Please pray!!! Ugandan adoptions on hold....

Please join w/ me in some strong prayer! I received an email last night from our adoption agency telling us that Ugandan adoptions were put on hold. Apparently the US is not pleased w/ the wording the Ugandan judges are using to grant guardianship to US citizens. I'm not completely sure exactly what is going on. This will affect our adoption, but more importantly there are families there in Uganda right now who have guardianship of these Ugandan children, but are not being allowed to leave w/ them. Their own children & our government is saying they can't leave w/ them! This is very upsetting, but I know God can change those embassy workers' hearts. If we all join together in prayer miracles can happen..... Please pray hard!!!

18.3 Million Merry Christmases

There are 18.3 million children in this world living without a mom & dad...

Jason Kovacs Blog

This year has been really fun preparing for Christmas with Braden. He now can understand why we celebrate Christmas, & all that is going on. I'm so excited for tomorrow morning with the boys. For them to open up their stockings & presents, spend time with family, make Jesus a birthday cake :-), but I'm also feeling some mixed emotions as well. What are our 2 little princesses going to be doing tomorrow? As they prepare for bed soon, do they even know it's Christmas? Do they even know tomorrow is a special day? Will they have someone to give them hugs & kisses & tell them Merry Christmas? It kills me to think what situation they'll be living while their brothers are here happy, being loved, & spending time with family. What's even harder is to think about the rest of the millions of orphans that don't even have a family waiting & praying for them. They have no one to cry to, be loved by, to call Mommy & Daddy. I have so much anger towards what these children have to endure. The only hope I have is to know that the hatred Satan has towards these vulnerable children started with one Child. The Child that has given us the ultimate gift of eternal life & the Child that will soon come back to save these children & be their ultimate Father. The hope I have is that my Savior will stand beside those children to endure everything they are enduring, & in the end will devour the one that is causing all their pain.

God gave us the ultimate gift on Christmas....His Son. His Son who came to our sinful world to pay the ultimate price so that we may become His adopted sisters/brothers. Because of what Christ did, we are now adopted into His family. Why are there so many orphans waiting for a home? God sent His Son to be beaten, tortured, & bruised so He could adopt us into His family, when all we need to do is set up a spare bed in one of our many spare bedrooms, trust in Him to provide, yes, quite a bit of money, to adopt a child into our family? A child that will wake up tomorrow morning, with no one to celebrate Christmas with. A child that has absolutely no one in this world to care & love them.

I know I'm so anxious for next year. To throw on some purple Christmas pj's along with our blue ones. To have dolls waiting under the tree along with all the cars, planes, & trains, & most of all to love on those little girls & give them a family to celebrate Christmas with for the 1^st time in their little lives with their brothers. What will you be doing next year for Christmas? Filling your spare rooms with TONS of presents or filling it with a child that knew no family until you decided to give them a home?

Just something to think about.... I get this response a lot.... “We could never adopt. It's too expensive.” Remember what the creator of the universe gave up 2000 years ago so that we could be adopted into His family. May this Christmas be one where we give thanks for our adoption and maybe, just maybe take a moment and think about what we can do for the “Christmasless” orphans of this world.

!!!Merry Christmas!!!

Photo by: Seriously_Crawf

http://kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com/2009/11/we-have-had-one-of-those-really-great.html

Info about Uganda

If you want to know anything about Uganda or the reason why we switched & chose Uganda, please read this blog! This couple adopted a beautiful little boy from Uganda as well. They probably don't even know I read their blogs, but they actually were one of the influences on us switching to Uganda.

Link: http://james127.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-uganda.html

Little bits of Uganda

This is a blog I've been following from a girl living in Uganda. She has a home full of 13 or 14 orphaned girls & works w/ very needy & vulnerable children. I'm going to share her blog entries from time to time for the few of you who have asked me about Uganda & the situations there. Some of the stuff she writes about are hard to take in, but it's her & all those children's every day life. She does an amazing job at being His hands & feet. I pray God will place a special person like her in my 2 little ones lives until they are in my arms.....

http://kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com/2009/10/full.html

This song so captures my feelings! Just wanted to share while we wait.....

AMOS STORY
Aaron Ivey. ©2009 IVEYMUSIC. (ASCAP)

Another photograph to wrestle in my head
Another sleepless night on concrete featherbed
These thoughts of you like bullets to my soul
We’ve got to find a way to get you home

I’ll find a way to get you here
If it takes my fleeting breath
Another sunrise hits the ground
And it’s a dark lonely sight
Lightyears away I hope you know
There is somebody searching
For the way to get you here

I will get you here

Throw the clocks away and run out to the street
We’ll fly to distant clouds where it’s just you and me
A day will come when all of this is gone
You’ve got to find a way to believe

I’ll find a way to get you here
If it takes my fleeting breath
Another sunrise hits the ground
And it’s a dark lonely sight
Lightyears away I hope you know
There is somebody searching
For the way to get you here
I will get you here

Close your eyes and dream of a better day with me
As angels hold you tight, may you sleep in peace tonight

So dream, dream, dream my child
Hear the whisperings of hope
It’s a song that you can sing, as you sleep in peace tonight

UGANDA!!!!

Hey everyone!
It feels like forever since I've given an adoption update....
Since the last time I blogged, we have transferred to a different agency, switched from the Ethiopian program to the Ugandan program, & have received a refund check for some of our $ we sent to our old agency.....

Why all the changes you ask??? Let me tell you :-)

We've been stuck in the same phase of the adoption for quite some time now. We needed about $12-13,000 just to continue on to the next phase with our old agency. We've been praying hard for God to reveal to us what to do next. We knew in our hearts He still wanted us to pursue the adoption we just weren't quite sure what steps He wanted us to take next. Someone asked Josh if we had ever thought about the Ugandan program. They talked a little about this, & when Josh got home spoke to me about it as well right away. We decided it was something we could pray about. The only hard part in switching programs was that our old agency didn't have a Ugandan program so we knew we would have to transfer to another agency. Knowing we could lose quite a bit of $ since we've been sending the old agency $ for about a year now, we needed to know this was really what God wanted us to do. We asked a godly couple from church to walk beside us in prayer for a week about this decision. After much prayer & asking others what they thought about it, we all came to a conclusion that there was no reason at all why we shouldn't transfer. Doors have been opening up wide for us & we have no doubt that we have made the right decision. Now looking back on things, God has been preparing the way for this for a while now. I was a little disappointed that we hadn't been excepted for any of the grants we had applied for, but had we been given that grant $ we probably wouldn't have gotten that back. Little things we look back on now that God had closed the doors on, now make sense to us on why He was doing it. Weeks before Josh talked about changing to Uganda, I had been looking at other agency's websites & programs, not b/c we were having problems with ours, but just because, or what I thought was just because was actually God nudging me into looking for other options for us ;-) There are no coincidences!! Only God-incidences!!!! We absolutely LOVE our new agency! We have a conference call with our new case worker on Thur. & look forward to working with her. We did lose a little $ from our old agency as they refused to refund some of it, but we now only need about $6-7,000 to COMPLETE our adoption with our new agency as opposed to $12-13,000 just to get to the next phase with the old agency.
We are very excited to see what God has planned next for us & God willing we will be heading to Uganda to pick up our 2 little ones as soon as God prepares the way!!!!!