Big news

We're expecting!

Well, sort of. Not in the traditional sense, and this will most certainly take longer than the usual 9 months.

Samantha's not pregnant, but we are pursuing an international adoption.

This may seem like it came out of nowhere, but it is something that we have considered for a long, long time.

We always thought we'd have 2 kids and then possibly adopt a third. It was a nice thought and it was easy to keep it in the background - way, way back.

In the past year and a half, things have happened that made us feel like God was pushing us to move from a thought to taking action.

Right before Maggie was born we went to a friend's house for a Memorial Day cookout. Someone threw a ball into the neighbor's yard and we happened to meet a family outside celebrating their daughter's birthday. It just happened to also be her "gotcha" day, celebrating the day they adopted her from China. At this point, the idea of adoption started to feel real. It went from pictures to a beautiful little girl Mac's age with two older brothers. It turns out that the family goes to our church and the older boy was in Doug's AWANA and VBS groups.

Then Maggie came and our lives became more full and chaotic than before (which we didn't think was possible). Once again, adoption was on the back burner - but not very far back and not for long. We started to feel that pull again and began to seek out ways to figure out if this was something God was calling us to, or if we were caught up in a fad.

We prayed (and still pray) about it. We searched the internet...A LOT. We ended up finding a great book on adoption and how it fits into the story of our salvation in Christ. The book is Adopted for Life by Russell Moore. We have a copy and would be happy to loan it out after it gets passed around the family.

After reading this book we felt more sure than ever that this was something God was calling us to do. But how? When? What do we do next?

One Sunday Pastor Carlos preached on Noah in our summer series, Big League Faith which goes through Hebrews chapter 11, looking at those in the "Hall of Faith". In that sermon he showed the truth that delayed obedience is disobedience. The funny thing is that I always feel this way when trying to get Mac to do something. Somehow I failed to see how that truth applied to my own life. Carlos urged us to have faith in God and to show that faith with our actions by obeying whatever it is that He is calling us to do. He finished the sermon with what felt like a direct message to us. He said "God told Noah to build an ark, what has he been telling you to do?" Then he told about a family that came to him before the service and told him they were planning to adopt.

We certainly felt like God was making it pretty clear that he was calling us to adopt, but honestly we had some concerns. This year, Samantha's uncle Chet preached the sermon at DeSoto Baptist's Homecoming Sunday. In his sermon, he preached about how we as Christians often don't have full faith in God to do what seems hard or impossible to us. We don't even ask because we are defeated. He said "God is bigger than cancer. God is bigger than any financial issues. God is bigger than any social issue." It was the social issue statement that hit home because an international adoption means an inter-racial family, which has been a concern for us.

This truth was reinforced for me when Carlos preached again from Hebrews on how our faith in God helps us to persevere in the hard times.

To be honest, none of these things individually scream out "go adopt from another country". All together though, and especially through prayer, we feel like God is calling us to trust him and to demonstrate that faith and trust in our lives through adopting internationally. We aren't doing this because we think it will be fun. Or because it will be easy. Or beacuse we want the attention. We are doing this because we believe that God is calling us into it and because by obeying we might bring honor and glory to Him.

We know this will be hard. We are actually excited that God is calling us to something difficult. We are encouraged to know that He will also give us the faith and strength needed to see it through.

We will post more on this with some more specific information. This was just to let everyone know what is going on in our lives right now and to ask you to join us in the journey, especially by praying for God to be glorified, for the orphans in the world, for the specific child that God is preparing for us, and for us as we change our family to welcome another child in.

Oh, one final thing - Mac doesn't know yet. We will tell him soon but we don't know when. We are thinking he will be excited about this and might start asking everyday when he will get another sibling. When we tell him, we'll post his reaction here too.

James 1:27 - Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.