This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.
1 John 5:14
When Brandon and I started this journey we knew we were being asked to take a big step out in faith and believe God for the outcome.
We knew we were supposed to be adopting a child but we did not know how we would pay for the process. One of the most common responses we get when we tell people we are adopting internationally is that they could never afford to do the same.
My response is always...Neither can we.
International adoption is expensive. I plan to further break down what each dollar is going to in another post. There are a couple reasons I plan to do that. One, we are asking others to help us bring our child home and when we are fundraising I feel like it is very important to be transparent. Also, it might just be my Type A personality but I like to see things getting crossed of a list and goals met so it will also help you see what we have already paid for and what costs we still have coming up. Two, it will help to dispel the myth that one person is receiving all that money. It seems to me that people envision that we are giving our agency $40,000 in exchange for a child and that is simply not the case. The money is going to many different agencies, government offices, institutions, and people for their services.
Anyway, back to this blog post. We started this process back in January with the money for our home study and our first set of agency fees needed. We did not however have the second agency fees or travel money on hand. Brandon and I had waited and prayed for God to lead when we started the process. We felt God calling us to adopt back when I was pregnant with Benjamin but because many agencies require your youngest child to be at least a year old we waited for that milestone. We waited because all the money wasn't there. We waited because there was talk of Ethiopia shutting down to international adoptions.
We finally realized God was asking us to step out in spite of all those things. He was asking us to trust Him for the finances. He was asking us to trust that Ethiopia would remain open and that if it didn't that He would still be in control. For two people who like to plan and have safety nets this was a little scary.
What if we submitted our paperwork and Ethiopia shut down? What if we got to the end of our money and we didn't have the amount needed to finish? What if we were not prepared enough?
You know the great thing? God isn't asking us to do this in our own strength, wisdom, or financial ability.
He is simply asking us to trust Him to be everything we need. Throughout this process we have had Godly friends encourage us when we were at our weakest. Fellow adoptive parents share words of wisdom when needed. So many others share in the financial burden of this process.
We have had people we don't even talk to on a regular basis tell us "for some reason" they wanted to give to help us bring our child home. We know it is not just some reason. We know when God calls us to do something
HE. WILL. PROVIDE.
With that being said we had a dear and generous friend contact us today with the offer of a matching donation. Here is how it will work...
Any donation you make over the next 3 weeks(by July 24th) will be matched dollar for dollar up to $1,500!!!!!!!
You can private message me or comment below with the amount you would like to donate
or just use our Paypal button on this blog and put ***MATCH***
in the comment section.
Any amount that has been given small or large has been a blessing to us on this journey.
However if you would like your donation to go twice as far now is the time to give!!!!
We are trusting God to provide the remaining money needed through our friends. We are so thankful for friends that are obedient to what the Lord asks them to do.
God is Good!!!
