of our control. We can get our paperwork done ASAP, but there are government processes, both here and overseas, that just take time. There are a lot of places where the process can hit time snags. So, since I KNOW that, this time I was just going to go with the flow. Uh huh. That lasted about two weeks!! The good news is that this is evidence to me that God is growing a real love for Susanna and Will in my heart. (On a side note, we think we have a name for our boy, but we want to wait until we visit him to make sure it is really his......so for simplicity sake we will just use Will until it is official!)

I think my plan really went off the rails late last week when I watched the short videos I have of her. What is amazing is that we could also catch glimpses of Will in the crib next to her. She would try and share the toys she was given with him by handing them over the top of the crib! I love being able to see her, but it is clear when you watch them that the attention she gets when she is being videotaped is not her normal. I remember this with Lilly. She looked confused, a little scared, but in there was a desire to please. They look so very vulnerable and the thought that it could be a year before I can get to them just weighs so heavy on my heart. I struggled to sleep that night, and the chance that I would be a cool cucumber this go around went right out the window!!

Right now the prayer is that our fingerprints, which were received by the FBI last week, will be back to us as quickly as possible (right now we have heard that they are running about 3-4 weeks). Once we have them, and our home study is complete, our file can move on to homeland security (which seems to be running about 4-6 weeks) for approval. Please pray that these two processes will move swiftly! 

We know that all of this is in God's hands, but we also know that He includes us in His plans through action and prayer....one of the greatest mysteries! So, we will get everything done as quickly as we can and we will pray that:

"He will cover [Susanna and Will] with his feathers,

and under his wings [they]will find refuge;

his faithfulness will be [their] shield and rampart."

Psalm 91:4

He has held them and we can trust that he will continue to do so until we can get to them. God, not governments, will set the timetable! 

I am a very visual person.....if I see it, it makes a much bigger impact on me. I want to share Susanna and Will with you. I would love it if those following their story and praying them home would print them and use them as a reminder to pray for their protection and process. It is a miracle that Susanna has survived this long without having surgery to close her back! Praying that she stays healthy and that God continues to breathe life into their spirits and prepare their hearts to come home!

Aren't they beautiful???

Officially Matched!

We got great news on Thursday! Our family has officially been matched with Susanna and Will! That puts us one step closer! We are continuing to get paperwork done so that our home study can get updated as soon as possible.

God has been so faithful to continue to give us little reminders here and there that this is indeed His plan for our family. When we name our children we always use a family name for their middle names......so they all have special significance to us. We had already decided to use Joseph for Will's middle name.....it was my grandfather's name. He came to know Christ later in life and always wished that he had walked with Him from the beginning. He died in a car accident a couple of weeks before my first birthday. Over the years I have wondered how things may have been different if he had lived a longer life......how my life would have been different to have known him here on earth. I am so excited to meet him when I get to heaven! As I was looking over paperwork on Thursday I noticed Will's birth name. His middle name is Yusuf. I hadn't heard of that before, so googled it and found out that it is the Arabic version of the English name......Joseph! Amazing! So sweet of God to allow for these little confirmations! They are a breath of fresh air and give me such a lift on days when I am tempted to live too much in the future and to wonder how everything will fall into place. They are a powerful answer to all the fearful questions that the enemy of my soul enjoys tossing my way!

 Tomorrow we send off agency paperwork, fingerprint forms, background checks.....and pray God continues to surround our children with His love and protection and ministers to their sweet spirits in ways we can't even understand!!

Where We Are in Our Process

I am hoping to keep current with where we are in our process as we work to get Susanna and "Will" home (we are working hard on our little boy's name.....we just haven't found it yet!).

Right now our primary goal is to get our home study updated. We will be working with the same agency we used when we adopted Noah, so they know us and we won't be starting from scratch. We are hoping that this will save us some time. The process for Lilly took us almost exactly one year from the day we first saw her picture. We are praying that we can move more quickly this time (hoping for 8-9 months) because we don't want Susanna to stay in that crib any longer than she absolutely has to!!

We will need to have physicals, complete lots of paperwork, get background checks done, and all of us, including the kids, will need to be interviewed by our social worker.  Once our home study is completed we will then apply to US immigration to get approval to adopt the kids and be preparing our dossier to be sent to their government. After all of these things are done, translated, and approved we will get the invitation for our first visit, and the return trip to bring them home is usually 3-5 months after the first. I am sure that I am leaving out some finer details, and I am certainly leaving out a lot of the paperwork, but these are the highlights!

We would appreciate prayers for as smooth and swift a process as possible, for their sakes, and that during this waiting time He will be preparing their hearts to join our family. Courage and peace for Susanna as she will be SO stretched to leave the security of her crib, and that God would be building an unexplainable anticipation and joy in Will's heart that something very good is coming!  He is so faithful and I know that He holds them both in His strong hands!

We have so much to do here to get ready for them that I hope it will make the time fly by!! Our house is going to need some modifications made to become wheelchair accessible and so that S & W will be able to navigate and move around as easily as possible. We are praying for wisdom and clarity to make wise choices and that He would lead us to affordable and trustworthy contractor(s)..... that we would be good stewards of His provisions as we move forward in faith!!!

Desperate for Him

It is a challenge to truly understand my need for Jesus when I can go through most of my days seemingly not needing Jesus. My husband has a good job, we have a nice house in a safe place, food whenever we want it, insurance that allows me to take my kids to the doctor whenever I need to, the freedom to worship God when and where I want to, and the ability to buy myself all of what I need and much of what I want. I recognize that these things are given to me by God....that all good things come from Him, but that truth lives mostly in my head and too often not in my heart. It is possible for me to go for months on end and easily not find myself in a single moment where I feel a desperate need for God. 

But, the truth is that I DESPERATELY need Him.  This life is a vapor. An instant and it is gone.  I let it sink in that the wages I have earned during these nearly 45 years of life are eternal death and that I CANNOT help myself. I cannot cover, cleanse, or fix the stains of sin that cling to me.  Instead I add to them daily. I cannot do enough good to outweigh the bad. I am utterly helpless and I am utterly doomed.  I am desperate for a savior. It is my ONLY hope. 

Against this awareness of my true state Easter is a life raft in the middle of the ocean. A drowning man doesn't casually swim to the raft and thank it for showing up (even though he would have been fine either way). No. A man who is truly drowning CLINGS frantically because he knows that it is his only means of salvation. And he is grateful. Utterly grateful. He will tell the story over and over about how without that raft he would have drowned. 

How much more should I cling to Christ? That He would endure the brutality of the cross for MY sin. How much more should I tell the tale of how He took what I so surely earned upon Himself so that I could could escape the punishment that I so richly deserved? Oh the love and gratitude that wells up within me....that is filling me daily with courage to lay down my life for Him in return. All of it. My house. My stuff. My lifestyle. My future. To love Him with the utter abandon with which He loves me. What more could He have given? What more do I need to give? 

Want to Hear A Good Story??

Here I am, a year after my last post, dusting off our blog to share some very exciting news! Our family is in the process of growing.....again! There are two precious children who will be waiting for us, thousands of miles away, while we work to get them home as quickly as we can. But before we get busy with background checks and paperwork there is a story here that must be celebrated and shared so that we never forget to make much of the mountains God has moved to bring us together! It is a bit long but it's good!!

Last Sunday I finally decided to organize the mountain of paperwork that remained from our adoption of Lilly and Noah in 2011. As I worked through it the thought rolled through my mind, "It's time to do this again", and that was that. I didn't even say it out loud.

On Monday Keith was out of town for work (which is rare since he primarily works from home) and I got busy making doctor appointments and taking care of family business. As I was working on my computer I took a minute to check on a blog that I have read regularly for years..... Linny's blog at A Place Called Simplicity. I noticed that she was advocating for a specific child, a little girl named Susanna.  I regularly see children advocated for on blogs but I have not ever once felt the tugging that I needed to find out more. I have shed tears, prayed, and followed their stories....but never have I felt led to become personally involved beyond that. As I scrolled through the pictures I read that Susanna has spina bifida,  like our Lilly. But, unlike our Lilly,  I read that this sweet six year old girl has never had the surgery to close up her back. Heartbreaking! She also has untreated hydrocephalus, and after years of rarely ever being lifted out of her crib is now left there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because to be lifted up past the bars creates tremendous anxiety in her. My mind struggled to comprehend what I was reading.....to imagine what Susanna's life must look like.

I noticed that she was in an Eastern European orphanage. When we began the process of our first international adoption, we ended up going with Lilly's country because it was the only Eastern European country where we qualified for adoption. What were the odds that Susanna was in this same country? In my mind not good, but I felt compelled to just reach out to the contact Linny had listed at the bottom of the post. So, I emailed and explained that it was unlikely that we would be qualified, but I had seen Susanna's information and having adopted a child already with spina bifida I wanted to do what I could to help....expecting it would be to advocate for her and help her find her family. After all, Keith and I weren't even talking about adopting again! Ha...ha...ha!!

The response came back quickly and I was truly stunned to see that Susanna was indeed in the country where we had adopted Lilly! Hmmm. This was interesting. I began emailing back and forth with Nina and finally I just picked up the phone and called to ask her questions!!

The wheels in my mind were turning! One of the major reasons that we moved to northern Kentucky in the first place was so that we could be near the spina bifida clinic at the nearby children's hospital for Lilly. It was a hard move for me because what had been my heart's desire was for us to move back west closer to my family. I literally went through a grieving process that took over two years (my husband will tell you that I do that sort of stuff pretty s  l  o  w  l  y!). When we moved here we had no way to know that God was going to surprise us with the adoption of a baby boy who started life at 1.6 pounds and who was going to desperately need the staff at this children's hospital to get him off a ventilator and in doing so give him the hope of a full life........AND that as a critical part of that process he would require major throat surgery that was actually pioneered by one of the doctors at that very hospital! Only God can orchestrate stories like this!! So, here we were a couple of years later with the very doctors on speed dial (NOT kidding) that Susanna would need to be restored to health! And here I sat, fresh from God doing a major work on my heart that had finally brought me to a place of true and complete submission to HIS plan for where I would live and how I would spend my life (His vision....not mine). Peace was bearing its fruit in my heart and now......how could we not help???

So, after I explained to Nina that I hadn't gotten out of bed that morning intending to pursue adoption, and that I still needed to attend to the "minor" detail of talking to my husband (he is one amazing man and I knew that he would come home with an open heart ready to talk and to hear from God), I assured her that I would get back to her soon. SO, next step was to call one of my dear friends who I actually met when she was the social worker for our first adoption. She is a woman of God and an adoptive mom who had brought home a daughter from this same country in the past year. I was unfamiliar with this agency that had Susanna's file and I thought maybe she would have heard of them....plus I wanted to share the news and get her counsel. Admittedly another fleece of sorts! So, this is about how it went......First, as I stumbled around to remember the name of the agency she filled in the blanks (yeah, she had heard of them) AND she proceeded to mention the name of a "fantastic" woman she knew who was with said agency AND that if she could refer me to anyone in the states to facilitate a Bulgarian adoption it would be, you guessed it, the very woman I had been communicating with....NINA! Her final words to me (and yes, she was laughing), "Well sister, I think you have your answer!"

Keith and I talked a bit that night and we went to bed. All night I thought about something else I had read about Susanna. There was a boy in the crib next to her that she had become very attached to. They would communicate back and forth. She would reach through into his crib and mother him by straightening his clothing or blankets. When he was taken from the room she would anxiously wait for him to return. It was going to be so hard for this sweet girl to even be lifted out of her crib. How could she be separated from him as well?? So, the next morning I emailed Nina again and asked about him. Was he available for adoption? Amazingly enough not only was he available, but his file was with the same agency! Only God! Nina said that they called him "Will", and she had known about him already, but not that he was the boy Susanna loved!

Now it was time for us to really seek God and pray for His direction. It is hard, once you start to connect to a child, to have to lay them before God and trust that if it is His plan, they will be yours. I let Nina know that we would need to take a bit to pray, but that we knew time was of the essence and we would let her know as quickly as we could, knowing that it was possible another family would get in line in front of us while we processed. The next 4 days were hard. Something else can happen when you are considering doing something big with God, like bringing home two children with big needs (Will also has spina bifida and, unless God chooses to intervene and perform a miracle, they will both spend their lives in wheelchairs).....fear can start to creep in. Doubt. The thoughts of sacrifices too big and opportunities lost. Honestly, it can get ugly. What was so clear to me though was that when my thoughts were centered on Christ the peace was so deep, but when I moved over to "my" side and thought about all that I may be giving up (it is worth noting that to fail to recognize that being the hands and feet of Jesus, however that looks in our life, is costly is to not understand what is required of us) I was flailing in misery. We shared it with our kids on Saturday night. They were excited at the possibility and that always humbles me......their sweet hearts. On Sunday I told Keith, "I have reasons not to move forward, but not one of them can be supported by scripture and they all have to do with me." He said, "Same here. We move forward." Ah, peace. I emailed Nina.

The next morning I had an email from her when I woke up that told me time was short and she needed  paperwork completed that day and it required both of our signatures (little detail here is that Keith was again out of town.....thanking God for a smart husband and electronic signatures!). If we didn't get the paperwork to her that night we risked losing the referral. Isn't God's timing amazing???

I am in awe of how many people have been praying for Susanna and "Will" (I use the quotation marks because Will Williams will not be his permanent moniker....but I love how it was as if he was being marked for our family!) and we ask you to please continue!! We covet your prayers. This transition will be so hard for Susanna.....but what freedom and joy will be waiting for her as God delivers her from both her literal and spiritual prisons!! Wisdom for the doctors when we get them home. Protection while they wait. Protection and provision for our family as we work through the process. We would love to continue to share this story with you.....so many of you are already a part of it and we honestly don't have the words to thank you!