and then there were 3

God is doing something huge…I really don’t know how else to type this out other than just to say it and give him all the glory. God is also giving us a daughter. With special needs. And she is beautiful- a treasure! We are so in love with her and are blown away by God’s faithfulness to us in this journey. First the boys, and now our girly! We are so blessed and humbled that he would choose us to parent these 3 children. He has provided everything we have needed each and every day since we first committed to Sheppard. And we know he will continue to sustain us long after the kiddos are home with us. For our girly he has provided over and over again already. She is listed as “Salome” on Reece’s Rainbow.

 

 We are so so so excited to get our girly HOME and shower her with love and therapy and medical care and more love each and every day! We are so thankful God has given us the ability to meet her needs and add her onto our adoption (thanks to generous supporters who raised her grant money through RR, we didn't even have to fundraise for her adoption costs!) We have had so much fun getting her room ready- lavender walls, fit for a princess. Our boys’ room is coming together too- bit by bit, day by day we are getting closer to becoming a family. To God be ALL the glory for this! He is making our family into the way he wants it to be. And he makes no mistakes. I am feeling so anxious to just have them all home already! As we continue in this waiting period for travel dates, God keeps reminding me that I can have all the peace I need in him. I have been memorizing this verse-

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock Isaiah 26 : 3 & 4

He is indeed an everlasting rock, and while we can never repay him for paying for our sins and giving us eternal salvation, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to live our lives for his glory!

Submitted and Puzzle Fundraiser!

Today is a great day :) It is April 24, 2014 and our Dossier is officially SUBMITTED!!!! Thus begins the countdown to travel- we could be hearing when our travel dates will be in mere weeks! Eek! So much to do! I've already created the packing list of all packing lists so now it's time to get to it!

And we still have some fundraising to do haha. Whew! the next fundraiser we are rolling out is our Puzzle Fundraiser! We got this awesome puzzle for the boys (isn't it the coolest?):

It's a 1,000 peice puzzle and each peice can be sponsored for a $5 donation to our FSP through Reece's Rainbow! The link to our FSP is here: http://reecesrainbow.org/70400/sponsorfahringer and there is also a button on the right side of our blog that links to it. All donations are tax deductible! Once you make a donation, let me know (either a comment here on the blog or a message on our facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/#!/fahringerfamilyadoption) and I will write your name on the back of a puzzle peice for each donation! Once the puzzle is finished, we will frame it in a clear case so the boys can flip it over and see all the names of the people who helped us bring them home forever! It will be artwork for their room :) I will be posting updated pics of the puzzle as it gets filled in with more and more names so keep checking back here for updates!

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.