Trust and perspective

While our "paper baby" is finished and waiting to be submitted to our boys' government, a whole new paper process has been taking up my spare time now- applying for adoption grants. The applications are miles long and involve interviews with our pastor who then has to fill out even more paperwork on our behalf. It's pretty daunting. Yet while I was looking up requirements on one of the grant sites the other day (The Orphan Foundation), I saw some statistics that helped me re-focus on why we are doing this. Yes the paperwork is hard. Yes the fundraising is even harder. But it is nothing compared to what our boys have been through already and what they would have gone through had God not opened our eyes to them in time.

There are 143,000,000 orphans in the world

There are an additional 20,000,000 “displaced children” in the world

The combined count of these categories makes the orphan population the 7th largest nation on the planet – slightly larger than the population of Russia



In Eastern Europe, less than 50% of the orphan population will live to see their 20th birthdays

In Eastern Europe, of the orphans that survive their 20th birthdays, 50% will end up in organized crime, drugs, or prostitution 

 



Since we committed to Sheppard in December, God has been teaching me something big. In the midst of the paper chasing. Getting bedrooms set up. Planning how to manage time off work. Fundraising. More Fundraising. In the midst of all this crazy. God is asking us to trust him, completely. He opened our eyes and broke our hearts for orphans in the first place. He loves Sheppard and Pierce more than we ever can and has sustained them all these years. He's got this. In light of this, suddenly the hard stuff of adoption- the tedious, never ending mess- seems so small. As Alden and I were worshipping with our church yesterday, celebrating Christ's ressurection and defeat of the enemy, it suddenly hit me just how patient God is with me. Every day when I worry about funds or travel, every day that I choose not to trust him, he loves me through it. He invites me again and again to trust him. And I realized just how blessed we are to even be on this journey. Here we are, out in these deep waters of a journey we never could have imagined for ourselves. What an undeserved blessing. What a God we serve.