Wow!! There have been so many things happening this month, it has been wonderful and exhausting! I am going to post a few updates as quickly as possible tonight b/c we are headed off to summer camp in the morning and I need to finish up our packing. I will write more detail after we return about some of things God has been doing in our lives these last few weeks but for now I will tell you where we are at with the girls:
Immigration approval letter came in several weeks ago and we immediately mailed it to our agency, who in turn mailed our entire dossier to Washington DC for authentication.
The dossier completed making its rounds in DC and our agency received it back and mailed it straight to Ethiopia earlier this week. Yea!!! It is so wonderful to finally have our paperwork on the girls' soil.
We received word in early June that we had received a matching grant that would match up to $5,000 in donations, we were thrilled and amazed by how good our God is. We went to TX to visit BJ(Will's) family and we were allowed to show our video about the adoption at his parent's church and that congregation donated the full $5,000. So, we left TX $10,000 dollars closer to our goal of bringing the girls home and we so encouraged by their love and support.
Returned from TX and had a package from our agency with the paperwork to officially accept the referral for our girls so that makes it official; they are truly ours. We also are now able to prepare a package for them so they will know that we are adopting them, it will include pictures of us and a new T-shirt so others at the orphanage will know they have found a family.
Four days after we returned from TX we had an adoption party at our house where family and friends here in Beaufort gathered together and we were able to share our video with them and rejoice over what God is doing in our lives and the lives of so many others. Towards the end of the night about 10 or 12 of us gathered together to pray over our girls and the countless other orphans who still await a home. It was a beautiful night for us and we felt God's presence here with us.
Tomorrow morning I leave with the younger 3 kids for summer camp in Greenville, SC and BJ and I are very excited to see what God is going to do in their lives. When we spend time praying and worshipping together as a family we can feel the roots of their relationships deepening in Christ and I know God wants to show them "deep and immeasurable things" and I am so blessed to be a part of their growth.
Also, we are moving in mid-July! Crazy but a God thing. We are staying here in BFT but we are moving into military housing to save money each month and we feel like the new home will be a better match for our expanding family. We had prayed in the fall about down-sizing and simplifying our lives and had decided to leave it up to God and then we got a phone call in late May that house had sold so here we go!
What else? Many things actually, God continues to amaze me with His faithfulness and He continues to draw us deeper into who He is and what it is He really wants us to be doing with our lives; our entire lives. I am often convicted of the fact that I have not really used what He has given me to minister in the way that He wants, but fortunately I serve a gracious God who is all about giving me another chance. I pray that I would live my life more like Jesus everyday and I know that Jesus surrounded Himself with the poor, the widowed, the orphaned and those that were truly broken; God give me Your strength to surround myself with those also.
