Many times in our married life I have gone to the book of Samuel. Most of the time it has been broken hearted begging God for the life of one of our children. This time again broken hearted for my son, the son God has called us to, Yu Ming. We know he is our son, we know that we are called to sacrifice everything possible to bring him home. Over the last 17 days our hearts have been broken, surrendered, waiting (patiently and not so patiently), questioning, doubting, and then back to resting.
When faced with any calling that requires steps of faith there will always be the questions from others, or the well meaning comments of "well if this doesn't work out then it just wasn't meant to be". This week we were reminded many times to go back. Go back to how we knew we were called to Ming, and all the things that have happened since. Every time it has been a journey right up to the deadline and Gods provision has been there. This time was no different.
Saturday we had a killer garage sale. Thank you to all who pitched in and helped and for those who donated items. Our total was a little over $1,000 from that sale and we are so grateful for the many ways you chose to support that.
Monday we were at Chick Fil A (yes, AGAIN). This is our favorite fundraiser if you couldn't tell and when they heard of our deadline they wanted to help by having 2 fundraisers for us in that 17 day window. What a blessing! It was at that fundraiser we were able to thank someone who had given us a donation on their own. I had been praying that we would be able to thank him in person. Little did I know what God was doing. We learned of his family and their adoption story. I love this part of public fundraising!
Tuesday- we were still in need of almost $2,000. That morning we had a very generous adopting family offer to loan us our needed amount. As many of you know we have felt very strongly that God is asking us to adopt debt free. While we know at some point this direction may change, we knew that God was just saying "wait on me for this. I will supply your need." All day our hearts just focused on the fact that we didn't need it yet. That morning we mailed this giant stack of paper to our adoption agency still not having everything we needed for those to even be processed. For us, that was a major step of faith just mail out 9 months of labor and over $2700 in documents and not know if we were even going to be able to finish processing them. But God is faithful...
Later that afternoon we received a call from someone we literally just met saying they had a check they wanted us to have before our deadline. Inside the envelope was a note of encouragement and a check for over and above what we needed for our payment the next day. God is faithful. We will never tire of sharing this story. Even if you are reading this and God is not a part of your belief system, I know you can not deny this is a miracle.
Our little miracles keeps showing us and pointing us to the name we have chosen for Ming.
Samuel - The Lord hears .
We will keep his Chinese name as his middle name and let him choose what we wants to go by.
God has not only heard our cries as parents, but has heard his cry for love and a family. His longing to be back with us. With joy we await the day we have travel approval and fly to bring him home.
Today we received word that our dossier has been entered into the china system and our papers are being mailed for translation. What an awesome week!
"now unto Him who is able to do exceedingly above all we could ask or think"
