Long Overdue

I'm fully aware I haven't posted in five months, and that I probably win the award for the most inconsistent blogger in the world, but for the few and far between who still keep up, I thought I would post.

It's a perfect day. The house is a wreck, and we're sliding down the laundry again. I'm in my new flannel PJ's, and it's raining, steadily. The TIDE is rolling, and the boys are screaming downstairs. It's been a whirlwind of a fall. I've called it my sabbatical. We walked away from many forms of "organized" ministry, and have focused on life to life loving and encouragement. I have felt the most refreshed I've been in two years. God is so faithful and sweet.

At the same time we've been following the Father's tender leading. When we began two years ago, we were certain God was calling us to Uganda. I've wept and celebrated several friends who've come and gone through their adoption journey, as I've watched God move us down so many paths, I feel like I'm turning cartwheels. But when we began this, we committed to the journey, that God would lead and transform us through that, as much as the end product. Even more so, we increasingly felt the calling not to only adopt one child, but to develop a lifestyle of orphan ministry.

God's ways are beautiful, beautifully hard. We will be finished with our foster parenting certification as of next Saturday (the 8th). We spent the fall with men and women who were passionate about loving and serving for the sake of Christ. It became a whole new community for us. For now, we're committing our ministry efforts to long term foster care, and we are committing to prayerfully considering any adoption that is opened to us through this journey. We're committed to watching this process change our three spunky guys, enlarging their spiritual heritage in ways they (we) could never imagine. We're committed to the places Christ draws us to because of His faithfulness to love the unloveable parts of us.

Specifically, we're open to sibling or single placements, and we're hoping to stay younger than Daniel, definitely younger than Caleb. We hope this age grows as our own guys grow. We're humbled to think that from year to year at this point, we'll have no idea what our family will look like, or how many it will hold. We have no idea of the joys and sorrows, and the lives we will come in contact with. We feel honored that we're called to be missionaries to children and birthfamilies, who would possibly never see or hear the gospel otherwise. I've been thinking a lot about a line from an Andrew Peterson song (that's actually about marriage). In "Dancing in the Minefields", he writes, "This is harder than we dreamed, but this is what the promise is for." If we never enter into those dark, hard places that the gospel promise was created and established to redeem, we miss the entire purpose.

We're so honored that God has led us to a place where we can experience this first hand.