Worthy of Praise

The Lord is so good. Things are really turning around here and hope is visible and even reachable. I am so undeserving. He is faithful to encourage, to lift up and to bless.

Cole started Therapeutic Listening Therapy a week ago. The first day he used a spoon all by himself. After a week, he has been adding new words to his vocabulary, been all around more pleasant and compliant (the time out chair must be wondering where he has been!), eating more foods and getting along better with others. Praise be to God.




Our Orphan Care Ministry had our enormous fundraiser this past weekend. The Holiday Gift Market was basically a craft show full of donations from friends and church members and stuff we had made. It was a huge success. More than we could have imagined or prayed for. $4650 huge. I would ask y'all to consider shopping online for Christmas but we are pretty much cleaned out of items!

We were so encouraged to see the Lord's faithfulness to bring people to the show and to bring people to help us in our efforts as ministry can sometimes be a very discouraging thing. Four of us stayed up until 4 am the night before (getting way too old for that kind of thing), got up at 6:30am and then worked the event until 3pm the next day. But it was fun. Good, hard working, ministry fun.

And now we have doubled our account at the church and have almost $10,000 available to offer financial assistance for adoption to families in our church . I've really been praying for families to come forward. But we are trusting in God for that. We are also looking at other ways to use the money - to support orphans locally and overseas. The greatest disservice would be for that money to sit in the bank when there are needs right and left.

Finally, we were so humbled to have a friend of a friend come to us and offer an incredible partnership. Caroline Nelson is an amazing photographer and has started a business to help save for a future adoption for her family. In the meantime, she has committed to donating to our ministry a portion of her income each month. Wow. Please check out her website here.

Looking forward to the holidays, time with family and friends and reflecting on all God has done and continues to do for us.

Gaining Perspective

Thanks for all your encouraging comments and emails. I feel a little silly for being so dramatic and woe-is-me but as I said, I write to get it out of my system. After several days to let everything sink in, to do research and to have a break (Mark's parents came for the weekend), I am looking at things with a wider angle, gaining perspective.
The fact is there are simple things we can do to change our routine and help Cole and in the big picture of life, those things are not that big a deal. I think so much of my problem was my misguided expectations of what adoption would look like in my family and how I thought things would be as time went on. I don't know if there was training or awareness for sensory issues before we brought Cole home, but even if there were, I'm sure I would have tuned it out, assuming it wouldn't be an issue for us.
I confess I have been a hypocrite for many months, advocating adoption, working hard to change attitudes about orphan awareness, and not living it out in my own home, my own family, with my own adopted child.
I was listening to the song below yesterday (the same song we used in our initial Orphan Care video at church last spring) and felt as though the first verse was not some generic orphan out there looking for a family, but my own child, Cole, asking me if I was willing to love him the way he is, even if that wouldn't change in the future. Begging forgiveness from the Lord, I hope now He can use me more effectively for His kingdom work in this area. I apologize to anyone I have misled or deceived up to this point.