Apathy

I have spent the last 2 weeks in Africa and since i have been home i wake up every night and can't fall back to sleep.  Some may say jet lag.  Perhaps.

The question that keeps coming to mind is how can i sleep when i know tens of thousands of children are going to bed on a dirt floor with no mattress or blanket but yet mine are asleep warmly in their beds??  Why do my kids get 3 solid meals a day but yet many only receive one which resembles a snack?

(A family of 24 live under one roof with over half of them sleeping on the floor)

The simple answer is--I AM BLESSED!  But, how can i not feel incredibly raw about this all the time??

I know what the gospel says.  I can quote scriptures about the poor.  I know God commands us to love mercy and justice, to feed the poor and the orphaned..blah blah blah.  And if we simply throw money into an offering plate for missions it's blah blah blah.

In fact, i'm pretty sure Jesus is serious about all of this since he basically says to care for the least of these in nearly every book of the bible.  But yet there is a gray area of filtering my life through our culture and not through the gospel. 

Is it really God's vision for us to build bigger buildings and acquire more stuff because we are Americans when the bible says God is obsessed with social justice?  So often we are blessing blessed people here in America as we dream about bigger houses and nicer cars or bigger church buildings.

Is this God's vision for us?  If all we do is talk theology and think about the suffering, what good is it?  Jesus did not seek out the rich and powerful, but yet he hung out with the outcasts and undesirables.  Are they suppose to walk into our 10:30 services?  Our bigger buildings?  Or are we suppose to go to them?

My trip to Africa makes me tired of Christian rhetoric.  Jesus' community is the brokenhearted.  The ones with the hurts, habits & hang ups.  Are our visions lined up with Jesus' vision? 

God, please break our American hearts for what breaks yours and align our vision with yours...

It's not a courtdate, but....

In less than 2 weeks, i will be traveling to Africa to meet our precious little girl.  I have had lots of people ask how they can help.

Simply...we need prayer. 

Specifically:

Pray that God would prepare our hearts for the upcoming changes to our family, and that God will give us wisdom, discernment, and insight as we raise our new daughter to know Jesus Christ.

Pray for our precious child. That God will keep a hedge of protection around her and pray for her little heart to start to heal despite the loss and trauma that she has experienced.

Pray for my trip to Africa.   Pray that i have the right words to say at the right time and most of all pray that God's love is seen through me.

Pray for Micah and the kids that will not be traveling with me at this time. He'll be Mr. Mom for 10 days.  He gets my vote for Husband of the Year award!

Pray for a court date.  That it comes soon!!!!

And most of all...Pray that God is glorified.  This sounds so cliche, but it's what we truly desire.

'There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven"

Here we sit and wait....we just heard that we have a good long wait before our court date.  Doesn't look like we are going anywhere anytime soon. 

Please keep us in your prayers and for God to work a miracle in His perfect timing.

My prayer today:

O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.--Psalm 139

God's work..God's way...

No news...

I wish i was updating you all with some fabulous news, but NOPE.  I have nothing.  We are waiting and guess what??? 

Waiting sucks! 

But through the waiting, i know God has His hand on our adoption.  We have had 2 deaths in our family and i can not fathom the thought of being half way across the world and missing those funerals. 

God's timing is perfect. 

So easily said...yet so hard to live. 

Dossier--Check!

Drum roll, please . . . The dossier is done.  I'm hoping after our agency receives it that nothing will need corrected but with hundreds of sheets of paper that's a pretty large margin of error. 

It has been signed and notarized and four sets of copies have been mailed to our agency for the last review. That means it should be in Washington by the end of the week and I can finally collapse with a big sigh of relief.

Thank you Jesus!   Now, we are waiting on a court date!

The Orphan Foundation Grant

Back an August, i spent the majority of my free time applying for Adoption grants.  Adoption is expensive. 

Crazy expensive!! 

We had a few friends that wrote reference letter after reference letter for us.  We are incredibly blessed to be walking alongside of some fabulous people in this thing called life.  I know life is busy and they would drop everything and send off a reference letter whenever i called.

One of the grants we applied for was through The Orphan Foundation.

The Orphan Foundation - This a foundation with programs that range from providing financial grants to low and middle-income adopting families, to a host of other volunteer services. They are all volunteers who are trying to make a difference in the life of a child. Their website says they award approximately 10 grants of $500 per child yearly, and they review their incoming grants on a quarterly bases. Their application process was fairly brief and entirely on the web. I received a response for them and hope they will be reviewing my application soon.


Sadly, they only have funding for 3 families this quarter.  By the grace of God, we were one of the three.  We received a $500 grant today.  I am amazed at God's hand on our adoption. 

The reality is that their funding is still very low, and The Orphan Foundation is trying a variety of ways to raise monies.

The have a program at a crowd-funding site, Indiegogo: http://www.Indiegogo.com/100orphans, but you can see that they haven’t yet reached the halfway mark to one $500 grant.

They think they will be able to issue 1-2 grants next quarter, but unfortunately, their push to raise additional donations has been more than offset by many new applications for grants.