Where do I start? So much has happened since I last posted in July. Most of it was completely expected. Summer vacations came to an end. I crammed to get ready for my new position as Computer Science teacher in the middle school. Ryan went to both new student orientations (so he could see as many people as possible before school started). Joel and Miles got letters in the mail from their new teachers. Rachel continued with a few cross-country trips to meet with her team.

Some of it was not expected. Not yet. On the second day of school, I got a call during my plan time. The agency had a birth mother who had seen our profile and wanted to meet with us. The next day. Or in eleven days on Labor Day. Well, it turned out that Rachel had a flight out the next day, so we had to wait. We waited, hoping that we weren’t missing out, hoping that she wasn’t meeting with other adoptive parents.

On Labor Day, we left our boys with my parents at our extended family gathering and drove off for a meeting. I won’t go into all the details, but we met the birth mother and liked her. And she liked us. She was in a tough situation and knew that she would not be able to raise the baby herself. She asked if we wanted to know if it was a boy or girl, and seemed excited to tell us that she wanted to place her baby girl with us. (We had submitted our profile, and she had picked us to interview all before she knew the gender.)

We drove home, heads spinning, as we began to imagine what our fall would be like. We prayed that God would guide and that He would provide. A few more pieces of paperwork later and we were matched. An official announcement was made on the agency’s Facebook page, and we continued to plan for how our house our home would look with a baby girl in it.

I shared recently that God has impressed on me that Christianity is manifested in Love and when I read the New Testament I see Love manifested in Generosity. We went into this in February saying that God had called us to give a family, and now we have been blessed to have family and friends stand beside us in generosity as we prepare to do that. We have quite the baby clothes collection and are almost done accumulating the baby furniture. All this at very little cost to us.

Now, with about a month to go, our biggest need is what it has always been: prayer. Please pray with us and for us as we prepare to be the parents of a girl for the first time and of a baby for the first time in eight years. Pray for the grant applications we have sent out, to help cover the cost we have already paid, and the cost we have coming up. Pray about giving towards our adoption costs or joining our financial support team as Rachel continues to send missionaries to South America. Pray for the birth mother, that God will protect her heart and that this adoption will be a positive thing for her, a turning point in her life as God pursues her like He does us all.

Thank you for your support, for the kind words of encouragement and the gifts of onesies, changing pads and hand-me-downs, etc. etc.

As another friend shared today, if you are interested in the process, if you feel God tugging at your heart to open your home and family to foster or adopt, we’d be glad to share our story in detail. Our agency just emailed that they have six more situations this week. There is always a need for people who can adopt.

Rachel just announced publicly on Facebook that we are adopting and have just finished an approved home-study and are now heading into the waiting stage to be matched. With that info completely public now, here is what I wrote about the process when we were about 5 weeks into actively pursuing adoption, on March 14, 2013.

How did we get here? How did we decide that our fairly comfortable life with 3 boys in a nice house needed to have a baby in it? How did that happen?

It’s quite simple. And quite complex. The simple answer is that God called us to this. The complex answer includes thoughts and emotions, it involves obedience and a couple babies, it involves a sermon and some role models and story sharing. The complex answer is, well, complex.

Last summer Rachel called me from Africa, in tears she told me that God had asked her (us) to say, “Yes.” We’ve tried to make a habit of saying yes. Saying yes took us to Kansas City Missouri right out of college. Saying yes brought us back to Ohio almost 7 years later. But this time we didn’t know what saying yes meant. It was scary and hard.

So we said yes in the little things. We took more time to pray together. We became more intentional about seeking God’s will and saying, “Yes,” in the small things. And we waited.

Then Rachel spoke at a church where a grandmother had guardianship of her 2 week-old grandson, and the entire afternoon Jaquan was either in my arms or Rachel’s. On the way home we looked at each other and said something like, “Wow. We could have just taken that boy home for good. He probably needs it, and we could do that.”

Christmas came around. This season has caused me increasing discomfort in recent years, as I see all the stuff we have, all the stuff that isn’t really used. I hear the boys say, “I want one of those!” and I cringe at the materialistic sound of it. I hear myself say, “Man I need some new running shoes, and lights to run with, and a new phone would be awesome,” and I cringe.

Then Rachel brought up the idea of really giving at Christmas. We took a large portion of what we usually spend on the boys, and we asked them to help us spend it on some kids the school social worker told us would not be getting much of a Christmas. We prayed for the kids and we dreamed of what we could give them. We shopped and purchased and wrapped. Giving at Christmas that year was amazing. It moved giving to the forefront of our minds.

In January our church had a Sanctity of Life service. Much of the service was about why abortion is wrong, and I admit, I checked out a little bit, feeling there wasn’t much in the sermon for me act on. Then the Pastor challenged us to make a difference.

“Don’t be obnoxious and picket, be forgiving and compassionate.”
Ok, no problem- I think.

“Pray for and support the local pregnancy center.”
I get those emails. I pray. Money is harder to come by.

“Adopt if you can.”
Whoa! Jaquan immediately came to my mind, and I thought, “We could do that.”