I continued to resist the idea of adoption for several months. My wife (who is awesome by the way) continued to pray for me and asked God to change my heart. She understood that it was my selfishness that was stopping me from moving forward with the idea. She , in her quiet wisdom never pointed it out to me the selfish attitude that was in my heart. I slowly started to allow God to speak to me and change my heart. The final straw was when we were watching a video from Family Life Today. Dennis Reiney was asking the crowd how many of them were adopted? A few people in the audience raised their hands. He then read a passage from Ephesians 1:3-5 which reads: "Praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will." I suddenly realized that I had been adopted when I did not deserve it! All of my concerns about where they came from and the baggage they would bring was dismissed. At no time had God said that we had too much baggage, or the cost was too high. "In love" he accepts us just as we are. Who am I to reject the children that God has planned to be part of our family?
On March 1st 2007 we sent in our preliminary application to the adoption agency. Elissa had a vision of getting two toddler girls to add to our clan. Shortly after sending in the application we received a video of waiting older kids who needed family's. We watched the video and dreamed of what God was going to do. One of the kids was a boy (about 7 years old) who had a leg amputated at birth. We were told that his mom was attacked by cattle while pregnant and his leg was deformed and had an infection when he was born. At the end of the interview we were told that he could not figure out why all his friends were going to family's and no one wanted him. I knew immediately that God was calling us to be his family. This did not meet with the idea Elissa had in her head. We agreed that if he was available when we were far enough along to put in the request for kids we would move forward with Abete.
Elissa was still praying for wisdom on the second child. It was going to be a toddler girl. After all we promised Zoe (who is our only girl) that we would get her a little sister. We looked through the videos over and over praying about who the little girl would be. Elissa kept coming to the same girl named Kidist. She kept dismissing the idea because Kidist was about 10 years old. On mothers day weekend we attended an adoption conference with Kingdom Kids in Spokane Washington. We met an amazing family who had adopted 3 girls from China and 3 girls from Ethiopia. All 6 girls were special needs kids. One specifically had a leg amputation exactly like Abete. We spent a lot of time talking to Yolanda the mother of the girls and she shared with us everything we were wondering about dealing with the issue we were going to face. It confirmed for Elissa that Abete was the child for us, however there was still the little girl we were praying for. Then Yolanda looked at Elissa and asked her "What about Kidist?" At no time had Elissa mentioned that she was being led to this beautiful little girl. God used this wonderful lady to confirm that he intended Kidist to be the one.
So back to the question "are we crazy". Many people think we are, but we are not accountable to people. We will stand before Jesus Christ and give an account of what we did with the gift of salvation he gave freely to us. If you don't understand this principal it is simple. 1) We are separated form God because of our sin. No amount of work will pay for what we have done. We can go to church every Sunday, we can give all of our money to him, we can volunteer all of our time and it will not cover our sin. 2) Jesus came to earth 2000 years ago and lived a perfect life. Jesus was put to death on the cross for all of our sins. Past, present and future. 3) three days after being crucified Jesus was raised from death. His sacrifice was the required atonement to pay for our sin. 4) All that is required of us now is to accept the free gift that he provided for all of us. When Jesus was asked "what works were required to enter the kingdom of heaven?" He replied that we are "to believe in the one the Father sent." John 6:29. If you need further information, please go to grace-alone.org.
Rob
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