God's Faithfulness!

The day after we decided we were adopting from Ethiopia and using Dove, our pastor gave an amazing sermon about tithing, and during it, I felt strongly that God was telling me that He (God) was going to take care of our adoption finances over and above what I could even ask or imagine. I was given complete confidence that the adoption is from God and that He is going to be in control of every aspect of it.

I hate to admit it but, after learning that we may have our new little one as early as June, I have really started to have a lot of anxiety about how we are going to pay for all of this, and have not been trusting God to take care of it like I know I should. We found out that several of the grants we were originally going to apply for require the country to have Hague accredidation (which Ethiopia doensn't have). We also have found that several that we do qualify for only help you ask friends, family or your church for money instead of give money directly toward the adoption (some of them provide matching funds, however). We are still praying about if any of these options are right or not, but I have been very convicted that I need to trust the Lord and let Him guide me and not try to make things happen on my own. I would really appreciate prayer that I would completely trust God to take care of our finances. This is very hard for me, but I know through prayer anything is possible!!

I also want to share with you several miracles that have already happened with our finances. (Then you can see how weak my faith really is since we have already been blessed tremendously!)

Our first miracle was that through an amazing sacrificial gift of a close loved one, we were able to have our first contract payment almost completely covered, which helped ease the pain of the initial contract which was in and of itself a little scary (pretty much there are no guarantees about anything with adoption) and didn't leave our bank account empty before we even got started. This was completely unexpected and an amazing act of giving towards us!

Our second was that our first "adoption fundraiser" that my sister-in-law did for us using her Partylite business, was hugely successful and raised $475 total, including people who gave private donations instead of buying candles. We were so blessed by all who bought things and gave donations. This covered a lot of our documents and education requirments for the adoption.

Our third miracle is that last night at house church I asked for prayer for my anxiety about finances and a couple in the group prayed for us. Today I received a check from them that had been post-marked on Monday, (and we prayed on Tuesday night) which really blessed my heart that God provides even before we ask for it.

Another huge blessing is that Brent's mom--who has a special gift for creating organized, buyer-friendly garage sales, has agreed to host a huge garage sale for us this spring as a fund-raiser. So, as you clean things out or think about getting rid of things, please consider donating them to our garage sale. We are happy to come pick items up from your house whenever it is convenient.