In case you haven't heard, we are adding another child to our family!! We are so excited to be adding a SON to our family! We are adopting a little boy from China, and we are in the very beginning process to do this. Ava will be a big sister! We haven't come up with a name yet for our little boy, so we call him by his Chinese name! Ava is 2 years older than he is which means he will be just a little older than Ava was when we brought her home. Once we get our Preliminary Approval from China I will post more info and pictures of our sweet boy!! There are no words to express how happy we are to have a little boy and how much we already love him!! So our children are 19, 15, 5 and 3!
Anyone who knows us, knows that we have a great passion for orphans and the "fatherless." Our eyes have been open only in a way that God can do. To many people we look like crazy folks who have lost their minds. So many people wonder why at our age we want another child...aren't we too old to still be wanting to add to our family? Don't we ever want that "empty nest" stage? Don't we just want to focus on the children we have? How will we provide for another child? Well, they are right, it really doesn't make sense. Most couples at 49 are not having a 3 year old child. We prayed that God would take this desire from us. It's not an easy path to follow. Emotionally, physically, and financially. But there has not been one day since we brought Ava home that we haven't thought about adopting again. We have seen the children in China who don't have families, we have seen the children who "age out" at 14 years old and are no longer able to be adopted and we have seen the transformation of children who ARE adopted and brought into a family and are no longer orphans! We have seen firsthand the transformation of our beautiful Ava, who was frail, timid and empty when we first met her. When God opens your eyes to things like this, it is hard to wipe away the desire to adopt again. Do we have room for one more? Can we love one more? Do we have the energy to raise one more? Yes, God willing, we do!!
Like I said, we prayed and prayed about this being God's will for us. We just had such a deep desire to adopt again. One reason is so Ava would have a sibling her age to grow up with, another reason is just because we feel we were called to do this. People have different talents and gifts, and we felt like our gift was the ability to love and the willingness to have more children. We will have to give credit to our older daughters for making our job as parents easy, therefore we are not "wiped out" or "burnt out" by raising our two older girls! We just kept feeling like God was leading us in this direction, but we couldn't figure out how it could possibly work. We used all of our monetary resources to adopt Ava so this just didn't seem possible. But for months we kept hearing sermons about trusting God, about being "radical" in our faith, and that God would provide for us. So we decided to trust God with this, and lean on Him to help us figure out how to save money, raise money, and be creative in being able to pay for this adoption. We covet your prayers...please pray that we will be strong in our faith, that we will not get discouraged when we can't see the answers. We are following the plan we feel that God has set before us, and we will give Him all the praise and all the glory.
I saw this poem, and this truly sums up how we feel about the journey ahead of us!
LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!! Congratulations!!!!!
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