So Far...

Our adoption agency asked if I could write our story for their blog. Of course, I said YES! The prompt was mildly overwhelming, "focus on what God has brought you through and taught you in the process". I should just point them to the previous 188 posts, but I will attempt to summarize our 3+ year journey. Here's what I submitted:

Our journey has been devastating. Our journey has been heart-wrenching. Our journey has been utterly transformational in our marriage, our finances, our mindset, our passion, our future. Our journey has been defined by waiting and loss and hope in God and disappointment and joy.

A thousand times we have said, "we would never wish this kind of pain on our worst enemy, but we'd do it all over again and we are beyond grateful." Our journey began with the dream of starting a family. It turned into the confusion of infertility and countless medical tests, procedures, and failures.

But long before we carried the title "infertility", God had also planted a dream in our heart for adoption. Throughout our infertility treatments, we knew that when we reached a certain point in our treatment, we would pursue adoption. When our last procedure failed, we immediately, whole-heartedly jumped into adopting a baby girl from Ethiopia.
We always knew Africa. We always knew a baby girl. But God shaped our dreams toward Ethiopia and for 2 little ones. Through the metaphor of a butterfly, God taught me about the transformation my soul needed from one form into another. I am a different wife than I was 3 years ago when we started trying to start a family. I'm a different pastor, friend, sister, and daughter. And I know I will be a different mother because of the challenge and transformation of this journey.

Today, we bite our fingernails (for so many reasons!) awaiting the arrival of the 2 beautiful little ones God's prepared since the beginning of time to be our children - and us their parents. In many ways the journey is only continuing, but we are different people now then we were when we began 3 years ago.

Grateful. Broken. Healed. Strong. Tender. Changed. We are...

It Takes a Whole Village...

For the past 6 weeks I've wanted to brag on our community a little bit because of how awesome they are! Seriously, our friends have walked us through the thick and think, pains and celebrations, every single seemingly meaningless detail - they have cared about. It moves me to tears to even think about how they have expressed such real love for us and our babies over the past 18 months.

When it came time to "announce" our referral, our small group was among the first round of people we were dying to tell. We found out about our referral on a Monday morning and planned on telling our small group on Tuesday night at small group. It was an agonizing 36 hour wait, but totally worth their reactions...

We made the announcement by presenting these t-shirts [below] to them. Brian calmly pulled each t-shirt out of a bag and excitedly announced that WE GOT OUR REFERRAL and they were finally going to be ah-gots [uncles] and ah-kasts [aunties]! Shock and awe and screaming and laughter and tears erupted! This is a picture of our amazing small group: Tony and Erin [left] and Loc and Christina [right].

After the intitial shock wore off, they wanted to know every single detail. This beautiful picture of me with my eyes closed is describing the past 36 hours and our kiddos. Erin got her kids out of bed to hear the news! You can see Christina here totally being Christina - thoughtful, introspective, totally crying, and overwhelmed at God's faithfulness.
The next morning I got to tell our staff at Newsong. I had already told my staff [minus Abe who was on vacation...SAD!], so when I made the announcement to our entire staff these guys ripped off their 2nd layer shirts to proudly display their new Ethiopian ah-got and ah-kast shirts.
This last pic is just another classic example of how supportive my girlfriends are. Christina and Erin held my hand through Babies R Us, carefully helping me select the 2 items I need from a walls of 100s of items. In a little over an hour, I registered for most everything we need for them. True love! NOTICE: I'm wearing my very own "eh-my-ay"/mama t-shirt that Erin got for my last birthday!!I have to say, we have the best village ever to bring our babies home. Though it breaks our heart not to have biological family in the area, our understanding of family is so much deeper and wider than blood...in more ways than one! :)

Good News

For a very long time, our prayer has been "EXPEDITE". God is now answering it in unprecedented ways!!!!

We heard this from our agency today:

"Once [our agency in Ethiopia] has all the documents from a successful court date - which can take several weeks - we can schedule your Embassy date two weeks from the time we submit your documents to the Embassy! We no longer have to wait for the grass roots investigations to occur, we no longer have to wait for the Embassy to give us a green light for families to travel. This will make scheduling Embassy dates much easier. This is indeed good news."

Basically, this means that our wait time from court to Embassy dates [the 2 different trips we have to make] have been shortened by as much as a couple weeks! Perhaps from 8-10 weeks down to 6-8 weeks. This is amazing!!!!!

Please keep praying. We received confirmation today that our paperwork is at the courts and it could take anywhere from 10 days to weeks to get our court dates scheduled. Please continue praying that our 2 scheduled court dates by the end of next week!!

As I posted on my Facebook status tonight, "It's hard to describe the love I feel for these 2 Ethiopian beauties whom I've never met and didn't come from my womb. Supernatural."