It has been over a month since my last post and so much has happened! God is moving in amazing ways and showing us His master plan little by little. We had a wonderful Holiday season as we celebrated with family and dear friends.
Here is an update on the family front. At the end of December we took Taylor and four of her friends out to Portland Oregon to attend a Campus Crusade for Christ conference. They had an amazing time and it was a fun road trip with all the kids. For those of you who don't know what CRU (as we call it) is, it is like Youth Group for college kids. They had a great time learning from some amazing speakers and fellowshipping with lots of other college students from around the Northwest. They spent some time every day sharing the gospel with people around Portland and had a ton of great stories to share with us. Chase is staying busy with guitar lessons, friends, and middle school stuff!
The kids both just celebrated birthdays. On January 2nd Chasers turned the big 12 and on January 3rd Taylor turned 17! It is so fun having older kids and we love all that comes with it. Taylor just took her ACT's as she is preparing for college in the fall. She was planning on attending MSU this spring but has now decided fall as she will be returning to Haiti this Summer! Her Daddy and I are all for that!
I think often of what it will be like to have younger kids again...it is going to be so much fun!!! I can't wait! (Not that 8 is that young;)
We are working hard at collecting all of our paperwork for our dossier still. WOW! There is a lot to this whole thing. Just when we think we have it done we figure out more to do or to do over. We have had lots of do overs on our paperwork...little things like letterhead or incorrect notarization can stop the process. We sent out a support letter along with our Christmas cards this year and the response has been amazing. We are so extremely blessed by the love, support and generosity of our friends, family and even acquaintances. To be quite honest I was getting discouraged in December as to how it was all going to go. I knew we would be finished up with our paperwork in the early months of 2012 and was wondering how that would feel if we had that all done but not the funds to go along with it. Well, God picked my spirits right up and showed us tangibly by the love and generosity of others that He has it all figured out! So crazy how we sometimes forget or question. Every time I think we don't have enough money to adopt, the Lord gently reminds me that He does! All the money of the world is really His and he will get it to us in His time and in His way....all we need to do is be faithful to pursue His calling for us and Pray!!! I look forward to the future holidays with our whole family...praying that is in 2012! We still have LOTS of fundraising to do but we are trusting!!!
We have had a few speed bumps along the way but I know that even in the process God is using it to refine me and grow my family in their faith. As many of you know we hosted one of the children for a month this summer that we are in the processing of adopting. We also became very close with one of the other children that was being hosted here in Bozeman by a family who was not looking to adopt but to advocate on behalf of the child. Advocate families host the children in their home to expose the child to potential adoptive families. So at the end of the summer we knew we were going to be trying to pursue the adoption of those two specific children. Now here comes the hard part...I have not been able to blog of this until now...(And it is still very difficult.) We learned shortly after the children returned to Ethiopia that another family (not in this state) was also interested in the second child that we were. We did not know where this would land us but we do now. The other family also is pursuing adoption of that child :( And since the two children we are wanting to adopt are not siblings well...the other family would get first preference. Since they were only pursuing the adoption of one child and we were pursuing two they would be first in line to adopt this child. This was and is very hard news to hear and to let sink in. We know God nudged us to pursue these two kiddos and we felt like they were already ours...it is amazing how our hearts were moved to double the size of our children in such a short period. We all have had lots of mourning through this process....lots of asking "why?". As for now we are not sure what will happen. If this other family is not able to adopt we would be next in line and we are ready!
We are trying lots of different things for fundraising with the kickoff being a water bottle sale. We are excited about the buzz already and look forward to seeing our friends and family members toting around their "Simply Love" Ethiopian water bottles. If you are interested in purchasing one just email me and I can get you the details. We have set a big goal and want to sell 100 water bottles by the end of the month. Could you help us spread the word? People can even pay online on our blog under the DONATE button. The water bottles are 20 dollars each with shipping of $5 if they live outside of Bozeman. We will deliver all the local water bottles the first week of March and all out of town purchases will be mailed that first week as well.
Right now God is revealing even some more WOW things along the lines of adoption things in our family. Some are pretty big and we are not even able to share yet! (I can't wait until we can!) But we do ask for prayer in this "other area".
If you would like to join us and support us in prayer here are our current prayer requests:
~Continued financials needs met at the next steps
~Wisdom over the new "other area"
~Protection for our kiddos far away
~Success in February Fundraiser
Thanks so much for your love and support. You can keep updated with us by putting your email in the follow box in the side bar.
HUGS! The growing Herzog family :)
