A long time coming

This post has been a long time coming and finally this past Sunday, God gave me confirmation to post it.  Don't know why it's taken me so long.   Maybe I have been scared as to what people would think.  Maybe I've been scared to say it out loud not knowing what God will do.  I feel I have no other choice but to share what God has been doing in our lives for some time now.  You see I got involved in the Orphan Care Ministry of our church about a year ago not really knowing my real purpose there.  God had been breaking my heart and allowing me to see with His eyes and heart to care for the orphans like in  James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.  I just remember knowing that I was supposed to be helping with this ministry. 

Come November we were recognizing National Orphan Sunday and we all were really excited.  We all had been praying for this day for sometime so that others would become aware to the number of children in the world that have lost their mother or father, are parentless, or have been abandoned and now exceeds 147 million!  Lets just say this day was way more than we could have ever expected.......of course Jesus orchestrated it!  There were people signing up to know more about Foster care and adoption, & sponsoring children worldwide. 

That day was a day I will never forget.  You see that day there was a table set up with necklaces and pictures of beautiful children.  These children were from an orphanage in Uganda and could be sponsored monthly to help take care of the child's food, shelter and medical care along with many other of their basic needs.  We decided to let our children pick out a child to sponsor as we explained to them why we were helping the home. Many of you know that the orphanage is Sonrise Baby Home and our sponsored child is Steven.  When we got home that day they wrote notes to Steven which I still have that say, "Dear God we love Steven."    You see that day God used Sonrise to touch the lives of our family in more ways than I can count. I could never thank Mandi Johnson and Amy Washington enough for allowing God to use them to change my family forever that day.  They said yes to a call from God to bring awareness to the children of Sonrise. That day we put our faith in God with our money in a way we had never done before to take care of a child we had never seen before.  That day God also touched my children's heart and allowed them to love a child they never met.

From this, God has worked on me like never before.  He has opened my eyes to things that I would have never seen before.  You see, if we were supposed to take care of the orphans then what was our roll in that?  God was working on my heart about what we needed to do.  I knew I felt this way, so did Josh feel the same way?  In Psalm 68:5-6  it says A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.  Yes, God was softening my heart towards adoption but I was scared to death.  I guess what I was scared the most of is what everyone else would think and what my husband would say.  Finally after bringing it up time after time, I asked him to pray about it.  He didn't give it a second thought and said he would.  Obviously God had been working on him too.  After months of us both praying over these things we both came to the conclusion that God would have us adopt!  What is it going to look like, I don't know.  In fact it probably will get a bit messy.  But I feel that if we are willing to get our hands dirty, trying to serve the least and the lost then God will show us the way. I would ask for you to pray that God "orders our steps" in this journey of our life.  

Why adoption?
We feel God has called us to this as His way for us to take care of the orphan.  We have become convicted and called out of our complete comfort to try and meet the needs of the fatherless.  All God's children are just like us in need of a loving father.  Adoption is the Gospel! Ephesians 1:5 In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-

Where?
We have chosen Uganda as a place to adopt.  Again we feel God has called us here.  Before I even visited this place, I was in love. My trip to this place only confirmed what God had placed in my heart. In Uganda alone there are 2.5 million orphans so we feel like this is a place where we are needed.

It costs so much!
It does cost a lot, but we feel that God can and will do anything if we are in His perfect will.  He takes care of his children.  Oh does he ever take care of his children! =)

Our family is already big!
I know go figure......God is funny sometimes.  And our children, they already want to know when we are bringing our child home that God is giving us! This blesses our hearts beyond measure.


There are many things I don't know, but what I do know are these three things.....
1. God has a plan for every person!
2. God is always at work behind the scenes!
3. God uses us to accomplish His purpose!