"Do you want to get well?"

This is from part of Daryl's message this morning ... it just kind of touched my heart and made me think of what my life has been like these past 2 1/2 years trying to become parents.

John 5:1-6
"Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem or a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethsda and which is surrounded by five covered colonades. Here a great number of disable people used to lie - the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?""

When I heard Daryl read from this passage this morning I thought to myself "huh, that's what I have been for the past 2 1/2 years,an invalid. I was unable to move on, unable to accept that God was in control of my life and not me. I was unable to truely live again ... because I just layed there in my dark and dreary pit of a life that I had created. I wasn't able to see at that time that it was really myself that had created that pit ... and that it was only me that was in the way of moving on. That I was the only one keeping myself from really being able to live. That question that Jesus asked the invalid in the story seems so simple ..."Do you want to get well?" That man had layed there for 38 years and made excuse after excuse of why he was still an invalid. Finally it just took Jesus being blunt with the man and telling him to "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk." What an easy thing to say, but such a hard thing to do when you just don't believe. This passage really brought back how dark these past couple of years have been ... and how much of my life I let slip by being miserable and losing faith each and everyday. It makes me sad to think of how much I hated God during this dark period in my life. How much bittness I had towards him ... Right now I am trying to figure out how I came out of that period in my life. I don't really remember making a conscious decision to "Get up!" But I feel so thankful that I am not in that same place anymore. I am so glad that God never gives up on us ... because if He did he should have given up on me a long time ago.
:0) I kind of feel like this passage was a gift to my soul this morning. Last week I started feeling really overwhelmed by everything that is going on. It's all because I have had some down time with the whole adoption stuff and my mind was able to start thinking ... always a bad thing! haha But I just started thinking about how impossible this was going to be to save up this much money. This passage really woke me up and made me realize that the thoughts I was having this last week are exactly where I was and where my mind always went during that really dark period in my life. I don't want to go back there ... I am refusing! So I am just going to "GET UP!" and trust God in this amazing adventure He has Alya and I on right now.

We recieved a call last Tuesday (1-26-10) from Bundle of Hope telling us that we were officially approved into the agency. They also told us to consider having our profile be reviewed by a birthmother. If we agreed to that and were chosen then we would need to put down $6,000. When I got off the phone with her I just started crying ... it hadn't even been a week since we had mailed off our application and here we were getting a call about a possble match. How quickly all of this is going! Alya and I prayed about it that night and decided that it just wasn't time yet ... and we felt total peace with that decision. I would have loved to tell them yes, but again that would have been me taking control ... and I just don't want to do that anymore. We have a few more fundraisers in the works right now. Tossing around some ideas of some coming up, and really praying that we get approved for a potentially really big one! We should be hearing back from someone on that in the next couple of days hopefully. We still need to get our home study sent in from FSS (hoping our new one for this year is done quickly so that we can send in a copy of that one since the one I have is from last year) We also have to get a Lifebook completed which is kind of like a little scrapbook for the birthmothers to look at when they are selecting an adoptive family for their baby. I typed up fundraising letters today and copied and mailed out 53. I am just in constant prayer about our journey all day long. I dream about it ... dream about our baby. I just can't wait for that day to come ... praying that it will be soon. Praying that God moves in powerful ways!

It's officially started!

Our adoption adventure that is ... I just mailed in our application this afternoon after school. After I got back into my car from leaving the post office I just started crying. Crying tears of excitment, tears of anticipation, tears of amazment in how big our God is! I know that this journey is only just starting ... and I know that it's probably going to be a roller coaster of emotions over the next several months to however long it takes to bring our baby home ... but I just can't help getting so excited to see what GOD is going to do. I know that this new journey in our lives HAS to be all him, because there is no way for me to have control this time. I just keep praying that I keep a positive attitude toward everything that we will go through on this new journey. I just want to sit back and enjoy everything that we get the priveledge to experience. I want to remember everything so that I can tell our little baby how many amazing miracles God did in our lives to bring them into our family.

It's been awhile since my last post ... just trying to get though the holidays and all of the buckeye making we did. We have raised $1,458.00 so far. $500 just went towards our adoption application fee which leaves $958 in our adoption savings account. We still have three more bottles of change to turn in as well. The next step is getting approved by the agency and then applying for as many grants as I can to raise more money. We are still trying to come up with more fundraising ideas to help us out as well.

I approached Alya just a couple of weeks ago when I was doing the finishing touch-ups to our application ... at first we had decided to just put that we would accept any sex and any race for an adoptive baby. But I just kept feeling like a little girl was being placed on my heart. I asked Alya what he thought about it, and he agreed that he wanted a little baby girl in the house again too. So we have decided to request a bi-racial baby girl on our application. It's going to cost more money than we had originally thought because we have chosen a different race. But I really feel like this was placed on our hearts for a reason ... and our God is bigger than any amount of money! Her name will be Amiah Grace Cotton and we just can't wait to see her beautiful face. I can't wait to bring my baby girl home with her mommy and daddy that have been waiting forever for her. <3

seeing a light at the end of the peanut butter balls!

It's been a long peanut butter kind of weekend! :0)

I have spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday making 118 dozen buckeyes with the help of Alya, Kacie, Shaun and Samantha. We have a requested buckeye total of 131 dozen ... so close to being done! And the cut off date isn't until Tuesday. I noticed that while making the buckeyes that my ingredients were going a lot farther than I had anticipated. So, now I get to RETURN ingredients to get money back. I had originally estimated that we would only get a little over one dollar in profit from making/selling the buckeys ..... BUT!!! .... I think that we spent about $184.23 for all of the supplies which leaves us with $470.77 to add to our adoption fund! I stand in awe everyday to see how God is at work through this. We now have the money to send in our application. We are leaving for Ohio this Friday, so I don't know if I will get to send in the application before Christmas or not. I might bring all the information with me and send it out up there. We'll see what happens ... I am so eager to get it in the mail soon. I just feel like mailing that application is really the start to the next step in our adoption journey. Oh how I miss having a little baby in the house. I can't wait to receive such a precious gift again! I can't wait to tell our little baby how many amazing people and things God used to bring them into our lives. :0)

Buckeye Madness!!!

So my best friend Kacie came up with another amazing fundraiser idea ... and I will have to admit I wasn't very confident in the idea that people would want to actually buy them. But boy was I WRONG!!!! Holy Cow! Seriously we have only been selling them for TWO, count them TWO DAYS and we already have over 76 dozen to make! That is over 912 buckeyes to make. How crazy is that!?! We were going to have a Buckeye Making party on Wednesday night ... but I guess I will be having a Buckeye making party allll weekend! HA! :0)

I just really can't get over how many people are partnering in on this journey with us. We now have a total of $1232.75 pledged for our adoption fund now! Both Alya and I just feel so blessed to be on this current adventure in our lives. I just really can't wait to bring a little baby home to share with all of these amazing friends and family that helped bring them home.

I went to an adoption ministry get together this past weekend and I met a woman who is good friends with the woman who started the adoption agency we are going to go wtih. She has known her for the last 12 years ... and I was just so excited to yet again find someone else that had a relationship with this agency. I am so excited to start working with them ... and I feel like that day is coming near! We are hoping to send in our application either just before or just after Christmas. I had FSS fax a copy of our homestudy to the adoption agency to see if it would be approved or not. If not then it will cost us and additional $1,300. So we are really praying that it is approved. It's funny at how much peace I feel about this process. I feel a little overwhelmed at times when I catch myself thinking about how the cost seems so impossible ... but then I just remind myself that it's all in God's hands and I don't have one single thing to worry about! I am so excited to see how HE is going to work in all of this. I am aching to hold my little baby in my arms ... I can't wait for that miracle. <3

investigations...

So one of my Facebook friends gave me the idea to look into making our adoption fund a non-profit organization. hmmm ... I think that would be awesome if it could work out. Having my mom help me out in that area because all the IRS lingo on the site goes waaaaay over my head! Hoping something could work out with that though, because it would be nice for our friends and family that are supporting us to be able to get that money back. There will definately be some investigations going on in that department. Never hurts to check things out ... on another note we received another $23.23 today from one of my students at school. God is so good! :0)

Amazed ...

I just feel so in awe of how much God has already been doing in just a week! It's amazing how much he can really do when you get out of his way and actually allow him to move in your life. I feel so blessed to have so many amazing friends and family that want to partner with us in bringing our little miracle baby home. We have 106 friends and family that have become fans of our group on facebook ... that means over 100 people that are praying for an amazing blessing to come into our lives. That alone makes me feel blessed to know that we have that many people who love and support us in this new adventure. In just a week we have already raised $380.75!!! I am still just so excited about this adventure God has us on ... I used to kind of dread it, because it just wasn't working out the way that I wanted ... but right now I just feel so happy and excited about what God is going to do!

The Beginning ... Our Story

Alya and I were married June 16, 2007, and like any newly married couple we were so excited about the idea of starting our own little family. We started trying for a baby right away and after a year of frustration and disappointment in being unable to conceive we decided to seek the help of fertility doctors. We found out in the summer of 2008 that we were unable to have our own children. It devastated me ... All that I had ever dreamed of when I was growing up was having a HUGE family one day, and my honest fear was never being able to have my own kids. It felt like I was living out my worst nightmare.

Pretty much anyone that knows me will say that I am a pretty stubborn woman ... so I decided that if I couldn't have my own kids naturally I was going to be a mom one way or another. We talked about in vitro or private adoption. And the cost of those things can be between $15,000-$20,000 which we just simply didn't have. So Alya and I started looking into becoming foster parents because we knew that it wouldn't cost us anything to bring a needy child into our home to love. We were officially licensed foster parents in February of 2009 and got our first little miracle six month old baby Hope that same month. For the first time since we had been trying to have a baby I really felt like baby Hope brought hope back into my life. She was perfect ... and she changed my life forever. We were able to share our lives with our little girl for 2 1/2 months and on the Friday before Mother's Day she was reunited back with her mother. I have never felt such pain in all my life. It felt like someone literally took my heart away. It's been a little over 6 months since they took my little girl away from us, and every day I still pray for her to come back home. We have been through a lot with working with the foster care system ... more than sometimes I think my heart can bear. We have been promised adoptable babies many times over the year, and I just don't know that my heart will survive if we keep going this route. After Hope was reunited with her mom I became very very bitter towards God. I hated him ... hated him for not allowing us to have our own kids, hated him for giving me the best thing that ever happened in my life and then taking it away again, hated him for choosing to create beautiful lives in people who could care less. I honestly just didn't really want anything to do with him anymore .. and I think a part of me slowly started dieing. I became extremely depressed and angry ... and have lived like that for way too long .... I think that I started letting go of my bitterness a little bit at a time. Allowing God to come into areas of my life that he really have never been. Realizing that I am a control freak ... and I have to let that go. Understanding that I can't control God, and no matter how much I hate that sometimes it's just not going to change.

So that has been a huge change over this past month or so and last week a good fried of ours sent me a link to a non-profit adoption agency here in Jacksonville. I have looked for the past two years at all kinds of adoption agency's ... and every time I have been so overcome with anxiety over how to pay for these agency's I just would stop looking. I discovered something though over this past year working with the foster care system. See with using an agency it might cost a lot of money but one thing I didn't realize that when working with a broken system like the foster care system ... it might not cost any money, but it will cost your heart. I just really started praying over working with this agency. I liked many things about it, one was that it was non-profit so they wouldn't be looking at taking all my money from me. Second, we knew people that had met the director several times and had friends that had adopted through the agency. We also were looking into adopting an African American or Bi-racial baby and because these children are so hard to place the agency actually eats some of the cost so that more families will want to adopt these precious children. I also realized one HUGE thing with working with this agency ... Alya and I don't have the money to adopt from an agency. The cost that we are looking at right now is $11,500 for the agency and an additional $2-5,000 for the birth mothers expenses. And we know very well that WE can't do it ... but I also know that I serve a bigger God that can. Over these last couple of years of trying to become parents I forgot all the times that God has come through in crazy, unimaginable ways in my life in the past. Ways that aren't even explainable ... but just plain God. I hadn't allowed God to enter into any part of this area in my life. I hadn't because being a mom was so near and dear to my heart that I was honestly kind of afraid of what God was going to do or say. Well .. I can now say for the first time, that I have surrendered all of this over to him. We have decided that we are going to send in our application to this agency ... but other than that we are just allowing God to move some mountains so that He can bring the perfect baby into our lives. And since I let go, and let God .. He has already been doing amazing things to get us there. We have already had friends that have told us that they want to partner in with us to bring our baby home. I feel so blessed to serve a God that never gives up on me even when I give up on him.

So ... this is a blog to keep you all updated on all the amazing things I KNOW God is going to do through this next adventure in our lives. I can't wait to see what he is going to do next! :0)