LIGHTING the WAY

Check out our adoption video!!

Another version HERE

First of all, THANK YOU for your interest in our journey! Your encouragement, blessings, and prayers touch our hearts and are appreciated more than you know.

Now that our adoption plan has been “officially” announced, we have been flooded with congratulations, well-wishes, and of course, questions. So, I wanted to take some time to address some of the most common questions we’ve received:

• You’re adopting? Cool! Is that because you can’t have biological children?

The short answer is no. Adoption is not a back-up plan for us. We don’t view it as a secondary way to build our family. It is our firm belief that the purpose of adoption should never be to provide children to a family, but to provide a family for a child who needs one.  It is something that we both have desired since before we were even married, and we have always known that we would adopt “some day.” We have a biblical mandate to care for orphans, and adoption is just one small way that we can be involved in that. It is a blessing beyond measure to be able to provide a stable, loving home for a child in need. Through a great deal of prayer and discussion, we have come to the conclusion that now is the time the Lord is leading us to begin the adoption journey. We also know that biological children are a possibility for us, and if God chooses to grow our family through that route as well, we trust Him to bring that about in His timing. The more the merrier!

• ­Where?

We are actually pursuing two adoptions simultaneously: one domestic and one international. For the international one, we are adopting from Uganda. Surprisingly, the international adoption is expected to be a much quicker process than the domestic one, so for now we are focusing primarily on that.

• How old is the child?

For the Ugandan adoption, he or she will probably be somewhere between 5 and 7 years old.   Technically, according to Ugandan law, one of the adoptive parents needs to be at least 21 years older than the child to be adopted. Although the courts can choose to waive this requirement, we prefer to stay within that age range so we have one less unknown variable when we get to our court hearing in Uganda.

For the domestic adoption, the child will most likely be an infant, although there is a possibility of adopting a somewhat older child. The agency we are going through works with birth mothers facing an unplanned pregnancy who want to choose adoption for their child, but they also partner with the local department of human services, finding families for children within the foster care system.

• What agency are you using?

We are not using an agency for the Ugandan adoption. Our dear friend Kevin runs The Greenhouse Orphanage in Kampala, Uganda, so we are able to adopt from that orphanage independently. For those of you who have kept up with our travels, this is the same orphanage that Brandon visited in 2008, and we also led a team through Xtreme Impact to this orphanage in 2011. Most of the pictures in our announcement video were from this orphanage. We are hoping to adopt one of the children we met while there in 2011. Doing it “on our own” means more work for us, but it also means lower cost, and potentially a quicker process.

For the domestic adoption, we are going through Crisis Pregnancy Outreach (CPO). It is a completely volunteer-based agency that began as a crisis pregnancy center in 1983 and grew into an adoption agency as the need arose. You can learn more about this agency at their website:  http://www.crisispregnancyoutreach.org/index.shtml.

• Where are you in the process?

Although we have been working on the adoption (researching, gathering information, making decisions, etc.) for several months, we are still in the early stages.  Right now, we are waiting on our home study to be finalized. We have completed all the necessary visits and have turned in all of the paperwork, but are still waiting on a few background clearances to come through and the actual write-up to be completed. The next step will be applying with U.S. Customs & Immigration to be approved as adoptive parents.

We know that adoption can be a very long, time-consuming, heart-wrenching, and costly process. But in the end it is so worth it. We ask you to please partner with us in this process through your continued prayers and encouragement. We will definitely need it! We are also planning some fundraisers soon, and would love if you could spread the word when the time comes. We will share more details on those as we get them ironed out. And we would love to talk with you more about the process! Please let us know if you have other questions you would like answered and we will do our best to address them.

Good evening! We hope you are enjoying the sunshine and summer weather. This year has really been flying by for us, and we have plenty of news to share!

As we mentioned in our previous letter, we have been praying for wisdom and direction as we search for a full-term placement location with AIM. We were initially looking to join a two-year outreach team among the unreached, semi-nomadic Mbororo people group in the Central African Republic (C.A.R.). As we prayed through the details of that team, we began to develop a burden for the Mbororo people. Unfortunately, due to instability in the region, that team has been postponed for the time being.

However, we have been presented with an exciting new possibility that we are prayerfully considering, and we ask you to join us in prayer as well as we seek the Lord’s direction in this. There is a possibility of forming a new team with another couple who had planned to be on the original C.A.R. team. We would be joining up with a veteran missionary and be based in the D.R. Congo, where the Mbororo people are nearby. While the details are still yet to be worked out, the idea would be to spend our first term primarily focused on language and cultural acquisition, along with discipleship, hoping to eventually move into the C.A.R.

While we are so enthusiastic about the possibility to move forward with this new team, there are still so many details and logistics to be worked out. We ask you to please join us in prayer as we seek wisdom in moving forward. Pray for the leadership within AIM as they work on the logistics, pray for the other couple who is considering the team, and for the veteran missionary who is already there laying the groundwork. Please also pray for us in our preparation, and for the Mbororo people. You can learn more about them here: http://prayafrica.org/mbororo/.

We are also stepping out in faith and moving ahead full steam with our support raising process. We are not certain the exact amount we will need yet, but we trust that when the Lord is ready for us to go, the funds will come in.

If you would like to support us financially, we are in need of monthly pledges for living expenses once we are on the field, as well as one-time donations towards our outgoing expenses. The following are ways to give:

– Checks made payable to “Africa Inland Mission” can be mailed to our home address.
– One-time or monthly payments can be set up through AIM’s online giving site. (Please let us know if you set up a payment to start at a later date).
– You will receive a receipt for your tax-deductable gift through either payment method.

We would love to talk with you more if you have any questions. We would also love to present our ministry in your church, Sunday school class, small group, or any other forum. Please let us know if this would be a possibility.

Thank you again for your continued prayers and support, and we will be sending out more details as they come!

I see it every day. My facebook newsfeed full of blog posts from witty, creative, inspiring people. Links to other peoples’ witty, creative, inspiring blog posts. And I have to admit, a slight tinge of jealousy starts to creep up. Brandon likes to tell me I’m a writer, because of one chance event that he witnessed 5 years ago. I had a tiny stroke of creativity in our cultural anthropology class when writing a paper about the funeral practices of the Latuko people of southern Sudan. When the professor handed back our papers, he told me I should be a writer and Brandon has never forgotten it….

But really, I’m not a blogger. I usually don’t have profound thoughts to write about. I’m not artsy. I’m not on Pinterest, and I don’t have a shop on Etsy.  I don’t have a hook….that one cool thing that can tie all your blog posts together and make people hang on your every word.  To be honest, I’m not sure I’m completely comfortable sharing deep, diary style ramblings with the entire world wide web.

And yes, this is my first blog post in over 9 months.

Between work and homework and a million other things that seem to be going on in our lives, it’s pretty easy to make excuses as to why I never update our blog. But lately I’ve been seeing the need to be more consistent. After all, once we’re living in Africa people might actually want to know what’s going on in our lives : )

So I’ll consider this my practice post. An agreement with myself to be more consistent, despite my lack of natural blogging abilities. Who knows, maybe I’ll even muster up a blog every month!

This week started out really rough for us. We were already exhausted heading into it after a very busy previous weekend. Then we got the news that our World Help Children of the World boys were back in town for a concert, and needed a place to stay. Of course, we jumped at the chance to have our boys staying with us again, but that led to some very long days. We picked up our boys on Tuesday after work, but since I had already made a prior appointment for that evening, we had to rush home so I could make dinner and then rush off to my appointment. Brandon was wonderful and played Legos with the boys while I was gone. The next morning was kind of crazy…perhaps all mornings are crazy when you have two 9-year-old boys? Maybe you moms out there can relate. But we did get to see our boys in concert that night, which is always a blessing. On a side note, if the Children of the World visit any churches close to you, I would highly recommend that you go to their concert….and tell Dan and Ashish that Uncle Brandon and Auntie Heather say hello! 🙂 Thursday night Brandon had the responsibility of watching our boys again, because I had my Apples of Gold group (I’ll post more about that later…it’s a whole story of its own!)….but I came home around 9:45 only to discover that our dog had eaten one of our boys’ shoes….So then I proceeded to make a late-night Walmart run! Unfortunately, it was a flip-flop that had been eaten, and seeing as summer is officially over, Walmart was very low on their stock of flip-flops. After 30 minutes of searching, I finally found a pair that was the correct size and somewhat resembled the eaten shoe. The small success boosted my mood. Friday brought about another crazy morning, and emotional goodbyes as we dropped our boys off for the last time. By the end of a long day at work, we were ready to come home, crash, and do nothing all weekend….but that was not an option for us. We had made a commitment to attend a CrossWorld New Teams retreat all weekend, starting as soon as we got off work on Friday. To be honest, neither of us were really looking forward to this retreat, but we knew that we needed to follow through on our commitment. Little did we know, this retreat was exactly what we needed. The purpose of the retreat was to promote a new idea that the CrossWorld mission agency has developed. One of the biggest challenges on the mission field today is team relationships. You are thrown into a new culture, new surroundings, a new language, a new home, and on top of that you find yourself suddenly relying on a group of people you barely know, and tensions start to run high. But what if you developed a team here in the States? What if you planned your ministry together, starting bonding with your team here, and then went out to face the challenges of a new country together? How much more effective could we be? That was what this weekend was all about. CrossWorld has 3 ministry locations set up, and the majority of the weekend was spent sharing the vision for those 3 groups, and giving us time to interact with potential teammates, as well as with CrossWorld missionaries and mobilizers. We prayerfully considered the 3 locations, and asked the Lord to make us open to joining one of those teams. However, we truly believe that he has another plan for us. And we met another guy there who felt the same way. We spoke with the CrossWorld staff about the possibility of starting a new ministry among an unreached, unengaged people group in Africa…specifically in southern Sudan! My heart is overjoyed at the possibility. Logistically, there is a lot that goes into opening up a new ministry location, but the staff seems very optimistic about it, and a small team has already begun to form. Please be in prayer with us as we await to hear further news from CrossWorld about this opportunity. One thing we really took away from this weekend was that CrossWorld is definitely an agency that we could see ourselves serving with full-time. They truly have an amazing infrastructure and philosophy of missions. We also ask that you would pray for us as we pursue a more committed relationship with the agency, and as we seek to develop a team while we are here. This weekend was nothing but encouraging, and has left us with so many open doors. Pray that we walk through the right one. The future is bright, and we are so excited about the journey along the way.

Today Heather and I bought our first home…

We both could not be happier and excited to have God bless us with the opportunity. However, I cannot help but feel the need to explain. Some have given us puzzled looks asking: “Aren’t you going to the mission field?” We still reply with an emphatic “YES!”. And we feel having this house helps us get there. With school debt we have to be here for the next 2-3 years. By taking the rent and making it an investment in a house, makes sense to us and others we have sought counsel from. The time to buy was now, the market is great, God provided, and we are blessed. We give and dedicate this new home to Him. For this is not our home (not just because the bank owns most of it)… but it as with everything God lends us, it is His…we pray we can use it and make it, for the short time we remain here… a home.

Welcome to the new blog! Greetings everyone! We hope you enjoy our thoughts, prayers, and even struggles that we want to share with you. May the Lord use it to glorify Him!