July 31, 2008

Welcome to our journey! I can't believe this is happening and so quickly. A little over a month ago, we were in the China program. But we felt like God was telling us to wait a little longer for our daughter from China. While this was heartbreaking, we felt like God had something else in store for us (at the time we did not know what it was, but thought it might be that there is another child out there somewhere that might need us quicker then our daughter from China who is not even born yet). It was heartwrenching to have to agree to wait, but we decided it was what we needed to do. I would say within a week after agreeing that we needed to wait for China, God opened up a door to adopt a beautiful little boy in Haiti.

At first, I saw his picture on the web, and I was thinking he is so precious...but really nothing more. Every other day or so, I would check to see if his picture was still there and of course it was! I also told Nathan about him and how adorable this baby was. Finally after about a week went by, i awoke one day and could not get the picture of this little boy off of my mind. It was seriously driving me bananas as I could not think of anything but him. Nate suggested I should email the adoption agency. I did, but was not holding out much hope as he was up on their site for awhile and I was thinking someone has to already be trying to adopt him.

Well, lo and behold the agency said he was not taken and no one was interested in him at that time! I was amazed and couldn't believe it! Nate and I talked after that and felt like God had brought this little boy into our world. So we jumped in and said we wanted to adopt him. But at the time we didnt even have a homestudy. We did have a portion of our paperwork already (from the China program), so we were able to use that. Well we found a place to complete our homestudy and it is now about a little over a month later and we are getting ready in the next week or two to be able to send our dossier in. I can't believe it! God has been moving so fast with this adoption. Not only that but this baby angel will be officially ours very shortly.

God has been doing amazing things with this adoption. We needed $12,000 pretty much right away (split between upfront, and within a month). We have payed out $3950 (this is not counting all the fees for gathering the paperwork, fingerprints, psychological evaluations, government fees, medical fees, etc). As soon as we are ready to send our dossier into the agency we will need to pay another $8050. We had a garage sale and were blessed by numerous people (donating, prayers, and help during the sale), and brought in over $1200, but we still had a long ways to go. With our savings and the sale we still needed to come up with $4708. But the other day we received a call from Stephanie our adoption coordinator from A love beyond Borders and she told us that one of our fees we will be able to pay later in the adoption (because of our circumstance and how fast the adoption is moving). This knocks off $2500 which brings our total needed down to $2208! Praise God for that blessing! I know that God will help us bring in that last amount, because He has been working miracles throughout this whole adoption so far. But please continue to pray that the money does come in and that God keeps this adoption in the palm of His hand.