I know it sounds a little crazy, but one March night in 2011, I awoke to the single word "Uganda" spoken very clearly to me in my sleep. I have never heard God speak to me like this before, but I knew without a doubt that God wanted me to find out about Uganda. At the time, I didn't even know where Uganda was. I remember sitting up in bed saying to myself, "I think Uganda is in Africa, but what could be in Africa?"
The next day, I spent all of my spare time researching Uganda and what I found out was staggering. Just looking for basic information on the country, I began reading about all the orphans in this country. According to countless websites and studies, Uganda has the largest orphan popluation per capita of any country in the world. I quickly began to see that God wanted me to find out about His children in this country. It didn't take long for me to stumble onto Kisses from Katie, a young girl from Brentwood, TN who obediently answered the Lord's calling for her to live amoung the Uganda people and minister to the poor and needy, namely the orphans.
I cried and cried all that day as I read her story. It was on that day that I first told Robbie that I felt now was the time to start researching adoption with serious intent. We both had all kind of excuses of why now was not a good time. Our kids are still so young, they still need intense training in righteousness, the cost is staggering, we need more space in our house, do we have the time to invest in more children or even time to research adotion?
Even with all these questions in our minds, Robbie gave me the green light to begin research so that in a few years, we would be ready! I took the green light as permission to engage and went right to work finding out all I could about internation adoption first, and then domestic adoption. As I researched internation adoption, I began to see that we would not qualify for many of the country programs because of the size of our family or because of the extended travel required for many of the prograns. We went back and forth on domestic adoption, but for now, have decided that we should pursue internation adoption.
Robbie started to get a little nervous when he saw information packets arriving in the mail and as I probed him for family information to help me fill out online applications! It was time for a heart to heart so that we could move forward together and walk on the same page of this new story. I laid out my concerns about finance and travel times and concerns over domestic adoption while Robbie gave me just 2 concerns he had. The first was our children. He really wants their training in godliness and righteousness to take root in their hearts before adding more children to train who will need lots of attention. That one seemed easy for me - I'll just focus more energy on training time. The second and biggest concern he had was our house. He felt that we are busting at the seems, not because of our bedrooms, but because of our small bathroom for the kids and our lack or attic or storage space. He thought we really needed to sell our house before should seriously move forward in the adoption process.
I was a little bummed because I was already filling our paperwork and starting to get excited about adoption and this put a little damper on my excitement. But, my response to him was, "well, I'm just going to pray that God sells our house, then." And that is exactly what I did. When I would start looking at agencies and countries, I would just have to stop and pray, "Lord, if you want us to adopt, please sell our house for us."
This takes me to Monday, June 13. On Monday, I decided to list our house as a "Make Me Move" option on zillow.com. I didn't really know what this was, but thought it might let people know that we would be willing to sell our house even though it wasn't listed. We eventually wanted to list it, but still needed to get it "show ready" before we could that. On Tuesday the 14th, we received an email from a couple in CA asking if they could get some pictures of the house. It turns out that they were planning to make a trip that weekend to come look at house in TN. My first thought was no way! We are no where near ready and it would take me longer than 4-5 days to get this house in order. But, Robbie and I both agreed that we needed to make this work and agreed to show the house on Friday.
Fast forward through the long week of yard work, cleaning, organizing, throwing out and so forth. An agent showed the couple our home and called us after 2 1/2 hours of viewing to say that they had written up a formal offer and wanted to close in 2 weeks! It's funny how we weren't really shocked. I mean, we were, but we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was God speaking to us. He was making us move! He was answering our prayer (or at least mine!) and saying very loudly, "It's time!"
The neat part is to see how through this sale, God was speaking directly to Robbie. I had already heard God tell me "now", but for the first time, Robbie was hearing God speak to him telling him to move "now". We had much work to do and the adoption process would be put on hold while found a house to move into, completed the moving process, began renovating the new house and began a new school year. But, we never lost sight of the goal of the whole move. We knew that we had to get settled so that we could begin again, with earnest intensity, seeking after the child God has waiting for us!
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