Provision

I have been amazed at how fast time is going by.  I cannot believe that it has been several weeks since my last blog post!  I knew going into this adoption that the two hardest things for me were going to be the waiting and the money.  God has been so faithful to us in both of these things.

Time really has flow by.  I feel like just yesterday I was celebrating a birthday with my little lady, but the reality is that was over three weeks ago.  We have been keeping a busy schedule with events and visitors, which has caused us to lose track of time a little bit.  One huge event was an adoption panel that our church hosted a couple weeks back.  We brought in some professionals, who actually know what they are doing and talking about, to give the church some information on adoption.  This panel was something that I really worried about (I thought nobody would show up on a Friday night to listen to people talk about adoption).  It was a great success though.  There were about 120 people there and we heard some great truths, such as:  not everyone is called to adopt, but we are all called to take care of widows and orphans in their time of distress, and to keep ourselves unstained by the world.  We were challenged to look at what we are doing to help the orphan, which was a great challenge to be given.  You can here more here.

God has put many people in our lives to help us with the money piece of our adoption.  We knew going into this that we could not do this on our own.  We knew that we would need faithful men and women to come along side us and help us out.  This week we were informed that a friend of ours was going to be helping us raise some money.  Her goal is to raise $1,000 this month by taking donations of stuff that people no longer need, and selling it.
She puts a lot of time into this, going through things, pricing them, and meeting with people.  The reality is:  this is not the first time she has done something like this.  She is constantly supporting ministries and missions.  Her heart is made of gold.

Our parents have also raised money for us through friends and Tupperware sales.  Through networking and friends they were able to raise money to help support bringing our kids home.  With all this help we are slowing inching closer to our goal.

Gretchen is also making hand stamped jewelry, which is pretty cool!  Check out what she has made:
Through this business venture she has raised quite a bit of money to help cover many of our costs.

God has provided us these things at just the right time.  All of the things that are needed for this adoption cost money, but God has provided that money through each of you.  You can help support our adoption by clicking HERE.

Just to add an update about our progress:  We have done all of the psychiatric testing (1 billion question test and 1 275 question test) and we are just waiting on our write up.  We have received almost all the documents that we were waiting on and have our first interviews scheduled for tomorrow.  So, Gretchen and I have our individual interviews tomorrow, followed by our family interview and home inspection.  Once that is done, we wait on the homestudy to be written.  One step closer every day!  Thank you for following us through this process and praying all along the way.