I needed this today. Maybe you do to?

Ephesians 2

¹ Once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins.² You used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil—the commander of the powers in the unseen world.He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God. ³ All of us used to live that way, following the passionate desires and inclinations of our sinful nature. By our very nature we were subject to God’s anger, just like everyone else.

⁴ But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, ⁵ that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!) ⁶ For he raised us from the dead along with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ Jesus.⁷ So God can point to us in all future ages as examples of the incredible wealth of his grace and kindness toward us, as shown in all he has done for us who are united with Christ Jesus.

⁸ God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. ⁹ Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. ¹⁰ For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.

¹¹ Don’t forget that you Gentiles used to be outsiders. You were called “uncircumcised heathens” by the Jews, who were proud of their circumcision, even though it affected only their bodies and not their hearts. ¹² In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. ¹³ But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ.

¹⁴ For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. ¹⁵ He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups. ¹⁶ Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death.

¹⁷ He brought this Good News of peace to you Gentiles who were far away from him, and peace to the Jews who were near. ¹⁸ Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.

¹⁹ So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family. ²⁰ Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. ²¹ We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord.

Now that's an adoption story. :-)

Life is exciting!

I have completely neglected this blog over the last month, but only because life is so abundantly full! So much has happened that I just haven't had the chance to tell you all about it. I'll give you a quick run down:

1. Zeke turned 1! My baby boy is a whole year old! He's learning to walk, talking all the time, and turning into quite the rough and tumble toddler. It's so hard to believe that it's been a year since he was born. Seems like yesterday. When I think about all the things that have happened over the course of the last year I can barely recall anything that isn't Zeke related! His birth has changed my life completely and I'm so happy to have him.

2. We went to CCDA! I love CCDA (Christian Community Development Association) and it is always such an encouraging week. We learned a lot and were very affirmed in our philosophy of ministry at the church and what we're trying to accomplish in our organization. We learned a lot of things about the importance of boldness and discipleship and we've returned home with a whole new level of commitment to discipleship. We've also gotten renewed vision for our ministry and for Northside and we're excited to start spreading that vision around and as John Perkins said, "turn the vision into passion"! I personally also have renewed passion for trying to encourage diversity on our district in the church of the Nazarene. I hope I'll be able to get some non-white speakers and leadership into the district events somehow. Don't know how that's going to happen quite yet, but I'm excited to try!

We're so excited to get to work on all these ideas. We've been trying to purchase the building across the street from the church to house interns in and we've got lots of ideas floating around to create jobs and encourage community development (food coops, men's discipleship, church run micro-enterprise, etc.). We just need to get it all organized in thought and start seeing who we can collaborate with to make it happen! I hope, and envision, God really bringing together the Church in Northside to help develop the people here who are under-resourced and often ignored in leadership and community building. I think it'll be fantastic!

Coming up next is more and more busy life. Our goal is to get our self-studies for the adoption finished by the end of this month and move on to the other paper work. We're also starting tutoring this week and hopefully starting Good News Club at Chase Elementary by the second-ish week of October. Exciting stuff!

If you think to pray for us pray that God will use us to facilitate the growth of Godly leaders in Northside. Pray that the adoption process would go smoothly and that God would provide the funds necessary to pay our upcoming agency fees. And most of all pray for our babies, both the one in our home and the one yet to come!

Oh Summer...

I have such mixed emotions about summer. It's wonderful because people are outside and it's easier to interact, make new friends, see old ones, etc. It's also terrible because it's HOT, people in the city get irritable and we all know where that leads... and it's BUSY. The past two weeks we have had mission groups staying and working at the church. Also both a blessing and a curse. We get lots of work done but it's so hot and so busy that it's hard to find time to take a rest. Even harder now that we're parents. Abe is working in the mornings at the chicken plant still so that leaves me to both run the group and be a mama. I'm lucky last week my mama came to help me. Today it's just me, Zeke, and the group. Zeke needed to nap so I left them to their own devices to get the work done. It makes us not such good hosts for groups, but it makes me a good mama to see my kid laying here next to me zonked out asleep. So I'll take it. I'm sure a bunch of junior high students and their leaders don't miss me anyway!

For those of you interested in the details of our adoption you'll be interested in this part of today's blog: Wednesday was our first meeting with our social worker from Catholic Charities the organization that is doing our home study. It was just an initial meeting for her to go over the paperwork with us and give us all the forms we needed. I felt kind of silly as I tried to answer her initial questions, "Why Ethiopia over other international places?" "Why international over domestic?" "Why adoption at all?" Sometimes I feel like I don't even have any answer because to say "I feel like that's where God led us." Sometimes seems not like an answer that people accept. But luckily, she's the kind of lady that seemed to accept it, even past all my ummms and uhhhs. I'm sure in a world where we see on the news that people have just sent their children back to their birth countries workers need to be very careful to be upfront about the risks of international adoption.

After she questioned us a bit on the why's and why not's she gave us yet a THIRD stack of papers to fill out and a check list of all the documents we need to get ordered and copied. She asked us what our timeline looked like and whether we were interested in getting it done really quickly or taking our time. We told her that with all the other jobs (pastoring, chickening, parenting, etc.) that we would probably be kind of slow going on the paperwork so it may take us until December. So that's our goal: To have all our paperwork done and have our interviews with her by December. Then we can quickly accomplish getting our dossier done and get waiting! Then maybe we'll have another baby by Zeke's second birthday!

So we've started writing out our very long "self study" and answering a million questions about ourselves, our families, our relationship and our goals. Very thought provoking to have to really think about yourself. We also have to do things that should have been done when we were pregnant with Zeke: pick someone to care for our kids in case of our untimely demise, get some life insurance, make sure our house has a fire escape route from every floor, etc. So it's good for our whole family going through this adoption process, it's making us better parents to Zeke and to our future baby.

First Appointment

Haven't updated in a while, we're about to have our first meeting with our social worker from Catholic Charities to begin our home study. It is Wednesday afternoon, nothing major - just to talk about what the process is like and for her to give us direction on getting the paperwork together. I'm excited though. Since we are dealing with Bethany in an out of state office we have never met any of our workers there - it seems it will feel much more real to actually be seeing and speaking with someone in person!

We had VBS at church this last week and it was awesome! about 30 kids each day and about half of them it was their first time attending our church. Valerie rounded them up from the housing project she lives in - she's an awesome evangelist!

Zeke has so many new skills emerging everyday it's crazy! He is finally crawling (belly OFF the ground), he's SOOO close to taking his first independent steps, and today - I said, "turn off the light" and he reached over and flipped the switch! His first step towards becoming mommy's little helper. He must be getting teeth again though because sleep has been hard to come by.

I'm trying to be patient in the adoption process, so I'm focusing on these things. Watching Zeke grow, ministering to kids in 'hood, and trying to be a good mama and wife.

News

A couple of days ago two really big things happened!

1. Zeke finally crawled, belly off the floor, for the first time! There's no stopping him now. For a long time he's wanted to stand and cruise along the furniture but only army crawl and DRAG himself around the floor. I was starting to get worried... well, no worries - he can move! He can crawl (slowly) to where he wants to pull up, once he's up he's all around the living room transferring from one piece of furniture to another until he's gotten into everything! In no time he'll be letting go and walking on his own. Guess I'd better get busy with getting all these precious items put away since his most favorite activity is throwing things on the floor!

2. We had our first actual phone call with our social workers from Bethany! They told us all about the next steps and most of it we already knew but it was good to actually get to hear voices that go with names. Someday maybe we'll see a face? Seems crazy to get to adopt a baby without ever meeting your social worker! It was a good talk and Abe and I are excited to move forward. A little nervous as we sent in our home study application over a week ago and haven't heard anything of them receiving it! Pray they did.

God bless!

We've been accepted!

Even though we were still waiting on one reference to come in, Bethany decided to go ahead and accept us into the Ethiopia Program! This means we can officially begin our home study and start working on our dossier. They sent us the dossier packet and the travel packet and after printing the approximately 80 pages of just INSTRUCTIONS, we started to get a little overwhelmed by the paper chase ahead of us. We're going to take our time and work on one aspect at a time. We'll do the home study and training first and then we'll begin the mad rush to get all the paperwork together before any of it expires.

Pray for us to be organized! I'm getting a binder to keep it all in and I'm going to try and put my best organizational energies into it!

Also, if anyone knows a notary who may be willing to help us out with the papers let me know!

Changes to Ethiopian Program

While we wait on our references to make their way to the Bethany office I'll update you on some changes to the Ethiopian Adoption Program.

Used to be that to adopt from Ethiopia only required one trip to the country. Now it requires two trips: one for court, and one for the embassy appointment when you pick up your child and bring them home. This means that the entire court process changed since when the adoptive parents were not there there was only one court date where the birth parents came, the court reviewed the adoptive parents paperwork and a decision was made. Now that the adoptive parents will be present the court thought it in everyone's best interest to create two court dates per adoption: one for the birth parents, and one for the adoptive parents. Also, an original birth certificate and photos of birth parents and the child are now required.

This means one main thing: more delays in an already long process. Now, at first I was feeling kind of upset about this. I'm thinking, man, this process is already so long and now it'll just mean a longer wait for a referral as they get used to a new court system, then a longer wait for a court date, then more money to travel TWICE, etc. etc. Problems, problems.

But as I keep thinking about it. I'm trying to remember that God holds all things in his hands. Yeah sure, humans can screw it up - but I firmly believe in his power and control to work all things for good.

So I started thinking of the positive. More delay also means: Zeke will be older when the new child comes (and hopefully potty trained!), more time means more time to come up with the money to travel, and here's the big one - if it were sooner, the child God has in mind for us may not even be born yet.

So yeah, there are many downsides to the new process. But a lot of upsides too!