Ready, Set, Go!

It is travel day!
Yesterday we packed and packed and PACKED!!!  We thought we were doing really well on luggage size limit requirements, but when we finally packed everything, we actually had to pack an extra bag to take every thing we "needed" or had planned to take.  Wow!!! we are taking five checked bags!
We slept great last night and we got up at 3:00.  We left home at 5:00 and arrived to the Birmingham airport at 6:30.  It is now 8:45 and our flight leaves at 10:00.  Praise God!!!  We arrive in Chicago at 12:17 and then our next flight leaves Chicago at 1:00 headed to Beijing!  The flight from Chicago to Beijing is almost 14 hours.  We will arrive there about 3:30p.m. which will be 2:30a.m. in Alabama.
We will be flying from Beijing to Nanjing on Sunday and then on Monday, March 26th we will meet our daughter face to face for the first time!  What a blessed day March 26th will forever be in our memories! 
In 1996 Greg and I were in a very bad auto accident.  We slid off the road and hit a driveway embankment that worked as a ramp and the vehicle was propelled into the air.  We flipped and landed in trees.  Greg had a brain injury and the doctors told us that they didnt expect him to live.  I had crushed vertebrae and wasn't sure if I would be able to walk again.  God healed us both miraculously and we knew then that God had work for us to do still here on earth.  That accident was on March 26, 1996.  We will forever celebrate this day.  Not only as the day we lived through an horrible accident, but now as the day we will be united with our precious daughter.  We are so thankful to be alive and have the opportunity to have two awesome sons and one beautiful daughter!!!
Thank you so much for your prayers.  You all mean more to us than you'll ever know!
Gotta go, next post will be from Beijing!

Were going to China!!!

We are SO excited to share the good news with you that we have received our travel approval today and we are ready to book our flight to China!!!!  We are leaving in two weeks!  WOW!  I (Angie) can not believe the time is here!  I think that through all of our adoption paperwork and process this past year and 3 months, a part of me has never really believed with all my heart we would ever make it.  Maybe it is a defense mechanism to protect myself if and when bad news came.  So, now, here I am thinking about ALL the things that need to be done, all the final preperations, and I can't sleep.  I am just too excited!  We just received the call from AGCI tonight about 6:30.  I have been laying in bed trying to go to sleep, but sleep just will not come right now.  It is too bad, I have to be up before 5:00 in the morning.  But, I have been waiting to post this post on the blog for 15 months and it is finally here.  I have to share the news before going to sleep with you all that have been waiting on this news for so many months.

We will leave around March 20th headed for China.  Greg and I will fly first to Beijing and spend 3 days sightseeing, getting over jet lag and enjoying each others company.  Then we will fly to Nanjing on the weekend and be united with Xin Ping for the first time on Monday, the 26th.  We will spend a week in her province taking care of adoption appointments and paperwork and then fly to Guangzhou for the last week to finish the process.

We just received an update on Xinping and found out that she weighs 19lbs and she is almost walking.  She can walk if she has something to hold onto.  
I can't wait to be with Xin Ping.  I can not wait to get to know her, her likes and dislikes, what cute thing she does when she is tired, what facial expressions she makes, to watch her sleep, to hold her, to count her fingers and toes...
Yet, I am also anxious.  It has been my prayer that God prepare our hearts for the arrival on Xin into our family and also that He prepare her heart for our family.  Even though God communicated to me more than a year ago that we had a daughter waiting for us on the other side of the world, I still wonder how those first moments and days will be as we are getting to know each other.  Oh, I pray for peace for her little heart.  One of the required classes Greg and I took to prepare us for adoption asked us to imagine how we would feel if we were dropped off with strangers who don't look like us and don't speak the same language as we do and we can't understand why we were left with these strangers.  And these strangers keep smiling at us and getting really close to us, all up in our face and then start touching us and examining us all over as if to make sure we had all fingers and toes.  I get homesick just thinking about it!  The food we will cook for her will be different, the smell of our home will be much different, she will leave behind all familiar faces and her favorite nanny and her best friend. 
This is why we decided we would not change her name.  Her name will be the only thing she gets to keep that is familiar to her.  We decided we couldn't start calling her a name she has never been called after all the other difficult changes.

So, there is so much to do and so little time, and I am so excited to finally start packing and finishing up the rest of the details here. 

Please pray for God to work in Xin's heart and our hearts a divine bond and attachment to each other from the very first moment she is placed with us, like she has known us and we have known her all her life!

We love you guys and our Lord, who has blessed us with a daughter!

Happy LOVE Day!!!

When Greg and I began our adoption process, we knew we would face spiritual warfare.  A couple of weeks ago Greg and I found ourselves at two separate events about marriage and I was reading a book about marriage, "Have a new husband by Friday" (every married woman needs to read this excellent book!).  That weekend Greg and I talked a few hours and we became painfully aware of some cracks in the foundation of our marriage.  We decided to make some big changes and some new commitments to fight for our marriage.  We are very happy with the changes we see already in our marriage.  However, even as we are trying to make new better habits and choices, satan continually attacks.  So, I was studying in I Corinthians 13 about what love means.
I Corinthians 13:4-8: "Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails..."
The Greek word translated "is patient" in the NIV is "makrothymeo".  Makro means long and Thymeo means anger, wrath!  Wow!  I have been angry a lot lately!  Does that mean that I have loved!?!  Makrothymeo means to suffer long, long suffering, as opposed to being given to hasty anger or punishment.  OUCH!  That hits a sore spot.  It seems I have been given to hasty anger toward my husband and hasty punishment toward my children.  When I am angry and frustrated at Greg, it seems I also have a shorter fuse with the children.  Makrothymeo involves exercising understanding and patience toward persons.  Makrothymeo frequently suggests a refusal to retaliate.  I definitely need to exercise and practice this kind of love!  Love is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs!  This phrase comes from a Greek word, "Logizomai" which means to count, reckon, regard, consider, to occupy oneself with reckonings or calculations.  To reckon anything to a person is to put something to his account, what he must be answerable for.  I have such a bad habit of keeping a record of how my wonderful husband has wronged me and I become angered so easily.  Instead I need to always hope in and believe that what he does, he does not do to hurt or harm me, always protect and faithfully stand behind my man, always trust that he is fighting for our marriage, always persevere and endure the hard days.  I have decided to enjoy the good days and pray like crazy for God's perfect love to flow from me on the more difficult days.  Thank you all for your prayers and letting me share with you what I have learned and am still learning about love!
Yesterday, on 2/14/12, valentines day, our consulate approval was overnighted to the CCCWA in Beijing! :)  So, we are at our final step in our journey to get to our daughter!  I can't believe we are finally at this point!  It sure felt like we would never get here.  Now we are waiting on our travel approval from China and then we book our flights!!!

We Got it!

We received our provisional approval! Yeah!!!  We are so excited!  We are one step closer and counting down!  We are so close that I can actually list the remaining steps while in conversation!  Well, it seems that some of you were itching for news nearly as bad as we were because I have had two good friends call out of the blue (whom I haven't spoken with in months) yesterday and today asking for updates.  Sorry it is hard for me to keep the blog updated.  After spending all day on the computer, it's not what I want to look at when I come home.  It also makes it hard that we don't have internet at home.  To do anything online, I have to go to one room in my house, in a certain corner of the house to access wireless internet from my neighbors.  :)  (Don't worry, its my parents and they don't mind.)  Anyway, I will try harder to stay up to date as we get closer to reaching the light at the end of this tunnel.  The waiting has been so hard!  I was warned it would be.  It is miraculous, the way God has grown the love in our hearts for our daughter and sister over the past months. 

Are remaining steps are as follows...
We are now waiting for a letter from NVC which should arrive in a week.  Once we get that to the consulate in Guangzhou, we will wait about three weeks to receive a Consulate Approval.  Then we send that to China and ask for Travel approval to travel in to China.  The travel approval usually takes about three weeks.  Once we have that, we can plan our travel and we should travel three weeks later.  So, put it all together and we should travel about two months from today.  Or at least, that is typical.  However, I'm finding that you can't ever expect anything to happen as it typically does.  So, we will travel when and only when our Almighty God is ready.  And that I know for sure!

As we are nearing travel we are busy getting immunizations (measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, and typhoid, ouch!), applying for visas, getting documents notarized and ready to go, racking our brains trying to think of everything we will need to take and need at home, toddler proofing the house, getting Rx's to take for us and Xinping just in case we/she gets sick while we are in China, etc.

We have MORE exciting news!!!  We applied for a matching grant through Brittany's Hope and they are going to match $7000 that we will raise to make a total of $14,000 to go toward our remaining adoption expenses!!!!  And our adoption agency is donating $500 toward our expenses!  God, our Father provides!  He is faithful.  He is a God who gives and takes away, but HE IS always FAITHFUL!  He has taught me and molded me so much this year and I have so much yet to learn and so far to go.

You are all SO AWESOME and I'm so thankful for all of you!  Thank you for helping to carry the burden when it has been too heavy to bear alone and thank you so much for lifting us up continually in your prayers!

What does the Bible say about adoption?

As I read through the Bible this year, I made a note of each reference to the orphan.  I want to share as a reminder of God's heart for the widow and orphan.
Happy New Year!!

Exodus 22:22-24 Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan.  If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry.  My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; you wives will become widows and your children fatherless.

Deuteronomy 10:18-19  He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.  And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 14:28-29  At the end of every three years, bring all the tithes of that year’s produce and store it in your towns, so that the Levites (who have no allotment or inheritance of their own) and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied, and so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

Deuteronomy 16:10-11  Then celebrate the Feast of Weeks to the Lord your God by giving a freewill offering in proportion to the blessings the Lord your God has given you.  And rejoice before the Lord your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name-you…and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows living among you.

Deuteronomy 24:19  When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it.  Leave it for the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

Deuteronomy 26:12  When you have finished setting aside a tenth of all your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give it to the Levite, the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied.

Deuteronomy 27:19  Cursed is the man who withholds justice from the alien, fatherless or the widow.

Psalm 10:14 But you, O God, do not see trouble and grief; you consider it to take it in hand.  The victim commits himself to you; you are the helper of the fatherless.

Psalm 68:5-6a A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.  God sets the lonely in families…

Isaiah 1:17 …Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.  

Isaiah 10:1-2  Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.

Jeremiah 5:28  Their evil deeds have no limit; they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it, they do not defend the rights of the poor.

Jeremiah 7:6  If you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow and…then I will let you live in this place…

Jeremiah 22:3 Do no wrong or violence to the alien, the fatherless or the widow…

Job 29:12  because I rescued the poor who cried for help, and the fatherless who had none to assist him.

Job 31:17  if I have kept my bread to myself, not sharing it with the fatherless-

Zechariah 7:10  Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor.

Malachi 3:5  …I will be quick to testify against …those who oppress the widows and the fatherless…

John 14:18  I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

Ephesians 1:4-5,14  In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.  …you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God/s possession- to the praise of his glory.

Titus 3:7 …so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life.

James 1:27  Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by this world.

I John 3:1  How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!  And that is what we are!

I praise you, Lord, for your heart for the orphan and adopting me to be your daughter, a daughter of the King of Kings!

Mailed in our new LOC

We received our revised Letter Seeking Confirmation yesterday from China and we mailed it to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.  We are so thankful to be done with that (hopefully) and moving forward again.  If the Lord is willing, we should travel in about three months.  We now wait for an approval from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services which takes about three weeks.  We will keep you posted.

New LOC has been mailed from China

I received news that our new Letter Seeking Confirmation has been mailed from China today.  We pray it arrives soon.
Thank you for your prayers!