Marked By LoveMark me with your sign of love. Plan only the best for me, God!

Sorry we haven’t posted anything lately. The past few weeks have been a blur of emotional highs and lows. We have been in Adrian for about 1 month and are still homeless. We have been staying with Dan and Kayla who have become great friends of ours, but we are really needing to get in our own place and get settled. Please be praying for our house to sell (there is a showing today), and that God provides a job for me!

On a more positive note, we had a leaders meeting this past weekend with the core who will be helping start this church. God is definitely on the move and we are so excited to be a part of it! We just found out that we can meet at a local college for free. Yes I said FREE! This means we can save to get a more permanent location and hopefully some income. We can see God’s hand moving things into place.

We’ll be in touch soon!

In just 4 short days we will be leaving our friends and church family to embark on a new adventure of pure faith…..planting a church in CJ’s hometown of Adrian, Michigan! What a whirlwind of emotions we’ve got going on right now. The thing about faith is we all want more of it, but we don’t want to walk down the paths that allow our faith to grow. It’s uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory which isn’t all that much fun when the world tells you to pursue security. Security is actually the opposite of faith. When we are “secure” in life, we don’t have to live by faith.

A few weeks ago, I felt like God told me He’s not going to answer us in advance, but He’s going to answer right on time. So we’re holding on to His promise….He is, and always will be, faithful!

For those of you who would like to join with us in prayer, here’s a few things you can pray for:
-Our good friends, Sheila and Jesse Cote, who are moving with us – that their house would sell.
-Our house would sell.
-Unity among the launch team.
-Clarity and direction for the future.

Much love,
Katie & CJ

We have been home for almost 3 weeks now and are getting settled into life with 3 children! It’s been so much fun! Here’s a few pictures we had taken last week…

Most of you have heard by now that we have a tentative embassy date of June 17th!  We have to be in country by the Sunday before which means we’ll be leaving around June 11th and returning around June 20th.  We are so excited!  It’s so encouraging to see it all coming together….it feels like we’ve been waiting for this forever!  It’s really cool that it was last year in June when I met Kalkidan for the first time and 1 year later she is now our daughter and we’re bringing her home.

Romans 8:28 (The Message)

^26-28Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

Living confident on this promise!

CJ & Katie

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Finally the phone call we’ve been waiting for.  We have passed court and Kalkidan is officially our daughter!!!  PRAISE GOD!  We were told this was the third time our case went to court.  The first time MOWA (Ministry of Women’s Affairs) didn’t show up and the second time the power went out.  Both of these are common reasons for a court date to be cancelled.  We are so thankful we were not told any of this until now because it saved us from what would have been an even more excruciating long wait!

In about a week we should have a tentative date of when we will be going to Ethiopia to bring our daughter home!  It should be between 6-10 weeks from now.

Zeke and Selah are so ecstatic!  I woke Selah up this morning and told her we passed court and that Kalkidan is a part of our family now!  She said, “Is she here right now?”    They can’t wait to meet their big sister!!!!

Thank you for all your prayers and encouragement!  It’s been a long road, but so worth the journey.  God ALWAYS makes it worth the journey!

Lovingly,

Katie & CJ

Hi everyone!  We have some great news!  We have found out that we will not need to travel to Ethiopia for our court date.  Because our case had been filed previous to this new law, we are exempt from it!  Also, we have just been told that we will NOT be notified of our court date.  They will contact us once we have already passed court.  This is very exciting news for us!  Once we get the call that we passed court, we will travel to Ethiopia 8-10 weeks later to pick up our daughter!

Hoping for more news any day!

Katie

We received some crazy news this week.  Ethiopia made a new law that went into effect a few days ago that all adoptive parents must be in person for your court date and your embassy date.  This means we must go to Ethiopia twice!  As you can imagine, this is big news because of the cost of flying to Ethiopia isn’t cheap and the extra time away from Zeke and Selah.  We don’t know many details, but we do know that both parents are required to be present for the court date….not sure about the embassy date.  Previously only 1 parent had to be there for the embassy date and bring your child home.  CJ and I both were planning on doing that, but this change most likely won’t allow us both to go each time.

So right now we are processing this all and what it means for us, and waiting to find out more specific details!

Hope to know more soon!

Katie

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted anything because nothing has happened.  We are still waiting for our court date.  We thought we would have heard something in February, but nothing seems to turn out the way we think it will so we’ll just wait.

Quote for the day:
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. -Joseph Campbell

Hopefully we’ll be posting news soon!

Katie

As we’ve been sharing with people that we are adopting, we’ve been asked a few times by well meaning people….”If you want another child why don’t you just have another one?”  This question is difficult for me to understand because it’s not about “wanting another child”.  It’s about what it does to our hearts everytime we hear that there’s 132 million orphans in the world (2008 UNICEF estimated total but only God really knows) and that 95% of all orphans are over the age of 5!  132 million children who don’t have a family; who don’t have a mom or dad to run to when they fall and skin their knee; who don’t have a family to eat dinner with; don’t have someone to help them with their homework; to hold them in the night when they’ve had a bad dream; don’t have anyone to love them……  This breaks our hearts!

Some people think they can’t imagine adopting a child…..but I can’t imagine us not doing this.  It only makes sense.  God adopted us into His family as His sons and daughters and now we get to do the same.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed at the numbers….we’re just going to love our daughter the best way we know how.

Some of you have asked for more information regarding orphans and adoption, so here’s some articles I’ve found:

http://abbafund.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/how-many-orphans-are-there-update/

http://abandoned-orphaned.typepad.com/paulmyhill/2009/08/the-count.html

thanks for listening,
Katie

Today Katie and I had a chance to get away and pray at our favorite place.  It was also a really good day because it feels like things are moving forward.  When we got home we had an e-mail that our dossier is heading by DHL overnight to Ethiopia. So over the course of the next two weeks our whole life, the good, bad and ugly will be translated into Amharic and then will wait for a court date.  A couple more e-mails later, was a major milestone in our adoption process, we were matched with our daughter!

I was reminded that God is so good and He never changes.  I love this quote by A.W. Tozer,”All that God is He has always been, and all that He has been and is He will ever be.” During this season of our life when it seems like everything is constantly shifting and changing, I am really glad that “God is the same yesterday, today and forever.” To tell you the truth I have a new understanding of what it means to see God as our Good Shephard. Because all we can do right now is trust that he will continue to take care of us and lead us to green pastures where we can rest in the fact that we are loved and taken care of by Him.

I cannot tell you how much I trust that God is good, because today has been proof that he is!

Today the shepherd was calling and his voice was clear.
CJ