Something's Missing.

Do you see the problem with this picture?  We do too.

Backstory:  Our family has come from a variety of places.  The United States, Canada and Ethiopia (we're not sure where the fish are from).  We like it that way.  We're proud of where we've come from and we love our family.

About a month or so ago Marjorie and I (Aaron) were talking seriously about children.  Are we done?  Would we try to have home grown children?  Would we adopt again?  In that discussion every time we talked about adopting again a large problem arose.  Money.  When we adopted Corban and Tobiah we knew where the money was.

Then one Saturday morning, Marjorie went to a ladies Bible study where she clearly heard God tell her to trust in Him.  To which she replied under her breath (but non-the-less outloud) "I hate God".  Now she doesn't really hate God but in that moment she was very uncomfortable with the conviction she felt.  She shared this story with me when she got home that afternoon

The next day in church, one of the points of the sermon was "what are you going to give up to impact one person's life".  Now I felt a nudge.  So under my breath so only Marjorie could hear I said, "I hate God."  About 10 minutes later at the end of church I jumped in my car and turned on sports talk radio because it would be "safe".  As I drove, a foster care commercial came on....at the end of the commercial it said, "you don't have to be a perfect parent to adopt.  You just have to want to change one child's life."  I turned off the radio and yelled, "Are you serious right now?"  See, I had kind of been feeling like we were done.  I didn't really expect God to show up and draw us back to a familiar place again.

So what no one knows, is that when Marjorie came back from her trip to Ethiopia last summer, she called YWAM's adoption ministry to Ethiopia and asked what the wait would be.  She was told that their wait list was crazy long....long enough that they couldn't put a time frame on it...and that was just for the pre-approval process, not even filling out real paperwork.  So she told them to put our name on the list...not because we felt called at that time, but just in case we did later.

So after our nudges from God, Marjorie called them to see where we were on the list now...kind of to see what God was showing us.  We were told that nothing had really changed and we were still looking at 6-8 months before anything could possibly happen, and if we wanted to go with a different agency to just let them know.

So literally a day later, Marjorie got an e-mail from YWAM saying that the wait list ahead of us all disappeared and it was our turn if we were ready.  SERIOUSLY!

We would like to formally announce that we are adopting again.  Within a week of that e-mail we were officially accepted into YWAM's adoption program in Ethiopia.

What does this all mean.

1.  We are going to use this new blog to answer a lot of questions and keep you up to date on the process of our adoption.  We have already felt a strong responsibility to tell lots of people and to take this journey with you.  We want YOU on board with us this time.  Please keep checking in often...or put us on your RSS feed...or if you don't know what that is...sign up to receive an e-mail update every time we update...the link for that is at the top of the right hand column.

2.  We know you have questions.  Be patient with us out of the gate here.  We're going to try in the next couple days and weeks to tackle them one at a time.

3.  We are really asking right now that you begin your partnership with us in prayer.  We desperately desire to be held up in prayer.  Pray for the journey.  Pray for our family and what it'll look like as it grows again.  Pray for a little child that we don't even know yet.  Pray that hearts will be melted together.

4.  I know.  I know....you all want to know if this time around it's going to be a girl.  We don't know.  Our first intention isn't to "even things out".  We're just trying to be obedient to what God told us to do.



We will both be doing the blogging on this blog.  Aaron has every intention of maintaining his other blog as a private blog.  While there might be some personal thoughts on our adoption...because it's part of our life...all main thoughts and updates will be here.