Guest blog post at What To Expect When You're Expecting!

So remember a few hours ago when I wrote about how God just keeps "overwhelming" us with His provision in our adoption? Well, just to drive the point home, here is a recent update:

A few weeks ago I was invited to write an article for the website www.whattoexpect.com. They have a super great section called "Word of Mom" which features articles written by all kinds of moms in all kinds of life situations. I was THRILLED by the invitation and even more excited that the article topic was left pretty much up to me, as long as it involved an aspect of parenting. After a few weeks of throwing a couple ideas around I finally finished my article and today it went LIVE on the website!

Click on the link to read the post!!
http://www.whattoexpect.com/wom/toddler/looking-at-adoption-through-the-eyes-of-my-4-year-old.aspx#

This is a HUGE opportunity for us to share our story and, hopefully, get that much closer to bringing our child home from China. 

Please COMMENT on the article and SHARE IT on Facebook and Pinterest!

If you are visiting from "What to Expect," Welcome! I'd love to invite you to join our blog and follow our adoption journey!

Stay with it.

I am so thankful that for these next few months all we have to focus on is fundraising. We are praying that we can raise around $5000 to $6000 by January so we can hit the ground running when its time for our home study in February. Wondering why we have to wait till Feb? Check out this post for the details. I am thrilled to report that as of this weekend, we have raised about $1200 towards that goal!!

Even though we have only scratched the surface of all this adoption adventure entails, I have already begun to feel overwhelmed. It's not all "stress" overwhelmed. Much of my "overwhelmedness" is due to the amazing ways God continues to show up and confirm His call on our family to adopt. Yesterday I sat down and began to write a list of the people who have donated money, dropped of items for yard sales, babysat so I could work on fundraising details, etc. My list already has over two dozen names! And we are only a month in!! 

Yesterday Pastor Travis preached on living a "risky" life. So so so good. One of the passages he taught from was Hebrews 10:32-39. The last verse brought such encouragement to my heart: 

"But we’re not quitters who lose out. Oh, no! We’ll stay with it and survive, trusting all the way."

What was even more encouraging was when I came home and looked up the scripture and realized it was just two verses down from the passage that has become my "theme" for this adoption! I even blogged about the verses a few weeks ago! 

So if you have a seemingly impossible task staring you in the face: financial challenges, kids starting puberty, hand-made Halloween costumes, etc., write Hebrews 10:39 on a sticky note and put it on your bathroom mirror. What great words to speak over your life as you are getting ready in the morning!

Stay with it!

An adoption "gem" by John Piper

Part of our preparation for adopting has been reading lots of books on everything from a biblical perspective of adoption to living life as a bi-racial family. Everything I've read has challenged me in one way or another. A few things have shook me to my core and altered my thinking entirely. 

One of my favorite adoption prep "gems" is a series of sermons by Pastor John Piper who happens to be a huge adoption advocate and an adoptive father himself. Tim and I recently listened to a sermon titled, "What does it mean to live by faith in the service of the fatherless?" The sermon is based out of Hebrews 11 and is brilliant. I would encourage anyone who has adopted or knows someone who has or is adopting to listen to it. I have attached the link at the end of this post for your listening and viewing pleasure :). 

Here is a portion of the sermon that has stayed with me since the first time I listened. When I start to feel scared and I am tempted to let fear guide my thoughts and and decisions, this section pops into my head and I am reminded that God is enough and better than life.

4) The common feature of the faith that escapes suffering and the faith that endures suffering is this: Both of them involve believing that God himself is better than what life can give to you now, and better than what death can take from you later. 

When you have it all, and everything in adoption goes well, faith says that God is better; and when you lose it all, faith says God is better. The clearest illustration of this is verse 35: “[by faith] women received back their dead by resurrection; and others were tortured, not accepting their release, in order that they might obtain a better resurrection.” 

What does faith believe in the moment of torture? Or the moment of family agony? That if God loved me, he would get me out of this? No. Faith believes that God is better—now, and in the resurrection. God is better than the miracle of resurrection that brought the widow’s son to life, only to die again later. 

In other words, faith is utterly in love with all that God is for us now, and will be for us beyond the grave. Faith loves God more than life. Faith loves God more than family. Faith loves God more than job or retirement plans or ministry or writing books or building the dream house or making the first million. Or avoiding the painful disruption of this adoptive family. 

Faith says, “Whether God handles me tenderly or gives me over to misery, I love him. He is my reward (11:6), the builder of the city I long for (11:10), the treasure beyond the riches of Egypt (11:26), and the possession that surpasses all others and abides for ever (10:34)." 

The great challenge of adoption and orphan care ministry is to cultivate a death-defying passion for God above all things. A faith that rests in him whether living or dying, whether comfortable or miserable, whether successful in our orphan care or not. Our aim is to cultivate and spread the unshakable confidence that God is better than what life can give us and what death can take from us.

 http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/conference-messages/what-does-it-mean-to-live-by-faith-in-the-service-of-the-fatherless

Down with personal pronouns.

For those of you who don't know us well, we don't exactly have thousands upon thousands of dollars in a bank account somewhere to be used to pay for this adoption.  To better illustrate my point, last month we had a yard sale in order to raise the $300 we needed for our agency's adoption application.

Not gonna lie, there are moments when I think about the cost of international adoption paired with our financial limitations and I wonder what the heck we are thinking. Is it "financially responsible" for us to take this on? How PC is it for us to be asking other people, many we don't even know, to give us money?

We call it "fundraising" because it makes it sound less intrusive but the reality of it is that we will be asking pretty much anyone we come in contact with to consider helping us pay for things like postage, notary fees, mileage for our social worker, plane tickets, etc. If I let myself analyze this reality for too long I start to get anxious and uncomfortable. I start thinking that the "responsible" thing for us to do would be to wait until we have saved up enough money and we can pay for this adoption ourselves.

-Pause-

Note how many times a pronoun was used in the previous two sentences.

Eight times.

This train of thought only leads down the road of "me." Like somehow this adoption was all my own great idea and that Tim and I can and should do all of it purely on our own strength and good will and killer budgeting skills.

WHAT A LIE!!

Tim and I didn't decide to adopt. God called our family to adoption. We haven't agreed to take on this massive, life altering adventure because we just happen to have $20,000 in the bank and don't know what to do with it. We are moving forward because we believe we have a child who is currently living in China and we are on a mission to bring him/her home.

We know that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and that all we have comes from Him. He is going to provide the money for our adoption. Every. Single. Penny. Don't get me wrong, we are going to work our butts off to raise over $20,000 dollars, but we are very clear about the fact that every dollar bill a stranger gives us to pay for something at a yard sale is God's money that He is entrusting to us to bring our child home.

I find all of this so very exciting!

I have no doubt that one of the many reasons God has called our family to adopt, in this specific season of life, is that this adoption will be a testimony to the faithfulness of our God who is a father to the fatherless. I can't wait to blog about the ways God is going to blow our minds through crazy successful yard sales or anonymous gifts in the mail or strangers volunteering to help or God speaking encouragement over this adoption process through friends and family. There are good things ahead. Stay tuned...

...and we're off!!

We are officially in the Holt China program! My 29th birthday was last Monday so we spent much of Tuesday night filling out the Adoption Application and paying our first $300 towards bringing our kiddo home!

It's official! The application has been submitted!

Our adviser sent us the China program guide book along with all the documents we will need to work on in February. Now we start the 6 month countdown till I turn 29.5 and can get crazy about the home study. Not gonna lie, it's going to be so hard to wait! To help me feel productive I took the advice of Brandyn (a dear friend who just finished her home study and is adopting from Ethiopia) and have been organizing all of our paperwork in a binder. There is a heck of a lot of paperwork. We are going to get really good at filling out forms...

So for now we are getting familiar with the process and making a bit of a schedule for the bizillion forms we need to submit to various government agencies. The biggest project we started this week is mapping out our fundraising plan. We will need about $5000-$6000 to cover our home study and a few other fees. Much of that will need to be paid up front so we are praying and working towards having this first chuck of change by the end of the year.

Tim has started to work on a business venture that we are hoping will help create some of those funds...more to come on that soon! We are going to be heading to our hometown of Tehachapi next month and participating in the annual Bear Valley Rummage Sale in the hopes of making a few $100s as well. Every little bit counts, right? There are a few other fundraising ideas up our sleeves that we will be rolling out over the next few months. We are taking it one step at a time but walking with boldness into this adoption adventure God has set before us!

One last treasure for this post...

When people hear about our upcoming adoption they often ask me what the kids think of it all. Well, lately, any time Sawyer hears the word "China" or sees Chinese characters written somewhere he yells, "Hey, that's China! That is where my brother or sister lives!" Be still my heart. I love this kid...

He is a keeper.

Holy smokes we're actually doing this...

So, as you might have figured from our blog subtitle, we are officially in the process of adopting child number three! It has been a looooonnnngggg road to this point and we have a much longer road ahead of us. The purpose of this blog is to keep our friends and family in the loop with the goings-on of our adventure. As this is our first adoption, we feel like we are kinda making it up as we go, though we have found some amazing resources and will definitely share them over the next few months. 

Sometime soon I will blog about the "how we got here" story but for now I wanted to write a "where are we today" post in effort to stay current...

As of today we are working towards adopting a child with limb difference (missing a leg, arm, foot, hand, etc). When we had originally begun looking at countries, we settled on the Philippines and began looking at agencies working in East Asia. The more we learned about the Philippines, the more excited we became. The culture, the government's approach to adoption, the cost...we were in. The only road block we kept coming across was that not many children with limb differences were being adopted out of the Philippines. I began to call some larger agencies working in East Asia and asking them about Waiting Children (that is the official term for adoptable kids with special needs) with limb difference. No one had good news. Everyone told us to go to China. 

Now, we never crossed China out, but China has a few more rules and stipulations than most countries, one of which being that both adoptive parents must be at least 30 at the time a dossier (all the paperwork required to request an international adoption) is submitted. China is also a bit more expensive than the Philippines and since this adoption will be primarily paid for via fundraising, we were hoping for a total cost of less than $20,000. Lastly, we are ready to move on this adoption. Having to wait an entire year before I turn 30 and can apply to China felt like forever. The road to international adoption is tedious enough. 

All of this to say, last week China was not high on our list. 

While talking with a social worker about what country she felt fit our profile best she said, "If you want to go where the need is greatest, go to China." She then proceeded to tell me about the many children with Amnionic Band Syndrome and limb differences who are regularly added to the Waiting Child list. She also explained that with the Waiting Child grant offered by her agency, our total cost would be between $22,000-24,000.

So we began to ask whether our son/daughter might be in China. And today, we think our son/daughter is in China. I am hoping that as we get a bit further down the road, we will KNOW our son/daughter is in China...though I know once we reach that point in the journey, it will become monumentally harder to wait to bring him/her home.

We will be working with Holt International and they have put together a plan and timeline to keep us moving forward as quickly as possible. We will submit our initial application to Holt on my birthday, August 19th. We will then take the next six months to begin saving and raising money to cover the cost of the homestudy and stateside legal fees. On February 19th, my half-birthday, we will officially begin our homestudy. This process should take 4-6 months, getting us as close as possible to my 30th birthday. On August 19th of next year, we will (Lord willing) submit our dossier to China. The social worker I have been speaking with said that because we are willing to take a special needs child, our wait for a match could be as quickly as 1-2 months. Once a referral is made and we accept, there is about a three month wait till we can begin making travel plans. Best case scenario, we will be flying to China to pick up our child in about 18 months. I am very aware of the fact that international adoptions rarely go according to plan but we will be praying for things to stick as close to the ideal timeline as possible. 

So that is all of it in a nutshell. There is so much more to the story and I will use this blog to fill in the holes as the weeks go on. God has already taught us so much and I am thankful to have a means to record what He is doing in our lives. I love to think that someday our third child will be able to read over these posts and clearly see the hand of God orchestrating his/her arrival to our family!

"God sets the lonely in families..." Psalm 68:6