Florida on Friday??? Your Will Lord...

It is with an extremely guarded, yet overwhelmingly peaceful heart that we bring this update to you tonight. It’s been quite a while since we updated everyone on our adoption journey and the main reason has been because there hasn’t been anything to update you on. It’s been months since we have heard about any specific situations from our agency and all contact has been lost with our connections with Lil Sinclair. We do know that Lil Sinclair is due anytime now and we pray for him often. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God brought that situation into our lives so we could continuously pray for him and his BM (birth mom). God has an awesome plan for them and we are thankful we had the opportunity to pray for them specifically.

I started this blog describing our hearts as extremely guarded, yet overwhelmingly peaceful. If you have read about our journey so far you are aware of the ups and downs our family has been on. Many times we have been stretched emotionally and spiritually beyond our comfort zones. Because of the nature of our journey thus far, we have become extremely guarded when open doors present themselves to us. We have committed this entire journey into God’s hands since the beginning and we trust that any doors we are not supposed to walk through will be closed according to His will for our family. The situation I am about to share with you would have rocked our world had we gone through it a few months (or even a year) ago. However, because of God’s faithfulness and everything He has taught us throughout this journey, we have an overwhelming peace that we can’t exactly explain. As you continue reading this blog entry, remember that above all else we want the Lord’s will to be done in this situation and we want Jesus to be glorified!!

This past week has been a very emotional one for our family. My (Shannon) grandpa passed away last weekend and we spent the first part of the week with family celebrating Grandpa’s life. Wednesday was a day of rejoicing as we shifted our emotions from days of grieving to a day of celebrating new life. Just one day after laying Grandpa to rest, we were celebrating the birth of my cousin…Kaitlyn Dawn. After visiting her in the hospital that morning and congratulating my Aunt & Uncle, we headed home to attempt to get back in the swing of things. Not even 20 minutes after we walked in the door, I received an email from our agency asking us to call them ASAP and that it was very important. I called Denise and she began to explain a situation with a BM in Florida. Very simply here’s what we knew…an agency in Florida had seen our profile and chose us for this birth mom to look at. Initially we were under the assumption that we were the “chosen family” but later realized it was a bit more complicated then that. We were told we needed to decide if we were interested and whether we wanted to proceed with the process or not. Coming off of the emotional week we had just experienced, we asked if we could take a few hours to talk about it and pray about it. After lots of conversations with each other, conversations with our parents, and conversations with God, we decided we were going to look at this as an open door of opportunity. Even though I desperately wanted a crystal clear answer from the Lord, we both felt that our faith in the Lord would guide us through and He would close any door that didn’t align with His will for our family. We sent an email to our agency that night and began the waiting game.

Thursday morning came and there wasn’t an immediate response to the email we had sent the night before. We waited all day and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I emailed our agency and asked if they had heard anything from Florida. She said the BM had several profiles to look at and as soon as she made a decision they would let us know. That’s all we knew as we went to bed Thursday night and anxiously awaited some answers Friday.

Friday afternoon we finally received a phone call from our agency. The BM had made her decision and it appeared we are the family she chose. Now let’s talk about the waiting game! We are planning on having a conference call with our agency and the agency in Florida sometime Tuesday or Wednesday. We hope to have some of our questions answered then. Until then…we wait. However, in the meantime, we need you to be praying. What specifically should you pray for? First and foremost…God’s will to be done in this situation. If this is God’s will for our family then we want everything to go according to His plans. However, if this is not our son, then we pray He will make it clear and begin shutting doors. We also pray that if this is not His will for our lives that He will place this precious little guy in a Godly home that will love him and raise him to love Jesus! Second, we pray for emotional strength and wisdom beyond their years for our girls. We never want to lose sight of the impact all of this has on them. We always want to make them a priority and we ask that you pray for them as much as you pray for us. We have taken every step of this journey together as a family and it has made us stronger because of it.

Thank you for your prayers and your constant encouragement! Several people have already shared with us that they will be taking several days this week to fast (in many different ways) and pray for this situation. We are going to join them in a time of fasting and we invite anyone else who is comfortable with this to join us as well.

We will update as soon as we know more…