A Surprise in China..

We have so much to share with you, our friends.  I think that the announcement will have to do for now.  As most of you know, we are on a waiting list with an adoption agency to go back to Ethiopia.  Lord willing, we will still adopt again from Ethiopia.  However, God showed us a little boy from China that we believe He wants to make our son.  Here he is, with a heart over his face.  Once we get approval to post pictures we will remove that heart and show you our precious soon-to-be son's face.

I was reading an adoption blog, as I often do, and this post referred its readers to a little boy in China who needs a family.  So, I clicked on his picture to see it better.  I wanted to pray for him and for his family to find him.  That click took me to an agency's waiting child website.  At the top of the list of waiting children was the little boy in the picture.  His special need is vision related, and since Greg is an optometrist, I asked him to look at his video and tell me about his eyes.  As we watched the video of this beautiful boy something stirred in the hearts of both of us.  I'm sure it was the Holy Spirit.  Greg looked at me and said, "What should we do about that little boy?"  After much prayer and Scripture reading, we could not escape that when we looked at the picture of this boy, we were looking into the eyes of our son.  And so, with excitement and lots of fear, we said, "Yes". 

Listen, friends, this is a leap of faith for us.  We did not just on a whim decide to adopt a special needs child from a country from which we were not even in the process of adopting.  However, Greg and I believe that sometimes (ok, many times) God's ways are not our ways.  And many times He calls us to "crazy".  This verse kept coming to mind as we were faced with this decision, "A man’s heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps." Proverbs 16:9
The question for us became whether or not we would trust the Lord and walk in the way we knew He was directing us to walk. 

So, as I said, we are on the waiting list for Ethiopia, and we will stay on that list and continue moving up.  We will be permitted to accept a referral from Ethiopia after we are home from China for 6 months or when we are ready.  We do hope to be able to go back to Ethiopia and adopt again, but right now we have a son in China and we must bring him home.  He doesn't belong in an orphanage.  He belongs with his family.

I like to listen to sermons online while I am cleaning the kitchen.  This is one of the sermons that I listened to during the days that we were making the decision to change course (for a time) and go to China.  It's a great sermon by Francis Chan: Click on this to hear Francis Chan.

"Take steps of faith...do things that don't make sense outside of Heaven." Francis Chan