Happy New Year!
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” 2 Cor. 5:17
We are so thankful for the new life we received when we decided to go all in with Jesus. Sure it was a risk, trusting in something/someOne we couldn’t completely see with our eyes, although evidence of His activity was (and still is) all around. And now, as we enter into 2011, we get to begin another new chapter in our lives as a family of eight. Unaware of the challenges we’ll face, God promises that His “lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning, Great is (His) faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23. Thank goodness! And how exciting!
Our hope and prayer is that God will use our story to motivate others to follow His call in their lives to experience the blessings of adoption. We certainly are examples of how He can accomplish much with little. Evidence of that is in a previous post about our adoption expenses.
The following is the beginning of an abbreviated version of our first trip to Ethiopia. Of course we are still processing much of what we experienced and for the sake of brevity, many details will not be included. If anyone is interested in more information, however, about our process or experiences, please don’t hesitate to ask- we’d love to share!
Traveling:
We were so excited to see our children that we couldn’t relax and sleep on the 12 hour flight. We arrived at 9:30 am Ethiopia time which was 1:30am our time. One of the first things Woudeneh said at the airport was, “no resting today- too much to do.” Thankfully, the adrenaline kept us awake and excited about our first day in Ethiopia.
Day 1 (Saturday):
We went straight to the transition house (a place for West Sands couples to stay where children also stay between passing court and going home- a brilliant idea), and settled in our rooms before having lunch. We then headed to the orphanage to meet our kids. Out of the four couples traveling together, there were 3 orphanages to visit, in two days. We learned that we would all go together on these initial visits. Although it made us look like a documentary crew, we were happy to have friends there taking pictures and videotaping so we could concentrate on enjoying that initial meeting. Obviously, we quickly bonded with the other couples with us!
Ours was the first orphanage the group would visit. The expectations were lowered a bit when just before entering, we were told not to tell the children the purpose of our visit, nor to take pictures of ANYONE other than our kids. This, plus the fact that we couldn’t speak their language made the initial meeting a bit awkward- but forever preciously etched in our minds. You can see in the pictures how hesitant Chernet and Mulu were to our affection. Woubet, on the other hand, had no trouble loosening up. Thankfully, God gave us a peace and joy about this meeting and although we didn’t want to leave, we loaded back into the van only 30-40 minutes after arriving.
(more to come)
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