Ode to Lisa Jones!

Well, today was an interesting day. My daughter went home sick from school (something that's never happened before.) She stayed with a neighbor b/c I don't have sick leave built in. At the end of the day, I was waiting for my son to get home from a field trip so I could then pick Emily up and attend to her properly. I was on the phone organizing some stuff for my job at the school when I overheard the owner of the school saying Nathan's bus had been in a wreck. I hung up on the person I was talking to and promptly picked up Travis and drove to the accident scene. We arrived at the intersection to see around 7 squad cars/fire trucks/ ambulances. There were 2 totaled vehicles and the damaged bus. We weaved our way through the chaos until we found Nathan. He was relatively calm and unharmed, watching his friends being taken by stretchers to the ambulances. MY SON WAS OKAY! But others were not. There was nothing I could do for the children on stretchers, but I could do something for the ones crying hysterically as they watched as bystanders. I know b/c someone once helped my children as they watched horrors around them.

This scene today reminded me oh so much of when the logging truck hit us in AL. That day, once upon a time, Travis and I were trapped in our car and our kids were taken by ambulance to the hospital without us. It was our second day in AL, so we knew no one. A wonderful stranger, Lisa Jones, did something that changed my life. She saw that it would take a while for them to "jaws of life" me out of the car, so she followed the ambulance with my children, who were bawling and begging not to be separated from us (and it didn't help that they saw us hurt and bloody.) She then spent much of her day walking from the children's wing of the hospital to us, updating our family members on how the others were doing. ~At the expense of missing her sons' baseball games. It touched me so much that someone would care enough to stop and help, taking such preemptive measures against fear that threatened to consume us. I decided right then that if it was in my power to do so, I'd help other families when the situation arose.

Well, today was my day. Even though my son was okay and I had every reason to go and attend to my sick daughter, I could not leave the scene. I spent the next hour letting kids sit on my lap, holding various hands and talking non stop with the kids, explaining what was happening and doing everything in my power to ease their fears until their parents came. I'm not normally a patient person. It was the workings of the Spirit and I'm pretty sure it was the growth of the seeds that Lisa Jones planted in all our hearts April 11th, 2009. So this is not a pat on my back. An hour was the least I could do. This is a deep bow to Lisa Jones and people like her in my life. Their witness and character make me want to be a better woman. And this is a deeper still bow to God. Even though it was AWFUL to go through, I can see fruit sprouting from our wreck oh so long ago. This isn't the first time I've seen fruit from that tremendous pain and suffering. Strange how that works. I still wouldn't choose to do it again, but I can see loving hands working all things to the good.

Yes, God is good. Amen!

And then there was one........

Change is always in the air when doing fostering of any type and you learn very quickly to be flexible or you'll snap. This round of orphan care is no exception. We originally signed up for 2 kids, a boy our son's age and a girl our daughter's age. Well, the day after we committed to those 2, the director left us a message saying, "We need to talk." Between the time Project 143 interviewed the children in Latvia and the time we committed, the boy assigned to us became in need of medical care and is no longer able to travel to the US. So he's off the list and we're only hosting Evija, the girl our daughter's age. We're still excited to have her come!!

I was just reading "Kisses From Katie" this week about Katie Davis, who is adopting 13 girls in Uganda. In the book, Katie had an incident where she felt prompted to ask an elderly lady to live with her. She prayed and wrestled with whether she could handle it or not. She finally decided in faith to offer her home and let God work it out. Immediately after she offered, the woman said, "No, thank you." Katie laughed to herself and realized sometimes God asks us to do stuff just to test us and build us up. I feel a little bit of empathy for that situation. We were told it would be easier to just host one child at a time. However, when we were trying to choose between the 2 kids, we just could not say no to either of them. Even though we knew it would be a bigger undertaking, we felt in our hearts that we should offer our home to both and let God work it out. Well, God did work it out, just differently than we expected. With the boy pulled from the program, we're down to one. But we feel guided, protected, and hopeful that this will be a good experience.

Thanks for tuning in. We should know a bit more in a few weeks. :)

Change is in the Air

Well, most of you know we've had a heart for caring for kids who have no one else for all of our married life. We did orphan work a little in Latvia, did foster care for close to 6 years here in the US, sponsored kids and some other avenues along the way etc. This is not for a pat on the back, just giving some background on us. We looked into hosting programs many years ago, but our children were so young at the time (2 and 4). We always said we'd look into it again when the kids got older. Well, they're now 10 and 11, so we thought we'd look into it again. We've been researching and praying about what avenue to take for about 5-6 months now. We're happy to say, we've been accepted in "Project 143"'s winter host program. Two Latvian orphans will be coming to stay with us for 4 weeks (approximately Dec. 15-Jan 15). (Email me if you want to see pictures!)

The idea is to bless them with some time in America, some time with a family, and some time to celebrate holidays here. I'm so glad we lived in Latvia for 2 years, so we can hopefully make this a very smooth transition for them~~ although we may be skyping with Marika (my BFF from my time in Latvia) quite a bit! Hopefully some of you will want to follow this journey with us. If not, that's okay too. One of the things I learned in AL was this: God will provide the friendships we need and prune the rest. And in other circumstances, he grafts people into our lives, whether temporarily or permanently to allow them to be a part of our family. All 4 of us are looking forward to these kids being a part of our family for a month. We'll see what comes of it! :)