Perspective

For those who are curious, I am going to give you a little update on where we are on our adoption journey. We FINALLY finished our homestudy and were officially approved. Last week we mailed in our I600A, and we now wait for our fingerprinting appointments. After being fingerprinted we will have to wait on another approval form, then we will need to send in our dossier, and at last we can be on the wait list for a refferal for our son.
In a more detailed update, I am just going to be real. I myself have struggled with fear a little bit lately. Fear of the unknown, or the uncontrollable. This journey thus far has been nothing but a roller coaster of emotions, some joyful and exciting, and some heartbreaking, and maddening. At first we dealt with a completely broken heart for the fatherless. God opened our eyes to what He cared about, and there was no turning back. Then came the excitement and an urgency to get started on this undeniable call God had spoken to us so loudly. Then came some heartache of rejection or lack of support, which was attributed to fear. We realized real quickly that not everyone was going to agree with or be supportive of this very Big thing God was asking us to do. With this we quickly learned a very valuable lesson to put our faith and trust in God and not in man. Then came the paperwork, and that brought discouragement and frustration, and apathy, but we pressed on. Then the fundraising brought stress and hard work, and humbling ourselves to an uncomfortable level of having to ask others to give. It also brought much joy and celebration to watch God provide through His precious people, and watching loved ones come together to help raise money to aid in bringing our son home to us. I can't wait to tell him one day of all the heroes he has in his life that helped in bringing him home. There have been MANY days when I have said to Aaron, "I cannot believe we are adopting a baby from Ethiopia." This is how I totally without a doubt know that it is for sure a God thing. This isn't something that we ourselves would've ever in a million years imagined ourselves doing, but we're doing it. This isn't something we decided to do on a whim. This was something placed in our hearts that will NEVER change or go away. So this is why we press through the fear of the unknown, and the discouraging arrows that the enemy throws at us. WE ARE CALLED! Our hearts were forever changed, and we know with all our might that there is a little boy all the way on the other side of the planet that God has hand picked for our family to call our own. He has a mom and dad who already love him, and two sweet big sisters that cannot wait to meet him and pray for him daily.