We're in the Weeds!

Readers,

Please take a moment to read this BEAUTIFUL article on adoption and foster care. It is one of THE MOST truth-filled, authentic, hopeful, reality-check, loving messages we've ever seen.

Check it out HERE... and know that you are not alone!

Upcoming Events

Hello bloggy world,

Here's a few upcoming events that may catch your eye. For more events, check out the Lifesong calendar frequently!  

Empowered To Connect, together with Show Hope, hosts the Empowered To Connect Conference — a two-day conference for adoptive and foster parents, ministry leaders and professionals designed to help them better understand how to connect with children from hard places in order to help them heal and become all that God desires for them to be. The next Empowered To Connect Conference will be on September 23-24, 2011, in Nashville, Tennessee at Brentwood Baptist Church.

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Connecting Community Crafters for Global Good! 

Crafts for a Cause is newly established initiative. The structure is simple! The booth fee, silent auction proceeds, and concessions are all donated to our sponsored cause!

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Join us October 21-22 in Phoenix for Together for Adoption Conference 2011. Over 1,200 people will gather together at Redemption Church (Gilbert Campus) to explore the theme Missional Living, the Gospel and Orphan Care. One of our primary objectives for this year’s conference is to create a forum to consider the good news of the Gospel, explore its implications for how we think about and implement orphan care strategies, and discuss how we can move toward greater collaboration as the people of God for the sake of orphans worldwide.

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The Tapestry Conference is completely free!  But even though it is free, we believe the breadth and quality of the conference is truly outstanding. 

We can't wait to see what the Lord has in store through these fabulous events!

Family Friday: Derry and Janelle

Meet Derry and Janelle!

They recently came home with they're little guy, Moses, from Uganda!  Here is what they have to say about their adoption experience and working with Lifesong:

When we first began looking at an international adoption we were overwhelmed by the cost.  However, we were confident this is what God has called us to do, we had to go for it. 

As we continued to move forward with the application and dossier we learned that great organizations like Lifesong help aid in the financial burden of adoption.  So, we began the search.  We came across Lifesong for Orphans and were intrigued.  We talked with some friends who had recently adopted and learned they too were blessed by Lifesong.  So we decided to apply.

Working with Lifesong was so wonderful.  Every person we communicated with was very helpful and kind.  After applying, we quickly learned we were blessed with a matching $2000 grant!  We were so excited and extremely thankful.  Not only were we blessed by Lifesong, but it also gave our family and friends an opportunity to join us on our journey.  When all said and done, our total gift was over $7,000.  We were blown away at how generous God’s people were.

And I love this little story Derry shares on his blog on their eventful last day in Uganda:

We were supposed to get a call from the US Embassy at 3 to let us know if Moses’ visa was ready.

At 3:10 we started calling around to everyone we needed. No car. No driver. We are stuck.

At 3:30 we were in utter confusion.  At risk of no Visa and not going to be able to change our tickets.

I posted on Facebook and Twitter:

I cannot begin to describe the spiritual attack that is happening right now. Pray against confusion, chaos. Pray for a car. Pray for a call.

You all must have started praying!

At 3:45, a car and driver loaned to us by another person at the apartment.

At 4:00 p.m., a call from the Embassy while stuck in traffic... "Your Visa is printing now."

I (Derry) hop on a boda boda (motorcycle taxi) and head to the Airline office to get Moses ticket printed.

Janelle stays in the car heading to the Embassy.

Janelle gets to the Embassy at 4:30 (15 minutes before close) and picks up Visa.

After a credit card rejection, a broken ticket printer, and an amazingly kind KLM and Kenya

Airways agents assistance, I get Moses' airline tickets 5 minutes before office close.”

Wow!  God certainly has a gift for pulling through in the final hour, doesn't He?  Thank you Derry and Janelle for sharing!  Lifesong is blessed to be a part of your story!

If you would like to read more about Derry and Janelle you can read Derry's blog HERE.

Family Friday: Mike and Karla

Meet Mike and Karla:

Please enjoy this guest post from Karla.  They have quite the story:

Our journey to adoption began long before my husband and I even knew each other.  I remember vividly watching the Sunday night 20/20 expose on the orphanages in Romania and thinking, “I want to do something, I want to adopt one of those kids!”  And I set my mind then that someday, some way I would adopt a child who needed a family.  When Mike and I met, we discovered that both of us had a heart for adoption and knew that someday, someway our family would grow through adoption.

With the seed planted deep in our hearts, we began the journey of our married life.  Being the “wise and smart” young Christians that we were, we planned to have three biological children and then adopt a baby girl from China.  We had it all mapped out. 

Our first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.  We were heartbroken but not deterred and not long after our doctor cleared us to try again we were pregnant a second time.  Our daughter Bethany was born in 1999.  My water broke at 23 weeks and I was on hospital bed rest for seven weeks.  Bethany was born at 30 weeks gestation and spent five weeks in the NICU.   In 2002 we suffered another miscarriage.  And in 2004 welcomed our first son, Josiah.  What a joy it was to have a healthy complication free pregnancy!  Two years later we were thrilled to be expecting another son.  At 35 weeks gestation I developed pre-eclampsia and HELLP syndrome and our 3^rd child, Judah was born prematurely.  Thankfully, Judah was healthy and did not have to go into the NICU.

We had walked an interesting, and not so easy, road to our biological children.  God is indeed faithful and we praise Him and thank Him for the children He has granted us.  Our journey of five pregnancies and only one full term healthy baby made it even clearer to us that God would use adoption to grow our family.

In 2008, an extended family member experienced an unplanned pregnancy.  Adoption was never in the mother’s mind, but seeing her situation and praying for wisdom for her and for her baby brought adoption back to the forefront of our minds and hearts.  God used that circumstance to flip the switch and we were ready to pursue adoption.

While we had planned, all those years, to adopt from China, by 2008 the wait for a healthy baby was simply too long.  Our oldest child was now nine and we wanted our children to be closer in age than the wait for China would allow.  And seeing reports and news stories about the conditions of the orphanages in the former Soviet countries really gave us a heart for those children.  We decided to pursue an adoption from the small central Asian county of Kyrgyzstan. 

At the time that we started our adoption from Kyrgyzstan, an adoption of a healthy infant boy would take less than one year.  We stepped out in faith.  We knew that God was calling us to adoption and we knew that God always provides when He calls His people.  We would be utterly dependent on God and His provision for the finances of the adoption.  We had our tax return and the Bush tax stimulus and I was finishing my last year of teaching school and could apply my last four month’s salary to the cost, but that still left us short by several thousand dollars.

We had heard of LifeSong for Orphans through various ministries and applied for a matching grant.  We had several friends and family who wanted to contribute to our adoption expenses, but we wanted them to have a means to give that would provide accountability for the funds and allow them the tax benefits that donations to non-profit entities carries. 

Kyrgyzstan was the first of the former Soviet states to declare independence.  They are a proud and beautiful people.  And we have fallen in love with their culture.  And in August 2008, we fell in love with a little Kyrgyz baby boy.  We had received our referral for a five month old baby boy!  We chose the name Asa James and flew to Kyrgyzstan in September 2008 to meet Asa.

Shortly after we returned home from meeting and bonding with Asa James, adoptions in Kyrgyzstan came to a halt.  A moratorium on international adoption has been in place since February 2009.  We, along with sixty five other American families, still wait to bring our child home. 

It has been difficult to say the least.  But God has been faithful to us and has brought so many people to stand beside us in the fight to bring Asa home. 

And with the moratorium in Kyrgyzstan, God was not finished calling us to step out in faith.  He was calling us to complete another adoption while we waited for Asa.  He called us back to China.  To the China special needs program.

While waiting for Asa, we learned a lot about the Waiting Child program in China.  With one biological child who has profound special needs, we did not think we should adopt another child who would have lifelong needs.  But we learned that so many children wait for families in China (and other countries) that have health or other issues that are very treatable in the United States. And they are certainly not lifelong needs.

We began our China Waiting Child adoption in January 2010.  With the matching grant and friend/family contributions from LifeSong for Orphans, we had prepaid all of our agency fees for our Kyrgyz adoption. Since that adoption was now on hold, we had a large credit with our agency.  The credit was just enough to cover the fees for the China program.  We finished our home study in record time and began assembling our dossier.  In February we got the call.  We had a referral for a beautiful baby boy!  Ezra Joseph was 10 months old and had been born with a cleft lip and palate.  While our hearts were guarded, having pictures of little Ezra only spurred us on to get our dossier finished as quickly as possible! 

We traveled to China in September 2010 and met little Ezra on September 19, 2010.  He became legally ours the next day!   Ezra is simply a delight and he fits right in with our crazy family!  His cleft lip was repaired in China and we had his palate repaired last December.  We have since had one more surgery to fix a small fistula in his palate.  And he has done wonderfully.  I was afraid of what the surgeries and hospital stays would do to the attachment we had formed, but our bond has only gotten stronger.  While we wish he did not have to endure painful surgeries and procedures, God has used those things to knit our hearts and make our family stronger.

We are in awe of how God used the journey to adopt ONE child to bring us two sons.  One of them naps in his crib right now; the other still waits for us."

Thank you Karla!  What a beautiful story!  And we will definitely keep your family in our prayers as you wait for little Asa to come home!

Family Friday: Keith and Tana

Meet Keith and Tana and their four little ones (three of which are within 15 months of each other!!!)

Aliyah Faith (Ludmia) and Christela Hope came home to Denver, CO from Haiti last January... 12 days after the earthquake.  In the midst of sorrow and devastation, God chose to work good for two precious little girls, who otherwise would have waited for another 1-3 years to come home to their forever family.

Today, instead of waiting for a home, Aliyah and Christela are thriving with two brothers and a mommy and daddy who LOVE them!

We want to thank Lifesong for Orphans again for your support of us in our adoption process!  

We are so thankful to have our girls home... to see their smiles and laughs.  And we know that the Lord has given them such a life of hope now... and a family that loves them.  

Your support was huge for us... both financially and as a confirmation that we were hearing the Lord correctly.  Even though we didn't have the funds to bring these two precious girls home, He did!  And He provided!

Keith and Tana

Thanks, Keith and Tana!  We at Lifesong are blessed to be a part of your story!