Answered Prayer

            God has been so good to us, in that things in this adoption process have gone surprisingly so well and so smoothly.
            If you read my last post, you saw that I asked for prayer that our USCIS application would go through smoothly and quickly and that we would receive approval.  Well, it's amazing that God has definitely answered these prayers!!  Praise Him along with us!
            We just received our approval yesterday in the mail!  I couldn't believe it when I got the mail from the mailbox.  In my mind, I thought we wouldn't be receiving it for at least a couple months.  But, praise be to God, that we're approved!  And now, I'm realizing, oh, I need to start putting the dossier together then!! :-)
            Once we have everything together for our dossier (which hopefully shouldn't take too long, because we already have most of it, we just need to receive a verification letter from our medical and life insurances), then we will be ready to start the process of sending the dossier over to Ethiopia!
            It's so exciting to think that once the dossier is received, then we are obviously waiting for a child!
            Please pray for us that God provides another $1000.  We are currently at about $2300 and will need another $1000 to get the dossier sent.  God has been faithful to provide so far, so we trust that He will continue to provide in His time, keeping us trusting in Him, who is Lord over all!  Pray to this end.

It is true, though, that the followers of Jesus should fill in the gap left by a contemporary Western consumer culture that extends even to the conception and adoption of children.  Who better than those who know Christ to welcome the all-too-often unwanted and discarded among the world's orphans?  After all, our God himself gathers together "the lame" and "those who have been driven away" and makes "a strong nation" of those who were "cast off" (Mic. 4:6-7).  Jesus' gospel is good news for the sick and the disabled.  In fact, they are the very ones who make up the marriage feast of our Christ: "the poor and crippled and blind and lame" (Luke 14:21).  When we care for the sick and the disabled, Jesus tells us, "you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.  You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just" (Luke 14:14)

- Russell Moore (Adopted for Life, p. 160)