Our Crazy Life...

I really thought our life couldn't get much crazier and then we entered the adoption process!!!  I feel like I am constantly spinning ten plates at a time and at least once a day I hear something crash!  ha ha!  Seriously though, life is busy and I wouldn't have it any other way!  I have to remind myself (usually during nap time) to sit down, take a deep breath and thank God for the AMAZING blessings he is giving us! 

We have finally finished gathering all of the paperwork for our home study.  We have both written our autobiographies, we all had our physicals, and all of our personal references have sent in their letters of recommendation to our social worker...this in itself is a HUGE thing!  We have our second interview with our social worker on Thursday morning and prayers would be much appreciated!  We have been warned that this will be a much more in depth interview and she will be asking a lot of questions about what we wrote in our autobiographies.  I feel like we are being looked at under a giant microscope and this makes me very anxious!  We will also be scheduling our "home inspection" during our meeting on Thursday for sometime next week and after that, we will know if we passed!  I am so excited to be on the downhill slope of the home study!

Once we have passed (hopefully) the home study, we will gather the last few pieces of paperwork we have left to send in for our dossier and wait for our FBI clearances.  I am praying this goes quickly and smoothly!  And then the waiting begins...

So what's going on in the meantime??? 

I am praying, praying, praying!  Praying for God's provision, for his protection for our child, for food for this little person and that he would provide someone to love and care for our child until we can bring them home. 

I am reading, reading, reading!!!  Everything I can about raising adopted children, trans-racial adoption and trying to learn as much as I can about Ghana.  We just finished our adoption classes and these were very helpful!  We went over all the things that could possibly go wrong and then what to look for and who to call if any of these things happen.  I felt very inadequate every time we left these classes but I was quickly reminded that God will equip us to do what he has asked... he has promised us this!

We are fundraising like crazy!  I feel like I am constantly planning something and God is constantly making me aware of his provision for this adoption!  We have raised $12,429.77!!!!!  I am not sure how to put into works how astonished I am at this number!  We are 42% of the way there and every time I am overwhelmed by the amount we still have to raise, I feel God speak to me and tell me to relax...he has this covered!  I am currently planning an "It Works" wrap party at my house on Thursday, August 9th.  A friend of mine from high school is an "It Works" consultant and she contacted me out of the blue to see if I would like for her to do a party for me and give me all of the profits!  I am in awe of the amazing generosity of God's children!  If you are interested in coming, just let me know!  We are also planning a yard sale for Saturday, August 18th and people have been calling and dropping stuff off at our house for us to sell since the moment I posted it on Facebook!  People that I haven't talked to in years have called!  People I don't know and people I would consider just acquaintances have dropped stuff off!  It is so cool to see how God is working through his children to provide for this! I can't wait to see whats next!!!

Lynsey

Yard Sale

Some people have asked us if we will be doing a yard sale for the adoption...so without futher adieu

Fundraising Dinner

The fundraising dinner was a HUGE success!  Our God is truly AMAZING!  One hundred and fifteen people came to eat and thanks to Bruce & Susan Stultz, the food was ready and hot!  I want to give a huge thank you to those who helped serve food, Lauren & Jason Crawford, Jennifer Goldsmith, Nancy, Alison, Aaron & Sarah Stultz, Scott, Leigh, Joshua, Stephen, & Abigail Beard & Kimmie Walker!  You guys did a wonderful job!  I also want to thank Ron & Jennifer Goldsmith and her mother Phyllis for making the coleslaw and The HomePlace Restaurant for donating the gravy!  Thank you to Carl Stultz for washing A LOT of dishes!  And thank you, Lou Musgrove for watching Eva and Eli so that we could do all of this!  It was truly an amazing day!  God was glorified and we were overwhelmed by the amount of love in one room for our family and for God's children!  We were able to collect $4,743.77 and every penny of that will go directly to our adoption expenses!  Bruce & Susan Stultz paid for all of the food and Lou Musgrove paid for all of the t-shirts so we are able to keep all of the profits!  That brings our total fundraising to $11,258.77!  We are over 1/3 of the way there and we give all praise to God for his provision! 

I was also able to talk about God's call to us for adoption and although I was very nervous, I felt like I was able to communicate what God had laid on my heart to say without crying uncontrollably!  This was definitely a gift from God!  Adam also shared a little about the adoption process and he was able to talk a little bit about Ghana as well!  On Friday night before the dinner, Adam went over to my cousin, Morgan's house to talk to her husband, Jeremy who has spent 9 summers in Ghana doing mission work!  This was  a huge blessing to Adam because he was able to share a little of what Jeremy told him about the country and we were able to borrow a lot of souvenirs from Jeremy that were from Ghana to decorate with. 

We really appreciate everyone who came out to support us and if you weren't able to make it and are still interested in supporting us in some way, we have a few items for sale. 

We are selling t-shirts for $15
This is the front:

 This is the back:

We have a few sizes left and we will also be putting in another order soon so let us know if you would like one of these. 

We are also selling fair trade, organic coffee from Just Love Coffee.  This is a very cool business that started because of a man who grew up in the coffee business and then adopted children himself from Ethiopia and decided he wanted to help families who wanted to adopt children.  We receive $5 from each bag of coffee sold and you can either order from the website at justlovecoffee or you can let me know and I will be putting in an order this week if you would like to save a little money on shipping. 

You can sponsor a puzzle piece for $10.  You can write your name and/or a message on the back of a puzzle piece and we will frame the puzzle with glass on both sides to hang in our child's room when they arrive.  This will be a reminder for them and for us of who all helped to bring them home.  Just let me know if you are interested and I will get the puzzle piece to you. 

We are also selling hand made cards made by myself and my sister-in-law Ashley.  She is making them for us and sending them all the way from Germany and they are beautiful!  Individual cards are $2.50 or you can buy 5 for $10.  If you are interested in purchasing any, please let me know and I will get them to you so that you can pick a few out. 

We are not exactly sure what our next fundraising event will be yet but we will keep you posted!

In Case You Missed It...

This is my adoption testimony I gave tonight at the fundraising dinner.

This past year has been a huge year for me.  I have been following Paul around in the Bible over the last year in Bible Study Fellowship and God has taught me so much through this man’s life.  After Paul turned his life over to God, he was used in amazing ways and God has used Paul’s life to encourage me and show me what a life fully given over to Jesus Christ looks like.  During that time, I also did Beth Moore’s study on James and if you have never studied the book of James, you need to.  Wow…that is a book that will open your eyes and convict you like no other.   God used James to teach me that we are all called to care for the poor without exception and that we are not just to read the Bible and know what it says but to actually do it!  And then I did Kelly Minter’s study on Nehimiah and God has spoken the same message about adoption to me through all of these studies this year.  I have been praying that God would break my heart for what breaks his and wow, did he do it. 

I am going to back up a few years just to give you a little background on our decision to adopt.  Adam and I began praying about adoption about 4 years ago.  A lot of you know that Adam and I used fertility medication to conceive both of our children and I often wondered why God made us wait so long and go through all of that when he was going to bless us with children in the end anyway and now I know.  If he had not put us through that, we may have never looked at adoption.  We prayed about adoption before I got pregnant with Eva and then when I got pregnant, we stopped.  Then when Eva was about 8 months old, we started looking at adoption again and praying about it and then we put it back on the shelf when I got pregnant with Eli and then in January of this year Adam and I decided we would begin to diligently pray about whether adoption was what God was calling us to and this is what I have learned over the past 7 months. 

I have prayed every morning that God would speak to me through his Word and through his people and he has amazed me!  I began to look into some statistic on orphans at the beginning of this year and I learned a lot!  There are somewhere between 143 million and 151 million orphans in the world right now.  Orphan being a child who has either lost both parents or been abandoned.  This was such an eye opener to me.  While studying the book of Nehemiah this year, I learned that Nehemiah was an Isrealite that also held the position of cupbearer to the king of Persia and along with this position he lived a life of luxury in the palace.  When his brother visited him from Judah, Nehemiah asked about the condition of Jerusalem, he wanted to know how they were doing and once his brother told him about the state of Jerusalem… Nehemiah knew he needed to do something to help them.  Nehemiah taught me that with information often comes responsibility; if we know, we are be required to do something and I very clearly heard God asking me,  now that you know there are this many orphans, what are you going to do about it? So I began to pray about orphan care.  I asked God whether he wanted us to adopt or to just send more money.  I told God I wasn’t sure we could do an adoption.  We didn’t have enough money.  I was worried about what would this do to our family, to the two children we already have?  What would this do to my life?  I felt like God answered this question while studying his word early one morning.  I read a verse that morning that I have probably read hundreds of times before but that morning it had a whole new meaning to me.  God laid 2 corinth chapter 8 vs 9 on my heart.  It says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.  I immediately knew that God was saying to me…I left heaven and came to earth for you.  Enduring shame, hatrid, and even death so that you could live a better life. 

So I knew that God was asking us to do something but I still didn’t know what so I asked the question of God…are we to adopt or just send more money?  I am sure that I was secretly afraid of what he would answer with but that very morning, when I got off of my knees, I opened my Bible to the verse we were to study that day and it was Nehemiah 2:17,

You see the trouble we are in…Come, let us rebuild.  Nehemiah didn’t merely send help from Persia, but he chose to share in their suffering and recovery process.  I really felt God say to me that morning – Don’t just send money to them, do something.  So I began to pray that God would speak very loudly to Adam J 

One night while Adam and I were talking about adoption again, Adam told me that he was afraid of not being able to complete this because honestly we do not have the money to do this and then he asked me if I felt like God would look at this as bad stewardship?  25-30k is a lot of money!  You can do a lot of other things to the glory of God with that money.  Is this what he wants us to do with his money?  This was on Saturday night and so Adam and I decided that we should pray about it so we did together that night and the next morning, I asked God again if this would be his choice for his money and on Sunday morning, Stafford talked about  assigning value to an object very briefly in his message to us.  He explained that something has value based on what you would pay for that object.  He went on to say that we had amazing value in God’s eyes, each one of us because God paid the ultimate price for us.  He gave his son for you and for me. This message probably had a very different meaning to everyone else at Summerdean that morning but to us, I felt God say how important his child is for us and that he has paid way more than 30k for one of his children.  He gave his son…what wouldn’t he give for us?

After praying and praying, Adam asked me one night in the kitchen….so how many do you want?  I can’t explain how excited I was!

At the end of that week, Adam and I decided it was time to tell our parents so we asked if they could come over for dinner on Saturday night but they were busy so we had to settle for the next Tuesday.  I was a little bummed b/c if you know me, once I have heard from God, I want to get the ball rolling but we would have to wait and boy did God have a reason for waiting.  He knew that I was a little worried about telling our parents and what they were going to think and Monday night at Bible study, the night before we were going to tell them, part of the video we were supposed to watch was about a couple who adopted an orphan. They explained how God called them to adoption and what a blessing it had been to them and I was overwhelmed by his timing on this!  How cool is that?  I knew that after seeing that video, they were going to be fine with it and Susan even asked me if we had decided to adopt before I saw that on Monday night.

This is one of the many reasons I know without a doubt that God’s timing is perfect.  I have seen it many times over in my life.  Now that I have children, when something happens to one of them there is a feeling that stirs inside of me that I can’t explain.  It is like my heart breaks a little when something bad happens to them.  When they take bad falls, it takes my breath away.  When they are really sick and I pray for them, my heart is just heavy for them.  I have been doing a lot of research in the last year into orphans around the world and especially in Africa and the thought would enter my mind every once in a while…what would I do if that were Eva or Eli?  I could not wrap my brain around the pain it would cause me as their mother to know that they were hungry and have no food or to know that they were sick and there was no medicine and possibly no one to hold them and love them.  And then I felt God speak to me….he said, these are my children.  I am watching them starve to death, I am watching them die of preventable illnesses and you are supposed to be my hands and feet in this world.   

So I have asked myself why do I feel like we should adopt an orphan and this is what I have come up with so far.  Because of Paul who taught me this year that my life is not my own, I was bought at a price.  I am here for a purpose.  Because of James who taught me that pure religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress and because he calls us to be doers of the word, not just hearers, Because of Nehemiah who taught me that with information comes responsibility,  Because of Jesus who told us he would not leave us as orphans, that he would come for us, and the final reason and the most important to me is simply because I know that he told us to….and so we are. 

Then we watched this short video... 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nVn8BDCmQM&feature=related

After the Storm...

I have just sat down on my couch in my home with electricity!  I cannot put into words how excited I am!  It has been a pretty stressful couple of weeks leading up to the storms on Friday night, then we lost the electricity at our house and have spent the last few days with family and friends.  Although I am very thankful to have had friends with electricity that my family could stay with, I did find myself frustrated and a little sad because we were not able to stay at our home.  God has reminded me over the last few days of how spoiled I am.  He has reminded me over and over to be thankful everyday for the amazing blessings that he has given me.  He has also reminded me that our child is living somewhere today in far worse conditions than I have endured.  Although we were a little hot, we still had plenty of food.  When we decided it was too hot to stay at our house, we were invited to stay with friends and family who love us.  I am very glad to be home but this weekend has reminded me that I need to work as hard as I can to bring this little person to our home as quickly as I can.  Not just for electricity and modern conveniences but to make sure that they have food to eat, somewhere to sleep and someone to love on them.  Thanks for the reminder and for being our shelter in the storm...I love you Lord!

Lynsey