Been awhile and much has happened

There is no way I could write enough to catch you up on the last year and a half or so.  That being said.....I will start afresh. 

We have had 7 children in our home through foster care.  Each situation has been different and had its own challenges.  We had a teen girl (K), an 8 yr old girl (L), a twelve yr old boy (D), a 3 month old girl (I), and a sib set of 3 boys ages 4 (E), 3 (I), and 2 (X).  1 of these kids has moved on to a new foster home.  1 has moved on to an adoptive home with his sister.  1 went to a residential facility for a year and has since been reunited with her birth Mom. The sib set of 3 were just reunited with their grandparents today.  The 3 month old who is now almost 13 months old is here to stay!  She will be ours forever.

Each of these children have impacted our family in ways that we can't describe.  We have learned so much over the last 18 months.  I am proud of our successes and pray we have learned from our failures.  We often hear things like how great it is that we do what we do.  Well, we don't think it is great, or amazing, or wonderful.  We think it is what God asked us to do, so we do it.  We say yes when it is hard.  We allow our hearts to be broken to hopefully heal others.  We answered the call to foster.  We have seen 1 of our kiddos be baptized.  We have seen 3 little guys learn to pray.  We have seen children fall in love with church.  We have spread seeds.  We know God will water them.

We believe what we do has eternal impact and that Jesus will steal I mean save these kids from the enemy who wants to ruin their lives and families.  We aren't good people, we are sinners saved by grace, who are so thankful we have the Holy Spirit living within us and aligning our wills, our hearts to His.  We hope you enjoy following us on this journey as I try to lead you through our muddy boot lives.  We are in the trenches and yes, our boots are muddy.

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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