Fundraising....the new frontier

Well, for most of you who know me, it will come as no surprise that putting on any sort of fundraisers and all the details that go into that are somewhat of a challenge for me. For those of you who don't know me, know that sitting down to make a grocery list has taken me close to two hours before and I am not exaggerating! Needless to say that this is a huge undertaking for me and any promotion of these two events that anyone wants to do and any help you want to give would be enormously appreciated. The events are as follows: a garage and bake sale at my house here in Zionsville on Saturday May 16th, followed by a benefit concert/silent auction, the next Saturday (may 23rd) with music by Connersvine and John David Webster and of course Brian will be playing with John David. The location of the concert is not set in stone quite yet so I will wait until I hear back in the next day or two to post that. In addition to this, we are currently designing a t-shirt to sell that will of course raise funds but will also raise awareness for orphans and the need that there is to help them. Currently the ways we need help are: 1. Donations of things to sell at the garage sell. Everyone knows that furniture and bigger things like that are the biggest moneymakers, but we will take anything you might think people would want to buy. Baked goods to sell at the garage sale are another way people can help. I will need help organizing the stuff a couple days before and help running the sale. 2. For the auction/concert, we could use donations of things that would be good for the silent auction, whether goods or services. For example, I have started making pillow case dresses for little girls babies to six years old out of vintage pillow cases. I currently find the pillow cases on my own, but wouldn't mind if anyone wanted to donate some they had, or if you find some at Goodwill and want to pick them up and donate those that would also be great. So, if you make things or have a business and would like to donate to this event that would be awesome. We will also need volunteers to help run the concert i.e. people to man tables and what not. We would like to sell drinks and snack food as well, and as much of these things that can be donated to that we can keep our out of pocket expenses to a minimum would be great. Let's see. Outside of these two events, just helping to get the word out and of course a ton of prayer, would be amazing help to us. I am hoping to get a link posted to our blogsite soon for people to be able to buy a T-shirt through paypal on line. I don't know how to do this either but hope I can get it done soon. Thanks to everyone who has encouraged us on this journey so far. I am getting really excited. We are still at the top of the list and waiting for a call. We are pretty sure that the baby has been born so really we are just waiting for a picture. Oh, her name is Mia. Middle name is yet to be determined as we would like to use something indigenous or maybe part of her current name. The name of the concert event Is Mia's Hope. There is story behind this name and I will get around to sharing it soon, but this is enough infor for now. Thanks again!

Another brick laid...

We finally got our fingerprint date and the official word our paperwork was in, so as far as I know, we are considered active to receive a referral! We go for the prints next week and then once those process we will be cleared for travel. Yay! I find myself jumping a little when the phone rings now, as it could be "the call" saying they have a child for us. It still feels a little surreal to me at this point. Beginning to wonder if it will hit me before I find myself on a 20 something hour plane ride half way across the world.....

We're up....we're down, oh where to next on the ride?

Well, good news! Our paperwork and money we sent to immigration recently was officially processed. We know this because our check was cashed. However, we still haven't received the letter stating it has been begun to be processed and issuing us a fingerprinting date. When this piece does come, we will officially be able to receive a referral. Currently I think we are the next family on the list to receive a referral. Yay! This news came on the heels of what we were afraid was a huge set back. We learned that we sent the paperwork initially to the wrong office and then were told by immigration to send it to another office which turned out to also be the wrong office. And on top of that, I learned that I made the cashiers check out to the wrong department and that no one could locate the paperwork, but the check had been cashed. We called several people to pray and in less than 24 hours, we heard back from our agency that as far as they could tell, all was well. So, I will feel 100% better when we have our approval in our hands. Please keep praying, and for those of you who read this before March 23 or so, please also pray for my brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew, and others in Uganda. Visit their blog found at kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com. Read Katie's blog while you are at it. It will ignite a passion for the fatherless, and I pray will spark you into action on their (the orphans) behalf. Not everyone is called to take and orphan in, but many of you are. All of us are called to care for the fatherless in some capacity. It is a wild ride, but let me say, I wouldn't miss it for the world. Thanks for reading and praying!

A Step in the Right Direction!!!

This has been a good weekend for us in that we have made some progress, hallelujah! To get down to the facts, we finished all our paperwork we needed to redo, it was okayed by our agency saying we had all the necessary info to submit to immigration and sent to us to prepare to send directly to immigration at the end of January. The only thing holding us up at this point was money. God's timing is always perfect in that we were able to get our taxes done early and got the refund Friday. The paperwork was sent along with our check yesterday, Saturday, to immigration! Yay! I cried when I left the post office as it felt as one more brick was laid on our journey. Today, I went for a run and as I was out, I felt like God began to pose a question to me. What is the difference in intervening through adoption in the life of a child as a believer verses someone who is not a believer? It is a question I have asked myself especially as I see so many celebrities and those who don't know Jesus pursuing the same thing. There must be a difference, I know, but haven't able to nail down what that is. This question He posed was rhetorical in nature because I feel that He began to tell me. Papa God is benevolent by nature. He is good, He is generous, and He promises to "not leave us as orphans." But in doing so, we see that His motivation is not centered on us, but on the unveiling of His glory, His essence, His heart. He desires to be known and seen. As His reflections and image bearers, it makes sense that we would not only mirror Him in deed but in purpose as well. I am reading a book called Papa's Voice and in it, I read one of the most, for me, profound things and that is that when we observe and study Jesus' life, we see that He was constantly bombarded with interruptions, diversions, and the unexpected, yet despite all of this, He always completed every task and mission He set out to in accordance with what Papa God had laid before Him to do. He was unwavering in His devotion to not only complete what God had called Him to, but even more so was at peace with how that would come to be because His heart wasn't about the task but about revealing His Father's heart and glory through each interruption and each "unexpected" event or person that was along the way. As I thought about our journey with adoption and the question I mentioned above, it became clear to me that one such difference is in the journey. Is my heart, like the Son's, fixed on God's heart, His essence, His strength, His glory being revealed along the way or have a made this process about another human being only. If that is the case, and it has been at times, I get discouraged. I get frustrated when the unexpected happens. I lose heart, grow weary, question my decision and begin to question His goodness. Yet when I fix my eyes on Him, and allow my self to be quietly reminded of what He desires to do and Be in the midst of this that is when the peace comes. Peace that results not from promising circumstances or results, but from taking on His yoke that says , "In the moment, I AM." And letting that be the place my feet rest. Don't get me wrong, I see that as Christ so boldly and desperately asked in the garden for the desires of His heart, I can make mine known to Him as well. I desire for the rest of this process to go as quickly as possible, for immigration to get back to us with an appointment time for our fingerprinting and background check and for that information to be processed as quickly as possible so we and the baby will be free to travel asap. I pray that I would not have to wait one more day than necessary to bring her home and that I can just see her face. I have not seen her face yet, and we still don't have a clear time line as to when that will happen. They may have us wait until we get our final clearance from immigration to reveal this to us or they may do it sometime in the process. Either way, please pray for strength for us for this journey. It is a slow process, but necessarily slow. God doesn't do anything unnecessarily. Pray that our hearts would remain fixed on seeing Him revealed through this process, however long He wills it to take. Pray for the children at the orphanage, the workers, and all of those whose lives are touched by this process. Adoption is close to Papa's heart. We are all adopted and He longs to reveal Himself not just through the acquisition of a child but through the process.



Instead of making this a new post, just wanted to add that I spoke with the adoption agency after I wrote this initial post and it seems that immigration is moving faster than what we were told to expect. We are hopeful that our time frame for fingerprinting AND approval could be as little as 6 weeks! Also, we will need to wait for a approval before they send us a referral, which is fine. We were also told that there is only one family ahead of us on the waiting list. Thanks for your prayers...we will keep you updated!

Putting my faith where my mouth is....

Well, we knew this journey would be long, but just how long I had no idea. I am glad I had no idea. To make this uncharacteristically short for me, we are now waiting for finances to come in. We are good with our adoption agency itself as far as being caught up with costs there (thanks to Shoahannah's Hope and the grant we got from them) however, because of the Hague convention that I mentioned in my last post, we had to redo our immigration application which meant we also had to redo our homestudy. Both of these were costs we have paid that we are having to redo. So, we redid the home study in October, it was approved at the end of December, and sent to us along with several other documents that we now have to send into immigration with our application so we have permission to travel and to bring the baby back into the U.S. However, before we can send this in, we need to somehow come up with more money to file with CIS as well as to pay our home study agency. This is why I titled the post the way I did. I am believing that God will provide, again, for us in this way. I am trying not to be anxious. I do not want our paperwork to expire again, so I am ready to get this going again, but can't until the money is provided. So, for now, we wait. Wait on our Faithful God to provide. Please pray, in faith, with us for this provision. We have now heard that we will not, most likely, get a referral until we are approved by immigration. So, I don't know that this summer is going to be the reality we thought it would to travel. However, I know that God can do anything and that if He didn't with hold Jesus, his most perfect and precious gift from us, He will not now, with hold any good thing that we need. It is getting harder on my heart to wait, but He is enough for that, too. Thanks for reading, asking, and praying. Will hopefully report soon!

The Latest...

As we anticipated, October was a quite month due to the festivals and what not going on in India. We did a lot of paper work "do overs" and are currently waiting on a criminal background check here in Indiana to go through so our homestudy can be re-completed, resubmitted, and refiled with our paperwork to immigration. Once we file with immigration, they will get back to us with a date to come in for an appointment for refingerprinting which can take up to 90 days to get the appointment then once that is happens we could have to wait as long as an additional 90 days for approval at which time we would then be cleared for travel to go and get our baby girl. So it is looking like our travel time might be as late as next spring. The big question up in the air right now is will the adoption agency actually send us a referral prior to the immigration approval. I know that we would not be allowed to travel until it is approved, but it is uncertain as to whether we will be assigned an actual child before then or not. As far as the emotional side of it, for me, and I think Brian would agree, God has been clear that this will happen in his timing, and we are trusting that. My personal preference is that we nor our daughter would have to go one day longer than absolutely necessary and we are praying this way as well. I would love to have the homestudy completed this week and have our application to immigration send off by the end of this week, but much of that is out of my control. I feel as if I have been pregnant with this child for years :-) and the delivery date is still somewhat uncertain :-) God knows, though. And I do have peace about it. For those of you who would join us in prayer for this, please pray safety and well-being while still in the orphanage, for perseverance in whatever obstacles we may face, and continued faith in the heart of our Father and in his soverighnty, and for continued financial provision. We will continue to keep you updated!

Twists and Turns

As many of you may know there are always unexpected things that come up in adoption. Our latest twist came with the news that was not new, but had not impacted us until now and that has to do with the Hague Convention. I am not exactly sure what it was but I know that as a result of it, many laws concerning immigration have been changed concerning adoption. What this meant to us was having to do an entirely new homestudy. Of course this is going to be an extra cost and extra time, but it also means more paperwork which is what I thought I was done with, again. Those of you who pray and follow this, please do so specifically that we don't miss anything and that it all goes through. In addition to that, at this point the paperwork will not slow down our getting a referral, but once we accept the referral and pursue the actual adoption it could slow this part down. What that would mean is that I would know and see pictures of my child and it would cause her to just be sitting in the orphanage waiting on us unnecessarily. I am doing pretty well, realizing that the timing is still God's and He has not "missed" any details here. :-)