Our Life-Changing Announcement!!

Well, I know all 10 of you that read have just been sitting on the edge of your seats awaiting our big announcement that I mentioned in my Year in Pictures post!  But before I just blurt it out, let me give you some history…

Last May, Michael and I were given a book by a virtual stranger while we were visiting our friends, The Graysons, for Memorial Day.  We had been hearing some buzz about it, but neither of us had read it.  The book is Radical:  Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream, by David Platt.  It rocked our world! This book challenged us to examine Jesus’ words in the Gospels without looking at His words through the scope of the “American Dream”.    It “radically” opened our eyes to the need in the world.  The need all around us.  If we simply stopped and took a look outside of our lavish and abundant lifestyles, we would quickly see those who are hurting and are desperately crying out for help.  Michael and I were both deeply moved and greatly convicted by this book, to say the least, and we both began to pray about what God would have us do in light of the things He had shown us through the pages of Radical. 

The prayer that we both begin to pray was simply this, “God, break our hearts for the things that break your heart, and find us faithful to do whatever you call us to do.”  That was it, pure and simple.  That is what we were asking the Lord to do…break our hearts.  Over the next days and weeks, the Lord begin to speak into our hearts individually, but he was giving us the same, clear message.  Our hearts were beginning to be broken for the orphan.  We would hear things on the radio, read Scripture that would address this issue, and read blogs about sweet families who had become forever families to a helpless little baby that desperately needed love, and we both felt compelled to act...to DO something. 

SO, with that being said, we are excited to let you know that we are adopting a baby girl from Ethiopia!!!!!!!! 

We have several reasons why we have chosen Ethiopia.  God laid this certain country on my heart from the beginning.  I quickly found lots of blogs of families that had adopted from there, and God broke my heart as I watched these precious little faces from this poverty stricken country, and I knew that our next child would be from there.  God confirmed this to both me and Michael through some interesting ways.  I will save those from another post, but we can confidently say that we know that from the beginning of time, God had a baby girl from there would be our daughter, and we can’t wait to bring her home!

We know this will be an exciting, difficult, long, but rewarding journey.  We also know that God is going to stretch us and grow us in ways we have never experienced before.  We covet your prayers over this process.  Please pray that as we begin that God’s hand of protection and provision would be evident.  This is a HUGE step of faith we are taking, but we know it is what God has called us to do.  We desire to walk by faith and not by sight.  We are praying that He draws us close to Himself through this process.  We know we can do NONE of this on our own.  We want to completely depend on Him.

This blog is going to remain our “family” blog, but I will be keeping up with our adoption process as well.  There will be some design changes coming soon too!

I want to leave you with a verse as well as a video that touched our hearts so much.  I just watched it again for probably the 15th time, and I still bawl my eyes out, or as my friend, Lenora, calls it “ugly cry”!!

“…once our eyes are opened, we can’t pretend we don’t know what to do. God, who weighs our hearts and keeps our souls, knows that we know, and holds us responsible to act.”  Prov. 24:12