Skip to main content

Grant Update

This has been a bittersweet week in our home. Last Saturday I got a call from my mom saying my grandma may not make it through the night. She was 91 and had been battling cancer for a year but suddenly took a turn. Over Christmas, I was able to spend time with her and I left knowing it would probably be the last time I saw her. We spent 5 days waiting for her to meet Jesus. Each day seemed like her last but she held on, saying goodbye to dear friends and family.

On Wednesday morning I got a call from Lifesong regarding our grant application. Before I could call back my dad text me, "To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. II Cor. 5:8-mom is with the Lord." I gave my students extra recess as I took some time to be alone and grieve and rejoice her passing.

After I gathered myself, I called Lifesong back knowing the call would hold encouraging news.  We have been awarded a $4,000 direct grant!! What a huge blessing from the Lord! We are so grateful for this gift and how much closer it brings us to our forever family.

We have also been selected to participate in a Both Hands project which we will complete this summer. We will be gathering a team to bless a widow while raising funds to bring our orphan(s) home! I've wanted to do a Both Hands project since before we began our adoption. They operate off of the verse James 1:27 "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." You can watch more of the story of how Both Hands came about here.

Thanks for walking this long journey with us!!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Biometrics Appointment Complete!

Another check on the checklist, another task marked off!! We submitted our I-600A less than 3 weeks ago. We were told to expect up to a 2 month wait for our biometrics (fingerprint) appointment. I prayed and prayed we would receive our appointment date by the end of this week. I came home Monday to 4 letters from USCIS with our appointment date set for noon on December 12. It was such a direct answer to prayer, exceeding our request for an already speedy process! Silly government people who assign random times during normal working hours. We both couldn't do it but we've heard from numerous other families that they will often take walk ins. So today, I left school early and we rushed over to the office...we got a little lost on the way, stupid iphone lead us to the completely wrong place! When we arrived we were told we had to speak with the immigration officer to see if he would allow us to walk in. Thankfully we saw the nicest immigration officer there is and he did
Post a Comment
Read more

Adoption Guilt and Choosing Joy

We promise to remain transparent in our adoption including the good the bad and the ugly...today it's the ugly and vulnerable. Please see our struggling hearts as we trust God with all the adoption decisions.  Our current struggle is this sense of guilt over "choosing" a child. I've been struggling with guilt ever since our home visit. For days it consumed me, I hid it, wrestled with it and let it cloud the Truth we've been following since the beginning. I finally crawled out of my hole and asked Chris if he's feeling the same. His guilt isn't as overwhelming and frequent but he has felt it also. At our home visit we were asked what "kind" of child we were willing to adopt. Age and gender and number of kids was easy to answer but we had to go deeper. Would we accept a child with down syndrome? Missing limbs? Missing digits? Developmental or learning issues? Autism? Medical issues both large and small? HIV? We were honest in what we felt lik
2 comments
Read more

#2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you tell we're a little excited around here. Like laugh and cry at the same time which sets off an asthma attack (true story). WE ARE #2 ON THE WAIT LIST!! WE EXPECT A REFERRAL IN 6 TO 12 MONTHS!!! Wow, thank you Jesus, Praise God, we are going to be parents!! After 18 months of discouraging news, setbacks, indefinite timelines, suspensions it doesn't seem real that we will probably become parents in 2016!! When we left our first agency, we were #11 on the wait list with an indefinite timeline. When we first began talking with our current agency in March, we were told there we would be #4-5 on the wait list when we completed our dossier and wait time would be 12-18 months. They were able to make a couple matches in May and we've moved up to #2!!! Please be praying for us, we are so excited and reality is setting in that our home will be filled with a little person (or persons). We are so grateful for God's sovereignty and provision, we are so excited
2 comments
Read more