I MOVED!

i've decided to start a new blog, and i'll be blogging there exclusively.

check it out...www.iamplantingtrees.blogspot.com

how it all went down

my friend, erin, wrote a post yesterday about how she came to meet and marry her husband, scott. go read it, it's really good. it might not make you cry like it almost made me, but it might inspire you a little. i've actually read a lot of love stories on blogs lately. so i think i'm gonna write my own. and if you're reading this, maybe you could write yours too?

when i was in college, i remember riding the bus at least once a week with a blind guy. i didn't know his name, i never talked to him. he often got on the bus after me and off the bus before me. i just remember he had longish hair and a yellow seeing eye dog. i also remember thinking it must be really hard to be blind person.

after college, i decided to pursue a three-year master of divinity program at wake forest university. it was seriously the scariest decision i've made in my life, namely because i didn't know anyone there. the director of admissions took a liking to me and encouraged me to live in a community of divinity school students. she told me about a house where there was room for one more person. there were 3 girls, 4 guys living there, and she told me wonderful things about all of them. i took particular notice to the comments she made about jamie dean, a joint law and business school student, who "everybody loves." jamie, she said, was blind.

now, if you're thinking this story is about to take some crazy turn back to the guy on the bus, i hate to disappoint you. jamie was not the guy on the bus. but what little i knew of blind people was from my observations from those weekly bus rides. i had a pre-conceived notion about blindness and people who are blind. and as everyone around me began speculating and joking about which of my male roommates might be my future husband, i just assumed the blind guy was out because, well, who dates a blind guy?

i met jamie dean on martin luther king day 2007. the dude walked in the door of our ghetto house on polo road after a weekend of skiing. all pre-conceived notions officially shattered. after he put his stuff down, he came in the living room to meet me. we jumped right into a spiritual conversation, and i failed to impress him. to be honest, i was really confused about faith for several months during that time in my life. i have no clue if i would've gone to wake had i not been so confused. so whatever question jamie dean asked me about my beliefs, i can assure you i didn't give a good answer.

thankfully, the great thing about communal living is that you're almost always guaranteed to have a conversation partner at the dinner table. jamie and i talked when he wasn't holed up in his room studying. at first, our conversations revolved around comiserating over recent broken hearts we'd both just sustained. but soon, those previous relationships faded into the background. he started asking me what my hobbies and interests were. what's something you and i could do together, he asked on several occasions. the more i talked to him, the more i saw how wonderful he was. he was smart, really funny, confident in his faith...not to mention that he had shaggy blonde hair, which i found to be super-dreamy. as i lived daily life with jamie, i saw that his blindness was just one aspect of a very complex person.

and then, there was that one fateful night when we all -- meaning all the housemates -- exchanged phone numbers. i'm ashamed to admit that our relationship blossomed over text messages. and after jamie made some ambiguous comment about making out with me in our basement, we thought it might be time to discuss things. at first, we decided it'd be a horrible idea to date. so jamie said he wanted to forget everything and go back to "how things were before." after about two days of pure awkwardness, we re-evaluated and decided to go for it.

we dated 5 months and 3 weeks. then we got engaged. we lived in the co-ed house another school year and got married june 7, 2008.

no, i never imagined marrying someone who can't see. unfortunately, our society isn't set up that way. we don't typically imagine ourselves falling in love with someone different from ourselves. in fact, to this day people still think i married jamie because i have a great heart as if i made the most important decision of my life based on charity. i wish those people were lucky enough to sit down and have a conversation with jamie dean. then they'd see what i see, know what i know. my husband, jamie, is passionate, determined, adventurous, and seriously the silliest person i know. he is full of grace. he loves justice. he is abundantly aware of his sinfulness and God's mercy to him. and he literally saved my faith.

i praise God that adoption was on jamie's heart before he met me. i'm thankful that we decided before we ever even married that we would adopt one day. and i'm pumped out of my mind to see those dreams come to fruition so i can watch that man be the best dad ever.

apologies for the lack of pictures. i can't seem to find any recent pictures on the computer. but for kicks, since my husband is the silliest and smartest person i know:

hope

the massai creed (1960, east africa)

we believe in the one high God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. he created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. we have known this high God in the darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the bible, that he would save the world and all nations and tribes.

we believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, jesus christ, a man in the flesh, a jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. he was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. he was buried in the grave, and on the third day, he rose from that grave. he ascended to the skies. he is the Lord.

we believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. all who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the holy spirit of God, live the rules of love, and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until jesus comes again. we are waiting for him. he is alive. he lives.

let me explain

i wanted to give a little explanation for why it seemed like we were so close to a referral before christmas and yet still haven't received one.

every child who is going to be referred to an adoption agency to be referred on to prospective adoptive parents must have proper paperwork. this paperwork is the evidence that shows the child is truly available for adoption and has not been trafficked or unethically removed from his/her birthparents.

in the past, the ethiopian government was satisfied with a lesser amount of paperwork. however, as accusations of wrongdoing have become more prevalant, the government has added additional paperwork requirements. this paperwork must be gathered by local social workers, not adoption agencies. and the problem is, ethiopia is a third world country with a fragile infrastructure and drastically fewer resources than the united states. so some orphanages may only have one social worker gathering paperwork for many children. that social worker may have to travel out to a village to get information. that social worker may have to dine with a local official several times just to get him to sign a particular document. there are many cultural and logistical variables making the paperwork process in ethiopia very slow right now.

i also know that some social workers are currently having to backtrack on paperwork for children who have already been referred. in mid-december, around the time we heard we were next for unrelated children, the ethiopian government began requiring death certificates for deceased birth parents to be included in referral paperwork (meaning, a referral can't be made without this paperwork). there are some cases right now of children whose referrals were made before that new paperwork requirement went into effect, but whose cases now can't be heard in court until that paperwork is gathered. thus, social workers are having to balance gathering paperwork for those "old" cases with gathering paperwork for children waiting to be referred. and, of course, with all of that you run into the cultural and logistical variables i already mentioned.

i would ask you to pray specifically for those gathering paperwork affecting our case. our agency was told in december that paperwork for 4 toddlers was "forthcoming," but it hasn't arrived yet. please pray it comes within the next 3 weeks. we would like to give jamie's brother the good news by phone before he deploys to afghanistan for a year. but also, please pray for the overall paperwork gathering process in ethiopia. this paperwork is protecting vulnerable children (it is a good thing), but the inefficiency of the process is keeping children in orphanages -- and without families -- far too long.

and as an aside to all of that, i feel a need to say that despite all the slow-downs and all the shattering of expectations, we would not do this any other way. we have been so blessed by adoption and feel confident in saying that God isn't done building our family through this miracle. he has given us such grace and patience and sustenence throughout this process, so please don't pity us and wonder if we regret making the decision to do this. in fact, the way we see it, the only decision we ever had the option of making was the decision to be obedient or disobedient to God calling us to something greater and bigger than anything we could've dreamed for ourselves.

in other news

i wanted to do a little update that doesn't involve doom and gloom about our adoption. the truth is, i make it out of bed in the mornings. i function throughout the day. i'm not sad all the time and, in fact, am mostly joyful about life. yes, the adoption has been painful and hard as of late, but it does not totally define my entire life. so here are some very random tidbits that are a peek into our world...

jamie got me one of these for christmas.

my parents were so surprised that i would even want a sewing machine that they were convinced the box had been delivered to the wrong house. i had mentioned a few times before christmas that i might want to learn to sew. i attended a friend's baby shower back in november where she received several handmade gifts, and it occurred to me that if i could learn to sew, i could make handmade gifts too. unfortunately, i'm not a very crafty person and am scared of failure, so it took me a month just to take the machine out of the box and use it. thankfully, my friend, erin, was there to help me, and i have successfully completed two of these, though the stitches aren't straight and neither is my cutting. i have a lot to work on, but now i'm motivated.

recently, i've gone on a crusade against high fructose corn syrup. it's not that jamie and i have suddenly transformed into the healthiest eaters on the planet, but we are trying to make better decisions about what we consume. fast food, for example, is a killer on the body and the budget, so i wish we could just go cold turkey on it. i've tried to get into reading labels at the grocery store, and i'm amazed at how much stuff has hfcs as an ingredient. many brands of bread use hfcs, which offends me because people easily make their own bread and don't have to use hfcs. then i noticed that my jelly and salad dressing also contained hfcs. they even put it in yogurt and chocolate milk! seriously, soda is the only product containing hfcs that doesn't offend me because i expect it in my soda...but not in my bread.

i just finished the chronicles of narnia for the first time! i love cs lewis. i know that's the most christian cliche thing to say, but i don't care. that man has saved my faith in many ways, and i most definitely plan to give one of my sons the middle name lewis. what i love about lewis is that he pushed the boundaries while also ardently defending orthodoxy. i like to think that's what i try to do on my best days. now i'm reading a book about dogs that is proving to be pretty interesting.

hmmm...what else to say? i'm coming up on 6 months working the same temp job. i think i'm guaranteed to keep this job until i need to quit as long as the housing market continues to suck. i'm currently on the look-out for a cheap table that i can paint teal and use as a sewing table. we almost, on a whim, painted a magnetic chalkboard wall in our sunroom (which will be our kid's play area downstairs). we're still going to paint one, but we realized it probably shouldn't be done on a whim. we love our church and feel like there's no other place we'd rather grow in our faith and raise our children. we finally, i think, have names for our kids -- 1 girl name, 2 boy names. whichever name we don't use now will be saved for the next kid, which i just assume we will have (probably by adoption, but i haven't totally ruled out pregnancy).

OK, i think that's enough about me. what about you? current reads? current crusades against evil, fake food ingredients?

1 year

i wanted to write something meaningful to mark our being on the waitlist for one year tomorrow.

but, instead, all i'm thinking about right now is how the ethiopian government is now requiring that death certificates for deceased birth parents should be included in referral paperwork. those words just loom heavy: death certificate.

it is a reminder to me of why we started this process. the world isn't right. and as christians, we believe we're to be little vessels for God to use to make those wrong things come undone. no child should face a future in an orphanage. no child should have to grieve the loss of a birthparent alone. no child should go a single day without hearing a mom or dad tell them "i love you." i hate that poverty and disease and war have killed off many thousands of mothers and fathers who otherwise might have been wonderful parents.

and i especially hate thinking about my toddler-aged child (though i have never seen his/her face or heard his/her story) sitting in an orphanage quietly mourning the mother he/she has lost and wondering if there will ever be another mother to hold him/her again. i think that he/she must be old enough to remember what his/her mother's face looked like, how her hands felt, how her voice sounded, how she smelled...and also old enough to remember how suddenly she was gone...when all the sights, sounds, and smells just disappeared.

but, in adoption, there is hope for redemption.

tonight, i claim for my children and all those who need families words of scripture, promises from God...he sets the lonely in families...he defends the cause of the fatherless... he is close to the brokenhearted...he knows our sitting down and rising up...he never leaves us or forsakes us.

i will not leave you as orphans, i am coming to you. -- john 14:18
in him the orphan finds mercy. -- hosea 14:3

known

i'm really digging this song as of late. if you haven't heard audrey assad, find her on itunes. right now, this song affirms for me that God knows my heart about our adoption. he knows all my sadness, all my worry, all my anticipation, all my frustration, all my joy. he knows all those thoughts that are jumbling around inside of me...some of which never make it to human ears. he also knows our children in exactly the same way. he knows all of their sadness, all of their worries, all of their frustrations, and all of their joys. he knows all of our burdens and bears them alongside of us.

today we found out that our agency is waiting for paperwork for 4 toddlers that is "forthcoming." this is the same paperwork our case manager told about 6 weeks ago. once that paperwork comes in, we will be matched with a toddler and then the next infant. however, we also found out today that 2 families who got their paperwork in before us (and who had been waiting on siblings) decided they were tired of waiting for siblings and decided to open themselves up to unrelated children, which means we are no longer technically "next" to receive a referral. this was a bit devastating, but we are trying to push forward and believe God is orchestrating all things to bring us to the two specific children he has chosen for us. please pray we would hear soon.