Since our last update at the beginning of the month, God has revealed so much and answered many prayers! We received an email from our adoption agency asking us to consider hosting a 9 year old girl from Ukraine in July. We had told them months ago that we did not want to host again because we became so attached to our last host daughter and then she decided she did not want to be adopted. It has been a grieving process for our family and we did not want our children to experience that hurt again. After our initial response of “no”, we prayed about it and God revealed many positives to us. As we continued to pray about hosting this precious girl, Christy once again felt that God was telling her to look up the meaning of her name. Her name means “resurrection” which to us felt like God was saying, “I am bringing you a new life to care for”. When the children found out about the possibility of hosting, they were so excited. Mekenzie, who is 9, is excited to be a big sister by 3 months!    

Long story short, we felt God’s direction to host this child of His and trust Him to work out the details. We ask that you pray for us as we work quickly to complete our international paperwork. If all the paperwork gets approved in time and we all feel that adding our host daughter to the family is God’s will, we will fly back to Ukraine with her at the end of July and adopt her in August!  

God has answered many prayers. We prayed for clarity of where He wanted us to adopt. We spent some time looking at other countries, including right here in the US. We kept feeling pulled to Ukraine and to a child in an orphanage. Ukraine only allows “blind” adoptions so if we did not host a child, we would go to Ukraine and then we would be shown profiles and pictures and would choose a child. We would then visit the child for a few days before deciding if she would be a good fit for our family. The child would also decide if she wants to be adopted by us or not. This process seemed a little scary and we worried about our children feeling left out of the process. After months of prayer, God took the fear away from Christy and like Jason had felt all along, she now felt peace that God was totally in control and He had already chosen our child so why worry about it. We now feel that God has shown us clearly that we are to host and possibly adopt this girl. (We would love to tell you her name but since Ukraine adopts blindly, we are not allowed.) God answered our prayer about working on grants. Christy worked hard and submitted a grant awhile back but never got word back. Adoption grants are very competitive so we have been praying for God to show us what grants to apply for. At this point we do not have enough time to apply for grants and have any awarded before the end of July so we are trusting our Lord and Savior to provide in other ways. Our FBI report will expire on July 27. Please pray our international paperwork will be approved prior to that date. It took 4 months to get the report so we do not have time to get a new one. There are so many answered prayers that we honestly cannot even list them all!

We appreciate your continued support and prayers. We have a lot to accomplish in a short time frame but we serve an amazing God who will work it all out to His glory!