May God Bless You...with Tears and Anger, Discomfort and Foolishness

I came across this today while running around on the web.  It spoke so clearly to my heart I had to share with you all ~

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.


May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.


May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.


And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. 
-Franciscan prayer

 How often do we think a blessing should look like anger or discomfort or tears?  What a perfect reminder that we are never promised an easy road, or a carefree experience here on Earth.  What we are promised is to be saved by Christ if we ask and follow through with faith, to be transformed by Him so that we can be more like Him.  We are promised to be indwelt with the Holy Spirit to guide us.  While reading this, I thought about how we always view blessings as a comfortable experience, but to be blessed like this, blessed with a heart that breaks for the things God's heart breaks for, that is truly a blessing to beg Abba for.  If we love as He has commanded, and we reach out as He has asked, and we stand up and fight when it is needed, we are truly shining His light this world.  If we never experience this kind of blessing, we may forget the orphan and the widow, we may ignore the poor and the hurting, the lost and the broken.  So tonight, I cry out to Abba please, bless me in these ways!

Amazon Store

I have been hard at work putting together an Amazon Store! This goes hand in hand with being an affiliate. There is a link at the top of the blog page, Our Amazon Adoption Store. When you click that link, it will take you to my amazon store. I have posted books that I love and has really changed my life, family friendly movies, books dealing with Africa, and plan on posting household items, maybe some foods, and many more things. I also have placed our coffee store from Just Love Coffee, and our Olive Tree Promise storefront links on the same line so that you can find them easily. I want to thank you each one again for helping us bring our child home. May God bless and keep you each one!

Amazon Affiliate!

I am working on something new.  I hope to unveil it very soon.  Some of  you already know the basics.  The quick version is this, we have become Amazon affiliates to raise money for our adoption!  It is so easy, all you have to do is use the amazon search box on the right side bar and we will get a percentage of your purchase that will go directly to our adoption fund!  It is quick and easy and you don't have to do anything different than you were already planning on doing!  If you are headed to amazon to purchase something, will you please use the link here instead of going directly to amazon?

It's Official

Wow!  We are so excited to announce that we are officially licensed foster parents.  What an amazing adventure, not always easy, not all difficult.  The most amusing thing about all of this process is all the worrying we did about our homestudy.  The social worker who did the homestudy was wonderful.  She was kind and loved our family.  What we were told prior to her coming to our home was that she would likely not accept our homeschool lifestyle.  On the contrary!  She said she completely agreed with home education and said she wished more families like us would apply!  Wow!  God is so good and so amazing.  Now we are just waiting for a phone call that they are placing a child with us.  Thank you all so much for the prayers. 

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Life As We Know It

Wow, have we been busy lately.  I am excited to say that we have completed our foster care training!  We are CPR, First Aid, and Universal Precautions certified.  We have even had our first home study visit.  I hear there could be one more.  Apparently the next step is what they call a staffing meeting.  In this meeting the staff gets together and goes over our file to decide if we would make acceptable foster parents.  So, at this point we have no idea if we will be licensed or not.  During the staffing meeting, they could decide to do a second home study visit for more information.  After the staffing meeting, we will either be approved for licensing or we will be finished without licensing.  We should hear something this coming week or so.  All in God's will and timing! 

Our home study seemed to go really well.  The social worker was very kind and seemed to click with our family.  She was a Christian and approved of our lifestyle.  This was the biggest concern for us.  We were told that home educators sometimes have a difficult time with social workers, especially when it comes to foster care.  This lady seemed to really enjoy our kids and she wasn't even concerned about "socialization".  One thing I will share is that we cleaned frantically and doing this has led me back to the Fly Lady!  Her way of doing things is so easy, and if you follow her routines, you never have to worry about a social worker visit whether it is a home study or not.  I am enjoying getting back into Fly Lady's routines too.  I love knowing my sink is shiny and my toilet is puke ready ;)  If you struggle C.H.A.O.S.  (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome) then F.L.Y. (Finally Loving Yourself) Lady is for you.

This week God has shown me a verse that I am resting in.  ‎"The LORD your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing." Zephaniah 3:17   To think that the God who created the universe and everything in it would delight in me, and rejoice over me by singing leaves me feeling so humble and loved.