Orphan Night

We just got back from a special Orphans Night Dinner that our friends helped us organize. The hope was to encourage Christians in our community to consider how they could do something for orphans. We had speakers talk about orphan care, adoption, and foster care. Our keynote speaker was David LeCompte, a missionary with Missions International based in Colorado Springs. He started an orphanage in war-torn Chechnya in the 90s and now does work in Iraq, Sudan, West Bank, and Egypt. (I think he's scheduled to be on Focus on the Family at the end of the month, but we had him first!) It turned out to be a fantastic night and many people were encouraged and challenged. Even if only one child gets helped or adopted because of tonight... it will be worth all the work it took to put it together! 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."

Praying for Patience

We are still waiting to get the exciting call from our agency with a child for our family. We are praying for patience...can you pray for us too? This seems to be the hardest time for us yet...waiting to see the child God has chosen for us. In the meantime we are keeping busy planning our community "Orphan Night" this Saturday. We are bringing in guest speakers and resources on orphan care, adoption, and foster care. Our prayer is that others in our community will have a desire to care for orphans in some way. We are not all called to adopt, but we are all called by God to do something for orphans. Our prayer is that this will be a start to something really big in our community. Thanks for praying with us.

Thank You Shaohannah's Hope

Thank you to Shaohannah's Hope, a ministry created by Steven Curtis and Mary Beth Chapman, which helps families financially adopt. We just received a letter in the mail today letting us know we are receiving a $3,000 grant to help with our adoption. Praise the Lord! We are again humbled and blessed to receive help for our adoption. We could not be doing this without the help of others. We can't wait to someday share with our child how God provided so much to bring them to us. God has a special plan for this baby...we can't wait to be a part of it.

Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow

We are humbled and amazed at how God is providing for our adoption! My friend, Becky, organized a garage sale this weekend to benefit our adoption. So many of our friends donated items and came and helped organize the mass amount of stuff. We put an ad in our local paper, but they forgot to put our address in the first night, so David called and got it worked out. The next night, not only did they forget our address again, but now also had the wrong dates! We decided to pray that God would bring the people to our garage sale because obviously, the paper wasn't going to. So, here we are, Sunday night, and Becky told me we made around $1,500!!! I think that's a pretty good garage sale! We also had a church BBQ today which turned out to be a VERY HOT event! I think it was over 100 degrees...that's very hot for us coastal people! Anyway, one of our friends let us know that she is going to gift us her airline miles. She used to work for a mission organization and took many trips and has many miles saved. She says she has enough miles for us to both go all the way to Ethiopia and back. PTL! That will save us almost $5,000!! We gathered our kids together tonight to pray and thank the Lord once again for all His blessings in our lives. We started this journey of faith 7 months ago with $200 to apply to our agency. In the world's view it is a very bad time economically to be embarking on a $22,000 adventure with no savings towards it and not willing to get into debt for it. But when we felt God directing us so strongly that you can't get it out of your head, you've got to just take that step of faith and jump out without seeing how it's going to all work together. I'm so glad we did! I can't wait to see what He has in store for us next!

Fingerprints Get Thumbs Up

FINALLY! My fingerprints clear and we received our I171-H Approval Notice today in the mail. I sent it off to Holt and we are ready for the next step...REFERRAL! Thank you to everyone who prayed for us through this funny, yet frustrating step in the adoption process. We are now ready to be matched with a child. YIPEE!

In the Top 10

We just got word from our adoption agency that we are #6 in line. It seems a miracle since we still do not have clearance from Immigration because of my worn off fingerprints. Please pray that our approval comes quickly! We also got word this week from Lifesong for Orphans that our friends and family have given more than enough for the matching grant. AWESOME! It is very exciting, yet humbling to see how God is working everything out for this adoption. This weekend, with the help of one of my best buddies, we are having a garage sale to help with adoption costs. We still need about $9,000 but it doesn't seem like much since we're down from $22,500!! Praise the Lord! I think this little baby is going to be special to a lot of people...so many have helped in so many ways! Thank you everyone.

Fingerprints... take 3! Posted by Dave

Long story short... we received notice that Kristen's fingerprints were not clear enough to pass the test...again. So last week she had to go to Coquille to have them taken yet again and the very kind woman working at the office tried her best (even worked up a sweat) trying to get Kristen's prints as clear as possible.
I'm beginning to wonder if my wife may have worked for M.I.B., had her prints removed, returned to civilian life and wiped my mind clean with one of those flashy things. :)
Travelling to Coquille isn't so bad... but we have to go to Portland once again because she (Kristen)needs to sign a paper in front of the officials at the Homeland Security office. The prints have been sent off to the State Police for clearance and once we receive all the documents back we send them to the Homeland Security office.
The deadline for being part of the matching grant (see post below) is September 17th. Thank you for prayerfully considering us in this.