#1 – The first event occurred in August. Jeff was out of town, a guys weekend with a friend from back in Ohio. The kids and I attended church, as always. And God took me by surprise. You see up until this time I was praying for God’s will, very loosely not wanting to “step on anyone’s toe.” That day in church I was convicted.
The sermon, well at least the part of it that I remember and
spoke to me loud and clear, centered around the fact that oftentimes as
Christians we pray lacking conviction.
We pray in such a way that if what we ask for doesn’t happen we don’t
act surprised. We pray lacking real
belief that our prayer does any good.
Pastor Dustin didn’t discredit the fact that God’s will is, of course, “at
play.” But this sermon was more about
our lack of sincere prayer. Prayer that
says “God, I know you can and will do what is best, but I want ___________. I need to you to ______________. Etc.” Prayer that says I may not get what I want
but I am going to pray BOLDLY for what I want anyway.
Now I know in earlier entries I have talked about how God
doesn’t always give us what we want or what we pray for but, I must confess even
in those prayers my belief that my prayers really were going to make any
difference was pretty weak.
I was convicted, and I changed the way I was praying. I started praying boldly that God would move
mountains to find Our Girl’s sister (her legal guardian), and that He would
bring her home to us. I prayed in the
knowledge that He might see fit for other things to happen, but I was not going
to be lazy and weak in my prayers. I was
going to PRAY for HER like I had never prayed before.
Now, I don’t claim that my prayers are the reason things
unfolded as they did, but I do believe my prayers changed me and changed how I
was approaching everything. They changed
my attitude from a “maybe, someday God will move (think Eyeore from Winnie the
Pooh)” to a “GOD MOVE! (think of a demanding, begging child in the checkout line
at Walmart).” My attitude and my
demeanor were altered.
#2 – The second event goes back to something that I did over
a year ago. You may remember that one
thing I did when I came home from my first mission trip to Ethiopia was that I
signed up to be on a waiting child photolisting through RainbowKids.org. In this site you can select certain criteria (like
age, race, gender, country, etc.) and when a child meeting your criteria is put
on the photolisting you get an email with his/her information.
So, I had been on RainbowKids for about a year. Pictures and bios of kids would come my way
and my heart would break a little. On
more than one occasion I would show the bio and picture to Jeff, praying his
heart would be swayed and we could adopt one of them. Well, until September of this past year I
continued to get these emails with these waiting kids.
In September, God convicted me. Probably one of the nearly audible times I
have heard from God. That is to say, I
didn’t hear a voice but the voice in my spirit was SO strong I knew without a
doubt God was talking to me. The
conversation went something like this…
God: If you are so sure ______ is meant to be yours, why are
you still looking at other kids?Me: Well, when I get their bios I pray for them.
While not a complete lie, this was not “why” I was looking. Obviously, God was not fooled. He knew my heart, and He knew that I kept looking “just in case” the situation with Our Girl didn’t work out. He knew I was scared. But He wanted me to trust Him. He wanted me to turn off the photolisting emails.
I argued with him about it for about 2 weeks. Trusting is scary. To me, turning that photolisting service off was bolding saying “She’s mine, and I don’t need to keep looking.”
And that was what I had to decide. I had to decide that Our Girl was in fact the
missing piece to my family, and I didn’t need to keep looking. So, I turned the photolistings off.
#3 – The third event happened in October. We had been discussing redoing Abi’s room for
a while. Initially the issue was we
wanted to get her a new comforter. But
the reality was that the bedroom furniture she had was built by my
father-in-law and my husband when we lived in Ohio. While it was beautiful, it was white, which
matched the woodwork in our Ohio house wonderfully, but now in our Oklahoma
house, with our dark brown stained woodwork, it looked out of place. The other issue was that it was a Queen sized
bed, which took up a lot of space in Abi’s room.
So, while we started with the idea of a new comforter, I
didn’t want to buy a new comforter if we were just going to get a different
sized bed down the road. So, we started
discussing the possibility of getting Abi a twin-sized bed. But this then brought up the fact that if we
bought a twin bed now, what if Our Girl really did get to come? We knew that it was most reasonable for the
girls to share a room, but if that happened it would affect how we might make
this purchase.
So, we had two choices, (A) we could buy one twin bed (or
the top bunk of a loft bed) now and then wait to see what would happen with Our
Girl or (B) we could buy two twin beds (or both beds of a loft bed) now and step
out in faith believing that she was coming.
Can you guess what we did? Take a
look for yourself below…
We jointly made this decision. We talked it through and decided that God was in charge of making it happen but we were going to prepare for it. First, we purchased two twin sleigh beds, and the structure of the room was just not working, so we returned those beds and ended up with the loft bed and associated furniture you see above. Half the drawers are not filled. They are waiting. Waiting for the things that will belong to Our Girl when she comes.
So, in August God told me to start praying with conviction. In September He told me to stop looking for another child – I had already found the One he had for us. And in October He asked us to step out in faith with our money and prepare a bedroom for two girls. And then on December 9, He delivered us the news we had been waiting for, praying for, preparing for. Our Girl’s sister agreed to our request to adopt her.
GOD IS SO
GOOD!
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