To-Do List

The day after I got back from the retreat, in prayer, God gave me a to-do list, one after the other:

• Get the home study process started.
  Even though I still couldn’t say absolutely that this was going to happen, I felt like we needed to start walking in that direction. I did that – got the info from Jodi about the agency she used, contacted them, and got the process started.
• Look into Ethiopia and Uganda, about adopting older children.
  For Uganda - I have been talking to Jodi to get more information about Kato Fred and maybe other older boys who are connected to him and available for adoption from the orphanage director. She just got a reply back from the director today, saying that he is available for adoption, and that he is 10 years old, in 5^th grade. :)
  
  For Ethiopia -- One of the things Eileen shared with Karen and me on the way to the retreat was about an orphanage she visited in Ethiopia called the Kolfe Boy’s Orphanage. It is a home for mostly older boys, that have no real hope of being adopted. She said it broke her heart, because the boys were so sweet and friendly, and happy to have them visiting; but the orphanage itself was in awful condition – windows broken out, just a big empty room for a cafeteria (no tables or chairs), a “kitchen” where they basically just cooked in a beaten up pot over a fire (this is her post about her first visit there -- http://jobsdaughters.blogspot.com/2007/11/forgotten-boys.html). When she got back, she wrote about it in her blog, and over the past couple of years she has raised tens of thousands of dollars to help renovate the orphanage.
  
  As she shared about the boys, my heart was really touched. So, when God said to look into Ethiopia, that was my first thought. I knew that Eileen was going back for a visit (she’s actually there right now), so I wrote her and told her the same thing I had told Jodi – that God was speaking to me about adopting a couple of older boys, and I wasn’t sure from where, but would she just be open to the Holy Spirit’s leading while she is there, if there were a couple of brothers that felt might be possibilities for us to adopt.

I really feel like God is going to do something in our church, that He is going to move on many families to adopt orphans, and these next three things all relate to that:

• Talk to my book club.
  These are all my closest friends, and I felt I should share with them what God has been speaking to me about adoption. I did that the next night at our meeting, and they were all very encouraging and excited.
• Order the book Small Town, Big Miracle.
  It’s about a little church of 200 in Texas, where the pastor and his wife adopted some children, and it spread through their church until their church had adopted 72 children). I did that, and read it already – amazing story.
• Start a blog.
  I didn't want to, because I'm not really into putting my life out there for anyone to see. There are a lot of blogs, and even a lot by people who have adopted kids from all over, so I'm thinking, what is the purpose of me putting one more out there? But I really feel like God wants to move on his church, and our church in particular, to become his arms to reach out and begin to gather in the millions of orphans in the world. And I felt like he said to me that my circle of influence is a different circle from everyone else out there, though it may overlap somewhat, so I can reach out to different people than someone else could -- like God is tossing pebbles in a pond in different locations, causing the ripples to spread out and overlap one another, to reach the whole pond, so to speak. So I'm doing this out of obedience. :)