Just a Quick Update...

Our caseworker was sick last week so we've rescheduled for Wednesday. I did ask her when we were on the phone if this meeting was standard or if there was a problem and she said it's standard for starting the homestudy process. So, I'll post again after Wednesday! Thanks everyone for asking how it went. :)

Meeting Tonight

We have a meeting with our caseworker tonight. I guess the agency looked over all of our paperwork and wanted to talk about some stuff. I'm not sure if this is standard procedure or if they're concerned about something, so I'm a little nervously curious about what she'll say! We had to take a pretty extensive personality test and we were totally honest even when it exposed our ugly places, so I hope we didn't score as psycologically unstable or something. We do have our moments... :)

The great thing about trusting God and His sovreignty is knowing that we don't have to worry about what happens because He has the best for us no matter what. But hopefully we're not nuts.

How it All Began

At 17 I didn't want to date. I didn't want to get married. I didn't want to have kids. I thought that getting married and having kids was an automatic disqualification from any adventure and all intense forms of ministry, not to mention a death-sentence on personal freedom. It was from this frame of mind that I was operating when Matthew decided to pursue a relationship with me. Needless to say, it didn't go so well at first.

He tried the typical tactics... told some friends that he was interested and let it trickle down the grapevine. I made it clear that I was not interested and sent that right back up the grapevine. He got the message, but was not deterred. He showed up wherever I was, always sat next to me, and just basically hung around until we had built a really strong friendship. How we got from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend is kind of complicated. I would say it started with a Diamondbacks game that he thought was a date and I didn't. It lasted 7 awkward innings and ended with a very long conversation in the driveway of my parents' house. I can't remember everything we talked about, but it involved dating, labels, marriage, individuality, and freedom for ministry. I don't know how long we sat out there, but I do remember whatever CD we were listening to repeated itself several times before I went inside. There were several crossroads like that in our relationship, and eventually I came to trust Matthew that he would not let us become what I feared: self-focused, cautious people with small dreams and fading identities.

We married in 2001, at which point I still wasn't sure I'd ever want kids. I did know, however, that if we did have kids I wanted to adopt. I'd even have been happy to only adopt and not have biological kids at all. Somewhere along the line that changed, but the desire to adopt did not. God placed the passion for the outcast inside me years earlier and it only grew stronger as I saw our marriage growing. I was frustrated that Matthew didn't share that passion and for a time it was a source of dissension for us. But God, who uses broken things, turned it into one of the biggest milestones in my journey as a wife as He taught me to let go, trust Him, and trust Matthew's leadership. I also started praying about it. My prayer was that God would change one of our hearts. Either He would give Matthew the desire to adopt or take mine away. To my delight, He chose the former.

As our family has grown, our passion for adoption has grown with it. For Matthew it has been a gradual process of being drawn in to the heart of God for the needy, the broken, the defenseless and the fatherless. For me it has been watching our family unfold and wanting to share that incredible blessing with a child who is without it. We have been waiting, waiting, waiting for the right time and we feel like this is it. We're seven years down this road now and I am so thankful that I was wrong about marriage, wrong about kids, and wrong about what it really means to be free.

Something New

Obviously, blogging has not been a very high priority for me lately. I've been considering just taking it down and being okay with saying “I had a blog once” and looking off fondly into the distance. An idea from our friend Luke, however, has brought new life and purpose to this neglected page.

Something that has been a high priority for me lately is navigating through the process of adoption. We're in the very beginning stages, so much of what we are navigating is our own hearts, our thoughts, our fears, and our desires. We have come to the point where we know with as much certainty as possible that we will adopt, and we will adopt relatively soon. Everything else is totally up in the air. There is a lot to be thought through and a lot of decisions to make and we'll surely need some help. That's where this will come in.

Our friend Luke is living his dream and planting a church here in Arizona, Second Mile Church. He also is doing some major navigating, thinking, praying, and decision making. He has a blog for the church, email updates, and most importantly, a prayer team. He suggested to Matthew today that we do the same thing for this adoption. So, this is effectively becoming my blog about the adoption. Suddenly I have plenty to write about.

Now what we need is a prayer team. Anyone who reads this can just pray for us as you keep up with what's going on, but if you'd like to formally “sign up” and really commit to pray us through this, you can leave a comment or just email me and we'd love it.

Much more to come....