The connected child and sandpaper eyes

 

 

Over the last weeks and months, Edgar and I have been working very hard on gathering up all the necessary documentation required to proceed with our adoption. Paperwork, reading, gathering info, revealing every detail of our hearts and lives, answering questions and going through a somewhat grueling process has all been a part of this drill. While the work itself hasn't been exactly fun and sometimes makes us feel like our eyelids are made of sandpaper, it is SO REWARDING because we know the joy that awaits us on the other side of this... Our daugher. :)

 

One of the requirements has been to read chapters out of this book, The Connected Child, as well as complete a 10 hr online adoptive parenting course. We've learned so much about how to love the heart of an adopted child well, how to meet their needs and communicate effectively with them, and what we can do to help them thrive in life. All of this preparation has made us so thankful that we are being even further equiped to love this child in the best way possible!

 

And the best part is, as of tomorrow...we are DONE with most of the work on our end! Yes that's right, tomorrow afternoon (right after I finish the last 20 pages of the book...) I am driving the 3rd and final packet of paperwork/documents we have prepared to the post office. What a great Christmas gift that is for us! The next step is to have our home study completed end of January.

 

And just a quick update for those who have asked me recently, we have already generously been given 12% of our total adoption costs! Some dear sweet friends, Josh & Jess Brown are baking homemade holiday bread this week as a fundraiser for our adoption, so if you live nearby and want to order some, send an email to lilbrown7806@yahoo.com.

 

Thank you for being a part of this adoption journey with us. We couldn't make it without each of you.

~

Joyful & Blessed Mom

I am the joyful and blessed mom of three precious babies.

And yet, I'm not able to hug or kiss any of them right now. I can't wrap them up in my arms and tell them how much I love them, how special they are to me and how there's nobody in the world like them. At nighttime, I can't tuck them in and pray the sweet blessings of Jesus over them.

For you see, my first two babies are already in the presence of Jesus, singing and dancing before the throne of God. They are probably sitting on His lap right now, or playing hide-&-seek with the children of our friends who have also gone before. Or maybe my beloved grandfather has taken my children by the hand and is teaching them about the glorious flowers that grow there. You see, before our babies even had a chance to breathe their first breath on this earth, they went home to heaven. But they are loved with an everlasting love and they are precious to us!

And we now wait on our third baby, our darling little daughter from Uganda. We don't even know who she is or what her name will be. But we love her fiercely and long to bring her home to us.

Every day we live in the tension between all that God has promised us, and the circumstances we find ourselves in. We are parents who have no children in our home at this moment. There are no little feet that run around our house, no finger prints to wipe away, no spills to clean up. Sometimes at dinner, when its just Edgar & I at the table, we wipe tears from our eyes knowing that there are precious little souls who are missing. We wait for them joyfully, expectantly, with hope...

And so, though I have no person on this planet right now that calls me "mom" and runs to me to kiss their tears away and for me to swoop them up into my waiting arms, it is ok, because I AM the joyful and blessed mom of three precious babies. And many many more to come, we hope. :-)

Our Little Bird

We feel like God gave us a really fun way to celebrate and record 

the way He provides financially for us throughout this adoption process!

Here is the idea: in whatever way the Lord provides for us, whether it is through Edgar's job, through friends and family, through anonymous gifts, or however He wants to provide, we are dividing up the entire amount (which is $24,000) over the 500 pieces of this puzzle. That means each puzzle piece is worth $48. So as God provides every $48, we are going to write on the back of each puzzle piece how the money came to us! As the story of how each puzzle piece comes together, we will slowly build our puzzle and record the story of how God brings our daughter home to us! This puzzle will hang in our daughter's nursery and will be a gift to her she will treasure her entire life - she will always know the story of God's extravagant goodness towards her.

Jesus has spoken clearly to our hearts that He WILL provide every single dollar we need, and we are not to worry or be anxious, but in everything make our requests known to Him. We will not be asking for money. Period. He is already stirring hearts and we have had multiple people ask how they can donate to our adoption fund - wow, we are humbled and thankful!! We trust God to stir up a desire in people to be a part of this adventure. So we will not be asking for money but we will wait on the Lord to do His work! We want to invite you all, our dear friends and family, to partner with us in faith as a community and I believe we are all going to see God do something extraordinary to raise this $24,000!

We are researching various ways where people can donate online using a credit card, perhaps via PayPal or something similar. If there is a way that the donation can be tax deductible we will pursue that option for sure. As soon as we determine the best route, we will post it on here!

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU guys for standing with us already. We are so amazed at the goodness of God, and we are only just beginning! This is going to be such a fun adventure... :-)

Trusting, Resting, Waiting...

Sometimes, the realization that we are adopting a little girl from Uganda suddenly hits me...

Not that I ever forget that we are adopting, of course. But it's such an abstract idea that at certain moments of my day the realization of it washes over me with joy and anxiety and excitement and curiosity. Kind of like in the days following your birthday: you are so used to thinking you are a certain age and suddenly one day you become older, but it is such an abstract thing that you sometimes forget you are actually older.

We are adopting a little girl from Uganda! That sentence makes me so happy.

So where exactly are we are in the process right now? This morning I ordered a book called "The Connected Child" which is part of the required parenting course we need to complete. Along with that course, we are working on gathering up a list of documents including copies of drivers licenses, birth certificates, pay check stubs, proof of health and life insurance, etc. Once we finish the parenting course and submit all those documents, we are ready to schedule our home study! Our goal is to have our home study done before the end of the year. We'll see if that happens... :-)

Even with all that we have going on at the moment and all that we are busy doing to prepare for our daughter's arrival, there is still SO much waiting, trusting and resting. The process is constantly dynamic and there hasn't been a dull moment since we began working towards adoption, but in a way it feels like "hurry up and wait"... So much to do and so little time, no wait I mean so MUCH time. Who knows when she will get here? The timing of adoption is such a strange idea, because when a child is growing in your belly, you know more or less they will arrive 40 weeks after they are conceived. But with our gorgeous adopted daughter who is growing in our hearts instead, there is just no way to predict the time. Which is beautiful in an odd way...

We get to trust, to rest, and to wait with patience and with joy and with perseverance. We get to fight for our daughter even before we have any idea who she is. We love her fiercely already and long to have her here so we can tell her how much she is wanted!

In the meantime, I will get back to my "hurry up and wait" kind of day. :-)

Extravagant Goodness

"You crown the year with Your goodness, 

and Your paths drip with abundance." Psalm 65:11

We are experiencing the overwhelming and extravagant goodness of God every single day of our lives! Some days we recognize it more by our earthly standards, such as days when the sun shines brightly or the birds are chirping loud enough to enjoy. There are days when the love and kindness from people who care for us seems over and above what we deserve. But even on the days when the rain is coming and the sky is dark, or the dawn seems so far away, God is still good! He is good, He is good... His mercy and grace are unfailing and His love is wildly extravagant, whether or not we feel it.

But right now, I DO feel it. :)

Over the last weeks we've been given several very sweet and precious gifts for the welcoming of our daughter, not to mention all of the verbal love and support she is already receiving! Today we are celebrating all the Lord has generously poured out to us and we are overwhelmed with His extravagant goodness...

Very soon after we began announcing that we had begun the adoption process, we received the first sacrificial love offering: the first $1000!! We were and still are blown away, humbled and overwhelmed and so grateful for this very first amount given to bring our daughter home! 

A sweet little Dutch children's story book sent to us from Edgar's parents, Henk & Tjitske! We can't wait to read this book to our daughter. :)

Dutch tulip bulbs and a beautiful prophetic poem from Edgar's sister Annelies and her husband. The poem reads, "For us at this moment, she is still invisible. But she is rooted and grounded in His love already. His love is her earth, where she can grow in. And by His grace there will be a flowering day."

 Some precious ladies in my life got together and gave me this gorgeous necklace which they had handmade for me! The front is a cut-out of the shape of Africa with a heart right over Uganda. The back says "Plan A", which is the phrase God gave us for His plans for adoption and our family.

Welcome!

Whether you followed us here from our old blog or are just now joining us, we are so thankful you are here! Thanks for joining us on this adventure as we wait for God to bring us the child He has chosen for us since before there was time.

Many of you have asked us "What now?" and that is a great question. What is the process now? What is the next step? We'll do a bit of Q&A today in hopes of letting you in on the nuts and bolts of our journey.

Q. "What is the next step?"
A. The next step for us is completing a Parenting Training course, filling out another approximately 100 page document, then having our Home Study done.
The Parenting Training course is a 10 hour online mandatory course and a book we must read to help us as parents prepare to receive this new little child. Once that is complete and we have filled out the large document and sent it in, we will schedule our Home Study with a social worker from Generations Adoption. The purpose of this is to make sure we look as good in real life as we do on paper. :-)

Q. "Where will your daughter come from?"
A. Kampala, Uganda! Generations works with a small but wonderful children's home in the capitol city of Uganda, and that is where our daughter will be coming from.

Q. "How much will this cost?"
A. Approximately $23,000.00. The large amount of money this adoption will cost has never once been an overwhelming factor to us. We trust the Lord Jesus to provide every single penny to bring our daughter home! Several people have expressed a desire to help us fund raise - we are SO thankful for that!

Q. "How long will it take?"
A. In theory, the length of the process from start to finish is 12-18 months, but this can vary greatly by a whole host of reasons.

There are many more questions we've been asked, but these are the ones that come up most frequently. We LOVE hearing from you and feel so thankful to be surrounded by a community of loving and supportive family and friends! The overwhelming response of love and support we have received has humbled us greatly.

Praise be to GOD who adopted us and welcomed us into His family; we delight in being His sons and daughters.

Heat

27th September 2012

At the moment, my stomach is growling and my senses are teased by the scent of pizza baking in the oven. It’s torture, actually, to breathe in that divine smell and know its still 15 minutes until I can eat it! As I tried to concentrate on the book I’m reading, my mind drifted off to what’s happening in the oven just several feet away from me: my pizza is cooking. It is changing shapes and being completely altered from something raw, frozen (don’t judge me, friends! some busy days simply call for frozen pizza) and unedible to something deliciously baked and delightful. I don’t have to do anything to it, really. It’s all about the heat that is inside that oven.

Heat.

If I think about this in a very simplistic way, what happens inside my oven on a daily basis is actually quite phenomenal. Drastic change takes place in there. Because of the heat, bread rises and cookies bake. Things are transformed from one thing into something else. Before the oven: unedible. After the oven: delectable.

All simply because of heat.

In the bigger picture of my life, I think about the refining fire that we each walk through at different seasons of life. That refining fire is not a malicious form of torture God forces us into. No, quite on the contrary, just like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were cast into a fiery furnace (Daniel 3), Jesus iswithus for every moment, right there in the flames next to us. He ever so tenderly uses the “heat” and trials in the broken world around us to transform us from one thing into something else entirely, something absolutely delightful. The heat purifies our hearts, it challenges our beliefs, it opens our eyes to the yuck in our hearts and brings us to our knees as we realize how desperately we need His love and grace. We are transformed into something absolutely beautiful, all because of heat.

I don’t know what kind of heat we will face in this journey of adoption. There will be plenty of potholes in the road and frustrations along the way, I am sure. This will definitely be one of the refining fires in our lives. But as we willing and joyfully surrender ourselves to being baked in the oven, I am confident that the fruit in our lives will be well worth all the heat.

Speaking of heat, that 15 minutes is up… time for lunch! :-)

The Story Behind The Story

25th September 2012

07.07.07 - Nashville, Tennessee

Edgar and I had been dating since December 2006 (after meeting in Shanghai, China in September 2006 - but that’s another story). Several of our friends from our Church were travelling up to Nashville for a large event of prayer and fasting hosted by The Call. On this incredibly powerful day, we spent time in corporate prayer repenting for rejecting the blessings God has given us as a nation. Psalms 127:3 tells us “children are a gift from the Lord”, and yet as a nation we fall so short of that perspective.

One of our big takeaways from that day was the cry for more people to rise up with a passion for adoption. How can we point a finger at those who see no way of taking care of their own child if we ourselves are not willing to be the answer to their cries? As believers in Jesus Christ, it is our calling and our privilege to welcome these precious little blessings into our home. Whether they were abandoned, unwanted or born into a home where good-willed parents just simply cannot care for them, it is our calling to have homes that are beacons of light and hope for those who have no hope. And so this cry for our generation to have a passion for adoption, to have a heart that beats with redemption was hugely impressed on our hearts that day! We knew from that moment forward that in addition to having biological children, adoption was also Plan A for our family.

Fast forward to July 2012…

Edgar and I have been married for just over 4 years. In those years, our hearts have been stretched and deepened as we have gained greater insight into God’s incredibly powerful redemptive heart towards us. We lost our first two children, in April 2011 and April 2012, before they could even breathe their first breathe on this earth and our hearts yearned for heaven where our precious babies are alive and perfect in the very presence of God Almighty. Through that suffering and heartache, we’ve gained greater perspective of eternity, parenthood, loss and hope. We continued to reference our passion for adoption, all the while Edgar being open to it at any moment and me - having it all nicely figured out in my perfect little plan - knowing it would be years before we began any adoption process.

Then July 28th 2012 came…

It was an ordinary morning, where we woke up at our regular time of 5:55am, I made our usual pot of coffee and I sat in my familiar cozy spot on the couch to meet with Jesus. But that morning, God spoke so clearly and loudly to my heart telling me - seemingly out of nowhere - that NOW is the time to start the adoption process!!! The urgency of this feeling startled me, and the timing was certainly not according to my perfect little plan for our family. Because we always knew that we would adopt, but right now Lord?? Really?! I wasn’t sure if He knew all that we had going on at this point in life… Ha ha. But it was so clearly evident to my heart that adoption was now a bright green light gleaming right in front of me.

That evening as I told Edgar about the revelation I had in my quiet time, he grinned from ear to ear! Evidently Edgar had been waiting for the Lord to speak to my heart. I asked Edgar when we should practically get started and his answer was “Tomorrow!”. :-) After seeking the Lord together, we quickly made the decision to go with Generations Adoptions, and very soon thereafter landed on the country Uganda.

An excerpt from my journal the day after we began the process reads: “…these children to come are my babies, whether or not our skin is the same color. They are the precious little hearts Jesus has entrusted to us, to shepherd with wisdom, love and compassion. All the little ones we will welcome into our home and hearts are Plan A for us. And so we begin… And we know this journey will be more difficult and painful than we ever dreamed, but it will also be more beautiful and worth it than we ever imagined. Jesus, hold us closely as we take this leap of faith.”

Officially Accepted!!

17th September 2012

Today, September 17, 2012, we received the official email from Generations Adoptions that we are accepted into the Uganda program!!! Edgar and I couldn’t be more thrilled as we realize that this huge and overwhelming mountain will be climbed one little step at a time, and today that first step greeted us with a door wide open.

“He sets the lonely in families…” Psalm 68:6

Check back soon for a blog post with the detailed story of how Jesus lead our hearts into making this decision!




September 14, 2012 - The day we turned in the very large information packet containing every detail of our entire lives to Generations Adoptions in Waco, Texas!

A New Beginning

16th August 2012

She’s our daughter.

Conceived in our hearts and birthed out of faith. We will love her as our very own, because she will be.

And so we embark on this journey of finding her, of searching the world over for her, until we find her and bring her home to our hearts.

July 28, 2012… let the story begin.