the whole long (absolutely amazing!) story

We knew going into this adoption that God would have to do it for us - we were in no way prepared or qualified. It is in our weakness that we have His strength, and we have been blessed to see not just His strength but total, straight up God miracles and it is just too cool! None of this is happening because of anything we've done - it's just the opposite - we are loved in spite of ourselves and we really want you to see how awesome He is and how much He loves each one of us. I know this is long but it's really worth it - please, please read it!! :)

About a month ago we believed that our trip wouldn't be for months 6-8 months which gave us lots of time for our grant and loan applications to go through. Then at the beginning of July it sped up to two weeks ...... As it turned out Kazakhstan wanted us to travel right in the middle of the mission trip that Clint was leading, I was chaperoning and Matt was going on for the very first time. Not only did we not have the money but we really felt that God was calling us to be faithful and take our kids on the mission trip. Our students are like our own kids, very loved by us so we weren't bitter about it, but we were devastated about what it meant. If you turn down an LOI that's it, we would lose our child, the chance to work with Kaz and all of our money. We cried our hearts out for days but ultimately knew what we had to do. Either this was in God's hands or it wasn't. We said we couldn't go.

After several days we got our first miracle... a family that doesn't know us at all sent me a message that said they had been blessed by a surprise 'gift' when they were hurting for funds before their adoption trip, and they wanted to do the same for us. God had laid us on their hearts and they responded with faithfulness, generosity and obedience and I just can't imagine a greater gift than this. There will never be words enough to thank them!

A few days later, even though we now had the money, we still couldn't travel when we were requested. But then God stepped in again and suddenly Kazakhstan decided they still wanted to work with us - the whole thing was not over!! Due to some extenuating circumstances our little kiddo couldn't wait for us and we were crushed but amazingly enough God gave us enough peace about this to get through and ultimately we knew that He had our child for us if we could just hang in there. We are so indebted to our agency for working through this process with us!

Knowing all of this we left with our kids and headed to Chattanooga, TN to repair houses as part of World Changers - a great mission group for students. We had an awesome time but in the background there were some heavy hearts. On Wednesday we couldn't help but think that this was the day we could have met our son for the first time.

On Friday of last week we received we got an email from Andrea, our coordinator, and she said she needed to talk to us right away. Clint and I were working on different crews, at different locations. He got the message and played phone tag for what seemed like forever. To make a long story short, she told him that we had new travel dates - they wanted us really, really soon! Then she told him that that wasn't even the good news... through what could only be described as the hand of God we were travelling specifically to adopt our little one!!!!  Of course when Clint called me (three times) I had my hands in paint, washing out brushes, and couldn't answer. By the fourth call I was frantically drying my hands off trying to get to the phone, and when he told me the news all I could do was stand there in total shock and ask "what does that mean?". No way!!!!!!

God called us to be obedient and faithful even when something so precious was on the line, then He gave us the strength to do what He'd called us to, and then He rewarded that God-assisted obedience with the most amazing gift of all. I'll never be able to do this story justice but I had to try. We are so unworthy. I am praying that my retelling of it brings some much due glory to our Heavenly Father, and some faith and hope to everyone else!!