Monday, May 19, 2014

Starting out . . .


Dearest Friends and Family,
As a first time blogger, please humor me as I was definitely not an English major!
We are very excited to share with you our newest adventure in life! Paki and I have prayerfully decided to pursue the international adoption of a young boy from Eastern Europe! Wow, right? We have absolutely nothing going on right now so let’s add this onto our busy lives!
Paki and I have always said we’d be open to adoption as we both wanted a larger family and didn’t meet until we were both in our 30’s. About a year and a half ago, I (Joanna) had a horribly vivid dream.
The short version: I had visited a daycare facility and met a bunch of toddlers in the back of some stadium type setting. Shortly later there was some sort of uprising happening and I was fleeing the country. For some reason, I went back up to this upper room where these toddlers had been and found them dying. They had all been abandoned and left with no food, water, ANYTHING. They were still alive, but too weak to move- not crying, just laying there with glassy eyes. I was panicking. In my dream I was crying out to God to not make me triage these children and pick just one to try to save. I woke up from this dream crying and couldn’t stop thinking about those little limp bodies that had been left for dead.
In the weeks that followed, I felt God laying this heavily on my heart and Paki and I began researching the possibility of adoption.  We saw a sweet little girl from Colombia that was deaf and she looked very much like one of the children in my dream. We started to get excited about the possibilities, but  we quickly  realized that we would not be eligible with Paki deploying in the near future.
Paki returned from deployment in late 2013, just 2 weeks before our little Konale (#3) was born. Life was full and hectic again so adoption was again on the back burner. In March 2014,  God again began gently to prompt us towards pursuing adoption and we again began searching to see what God had in mind. We sought out to find the sweet little girl that we had previously seen, but sadly, she had passed away. I was devastated and felt that we had let this little girl down. Since then I have been gently reminded of is this: God has a purpose in everything. And the purpose of that little girl may have been to lead us to find our special little “Koen”. (Koen is an alias as we are not allowed to use his actual name until after the adoption.) And for that we are forever grateful, simply amazed at God’s continuous provision. But I am getting a little bit ahead of myself...
It was late in the evening on March 25th that we saw a sweet young boy that looked surprisingly a lot like Kahiapo. This little boy will be turning 5 this summer so he will be an instant big brother to his 3 siblings! Here’s the picture we have of this amazing little boy:



Though it has only been 2 months (it feels like SO much longer), we are almost complete with our paperwork that is required for this process. While it sounds like no big deal to be wrapping up our paperwork in just two months...NOT. EVEN. CLOSE. We’ve had some discouraging days, but we are constantly amazed at God’s grace and encouragement in such real and tangible ways. So for the most part we are “patiently” waiting for approval from the U.S. for the adoption. Once that happens, we send off our final document to the country we are adopting from to wait for our court date.
So as we embark on this new adventure, we’re asking that you pray for us. We are continuing to ask God to guide us as we step forward in faith and trust that He is preparing our path.
We do have a donation page set up through the adoption site if you feel led to donate towards helping with our adoption costs (a link should be at the bottom of the page if I can figure out how to set it up!) and we truly appreciate all the help we can get, but what we desire most is PRAYER! Please pray that God would continue to open doors for us to bring little Koen home safely and then pray that he would find solace, comfort and love in his new home.
Thank you for taking the time to read about what we’re up to and we hope to have some great updates coming soon.
Much love,
Paki, Joanna, Kahiapo, Kale’a and Konale