in a {nUTSHELL}

2013...already a month into this new year.  wow!

     I'm excited to announce that this week our adoption paperwork is sitting on the Clerk of Courts desk waiting to be signed.  That means our adoption will be finalized soon.  

I have not blogged much about our journey through foster care and adoption.  We are adopting locally and through North Carolina's foster care system so most of our story is confidential for the time being.  I also didn't want to talk about our sons as foster children.  This was never short term for us and calling the boys foster kids felt temporary.

This weekend I had the opportunity to share our story at a local church.  And as I thought back over the last year as life changing and hard as it has been; the year has flown by. 

In a nutshell it has been a year since we first met these little boys.  They were five and six years old.  Adorable!  Quick smiles.  Adventurous!  Lovable.

It was not a quick decision to bring them into our home.  If you know our family you know that we intended to adopt a young child, preferably under a year old, and just one.  I repeat just one baby was the plan.

We also had a lot of things to consider with adopting older children.  Not just their own history, but how it would affect the three children already  living in our home.  It was an intimate process that the Lord took us through.  A lot of prayer, even some tears.  I don't know how else to say it but the Lord gave us faith.  We knew that bringing the boys into our home would be obedient.

They came to live with us in June 2012.  We had a great summer.  There were a few months of adjustment, but the Lord was faithful.  We experienced Him going before us in amazing ways. 

My favorite story is the morning we brought the boys to church and a good friend became emotional when she saw them.  She had been a teacher for one of the boys a couple of years earlier and had been praying for him ever since.  She later showed me the three by five card where she had his name written down and what she had been praying for him.  

Her prayers were answered along with ours.  Our journey to get to the place where we can call these boys our own has had many twists and turns.  It is not how I would have written the story.

My story would have no adventures, no surprises, no heartbreak, no tears.  But I would be writing fiction.  Reality is we are all orphans with messy pasts, we need a Savior, a hero to come rescue us.  

My God is a much better author than I am. 

 I have no idea what lies ahead of us with these two kids.  I just know more than ever after the last year that my God does know, He's got it, He's in control, He's got a plan for these boys lives.  For all five of my kids lives.  

And as I help raise them I hope I will always reflect on my own adoption by my heavenly father.   Who has called me His own.