Getting Closer

So, Tom and I finished our paperwork on our end of things. We are now waiting for our approval of our I-600A and for the secretary of state to certify some paper. After we receive these papers are dossier will be sent to our agency and we will be put on the waiting list for a child referral. I can not believe how fast things are going. We serve an awesome God! It looks like possible travel in late April!

One of the most asked questions that we have received during this adoption process has been, "How much does it cost." Lately I have been thinking about the cost in a different way.


Our child will have suffered more in his short life than we have ever, and, by God's grace, hopefully ever will. Our child, through the lens of two, three or four years of childhood, perhaps will have witnessed the death of his parents; will have perhaps been forced to wander the streets for food and shelter; will perhaps have been taken in by a stranger and then dropped in an orphanage where there is no familiar sound, smell or smile -- he will have experienced the kind of fear that causes you to close your eyes to shut out the desperate world around him. Adoption will have cost him everything.

I've heard several people comment that our child is so "lucky" to be adopted by our family or how "good" we are to be "doing this." I understand the heart of these comments -- and honestly, I think before I really started learning about children who have been orphaned, I probably would have had the same thoughts -- but when we stop to think about it, NO child is lucky to be adopted, because to be adopted one must first be orphaned.

What adoption is, however, is God's hand of love and grace and mercy on a child who, through no fault of their own, has lived in the depths of our fallen world where tragedy and death are realities. Adoption has nothing to do with US and it has everything to do with God. This is not a story of what WE are doing. It is a story of what GOD is doing. God loves this child SO much that He is giving him a second family. For reasons I do not necessarily understand, God has chosen our family to be part of HIS plan for HIS child. As a result, God is putting HIS love in our hearts for HIS child. We will love him as our own. But he is not lucky and we are not good. We are, however, both loved beyond measure by our Father in Heaven and we are being used by Him to fulfill His perfect plan for us.

I also think about what adoption cost our Heavenly Father, His one and only Son Jesus Christ. Yet He was willing to undergo that cost for us, and He did it with joy! What pain and loss that God must have experienced, and yet He delighted in bringing us into His family. The adoption journey is not easy, but every hour of turmoil, every obstacle encountered, every tear shed, every sleepless night are all just a shadow of the price that God paid for us.

Our adoption cost us nothing, but cost God His Son. And this is how we know what love is.

Please keep praying for us as we take this journey to get our son in Ethiopia that God has hand picked for us