Reflections

Well, its now February, 2009 and so much has happened. Maria has now been with us 7 months Wow how the months have flown by. She loved her Christmas time and the whole month of preparation for Christmas. She is still waiting on that first real snow to enjoy some sledding but hopefully God will give us at least on snow before the winter is over. Maria's ability to adapt has just amazed me. She is very functional in her English speaking ability now. She absolutly loves her sisters and she enjoys having a huge extended family.....she thinks everyone she meets is a cousin or an uncle. She no longer has withdrawn crying episodes and she accepts the disciple from both her mom and dad. She loves homeschooling and is really starting to spread her wings in math....a far cry from when we first brought her home and she hated the mention of the word school. Well this is supposed to be a post about REFLECTIONS on this whole adoption.


The core things that I have become deeply convinced of through this whole process are:


1. God can and will answer our prayers! Likely not on our time schedule (unless it lines up with His), likely not in the way we may be expecting him to answer and sometimes not with the answer we may want yet he does Hear and He does Answer! If we could have had our way we would have left Panama within a few days of getting there. We prayed for such a quick turnaround but this would have been the worst thing we could have done. Maria neeeded every day of those three weeks to help her bond with us, I can't imagine how things might have been if we had left in just one week.....But God knew that and it amazes me how intricate are his plans.

2. If you feel the Holy Spirit has called you to do something God will equip you with all you need to meet that calling. When we first began this process we did not have the money it takes to do an international adoption, we knew that we would have to rely totally on God to help us with the finances. What is interesting is that the wheels of progress for the adoption took 2 years which was enough for us to save up what we needed. God did provide
It has been said God doesn't always call the equipped but he equips all those he calls. I believe that.

3. We have learned from this that God cares greatly about those that have been "forgotten" by society, and that every Christian can be the hands, feet and heart of Jesus in reaching out in some way to the forgotten right here in our communities. God will use us if we will just let him.