Waiting on God's timing...

Some days are really easy to wait. Other days I am impatient with how long this process is taking. But through it all I have to remind myself, it is all in God's timing. It is equally hard when we are wanting new information and a detailed update on our daughter we still have yet to meet and there is only silence. We have not gotten pictures we requested when we sent her a cake for her birthday back in June! It is totally up to the Foster family on whether or not they will supply an update and/or pictures. All the information we have on Joy is from over a year ago. So many unknowns and I just sit here and have no way to change things. All I can do is pray. 

Our Fall is jam packed with school, volleyball (I coach at a local private school), youth group, choir, and retreats. Travel will greatly depend on when we get our Letter of Approval (LOA) and when all the visa and travel documents get approved. China moves at their own pace and there is nothing we can do about it. When we get our travel approval we travel within 2 weeks! So, having an idea of when we might travel is very sudden. We need to "drop everything" and go. So plan need to be made without solid dates and we just pray it will all work out. How hard this is for me who is a planner and likes to have everything thought out ahead!! (driving me a little crazy I will admit!)

I try not to compare our journey to other waiting adoptive families as it just causes me to wonder why some get their approvals earlier while others of us wait so long. There is no rhyme or reason to the approval process and we just have to wait.

So as we wait, we finish up much needed cleaning, we evaluate what doctors may be needed and health concerns checked.... so many unknowns, we go on with our daily routine and pray! I have a list made (and continuing to grow!) of things we will need to transition from a family of 4 to a family of 5. Joy comes from a part of China that is sub tropical. She will be coming home to a place that gets much colder than her coldest days! Kind of like someone moving from southern Florida to the north east! So, we need extra warm blankets and layers for her to wear to keep warm this winter, flannel sheets and other things we can't really know until we meet her. I have no idea what size clothing she wears either!

In the mean time, we have a huge yard sale coming up on August 23rd. We have cleaned out a lot of unnecessary things to make room for our new daughter. God has been good in allowing us to get a great deal on twin beds for the girl's room and a friend giving us a bed for our son's room. We realize just how much stuff we have and don't need. So, all of it goes into the yard sale! All money from the sale goes towards our travel costs!

One of the ministries we applied to for a "grant" or funding help is Connected Hearts ministry. If you have been thinking of making any donations to help us with travel costs and medical costs to add to our family through adoption, now is your chance! Connected Hearts Ministry has listed our family on their non profit site for the next two weeks! ALL donations are tax deductible and go directly to our adoption agency to be used for our travel and over seas expenses for finalizing our adoption. Go here to see our story!  http://www.connectedheartsministry.org/#!family-listings/c126c

We continue to be grateful for your prayers during our journey! God is listening and we are being blessed beyond measure! He provides just when we need it! Thank you and please continue to pray that we will lean on Jesus and be content to wait on His timing through all of the paperwork being reviewed and approved!

Psalm 5:11-12
"But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;
let them ever sing for joy,
and spread your protection over them, 
that those who love your name may exult in you. 
For you bless the righteous, O Lord, 
you cover him with favor as with a shield."

Day 68 and still waiting for LOA!

Now the Day count is at 68 days. It is already Saturday in China so the offices are closed for the weekend and we have to wait till Monday to find out if our Letter of Approval (LOA) is processed! Once we get that letter we will apply for I-800 visa approval to adopt Joy and then wait for Travel Approvals and all the other steps in between that will be 6-8 weeks more of waiting! We are starting a very busy season in our house this coming month and the long summer is almost over! We are praying we can travel in late October to bring Joy home! 

Joel's birthday and our Anniversary is this coming week. It will be nice to get our LOA! What a gift it will be! School begins for our two teens (9th and 10th graders this year!) on August 11th, so our summer is pretty much over in just a week.

The week of the 11th our story will be featured on the connected hearts ministry web site. I'll post the link when our story is up!! If you can share the web site with your friends and family we are hoping to make the last push towards raising funds for our travel, orphanage donation and medical costs. Every little bit helps and it will all be tax deductible! 

Our Puzzle Fundraiser is getting off to a slow start, but we haven't advertised it as much as we could. We have sold 16 puzzle pieces ($10 each) so far and have 16 different verses already to write on the back of them! What a blessing!!!!! Thank you to those of you who have sponsored a puzzle piece so far! We are hoping to have ALL 500 pieces sponsored by the time we travel in October! Let us know if you would like to sponsor a puzzle piece!! 

We are praying we will continue to trust in God's timing. He is faithful and we can trust Him. 

I'll leave you with one of my favorite songs that helps me keep my fears and anxiety at bay. 

"Doing your best and praying its blessed, He'll take care of the rest." Keith Green

He'll Take Care of the Rest

Getting closer... LOA Wait

We are on day 55 of our LOA wait. Letters of Approval have been processed and mailed around the 65-85 day marks for some families this summer. With the huge Storm that has just gone over Guangzhou this past week, there may be a further delay! Please pray for the people in Southern China who are experiencing heavy rain, wind and land slides. Guanxi Province took a direct hit from this storm. 

While we wait we have been pretty busy with summer projects. Our A/C is finally fixed! Praising God that this summer hasn't been hotter! I am thankful for Joel's resourcefulness in getting the parts and the people needed to put it all together! 

We also received our first Grant Approval!! Show Hope awarded us a grant for 3,000 dollars!! This will help with in country costs, visa and customs fees! We are sooo Thankful!!!  

We are continually thankful for friends and family who have donated funds for our travel costs and who are lifting us up in prayer! We have some big cost items coming up this Fall and hope to be fully funded by October!! We have in the works a Dinner and Silent Auction! We can't wait to share our story and more about our daughter with friends and family!! 

This journey has been so long and we know we still have so much to do to prepare. We know once Joy is home there will be a lot of adjusting! We are continuing to research, learn and seek medical advice and therapy options for the road ahead. It is so hard when it is an older child. She will be leaving everything she knows and I just pray for her heart. She may not know what adoption and being in family means. Praying that we can meet her where she needs us and show her she is loved from the first moment! 

Thank you for praying! We covet your prayers! 

  

Artwork for Adoption

My daughter is an avid artist and loves to draw. She came to me with the idea that she wanted to sell prints of some of her favorite drawings and use the funds to help us with travel costs. She and our son will be coming with us when we go to China so it is extra cost for them, but they are brain storming ways to raise the needed air fare. We are blessed with such wonderful kids! :)

So here are the drawings she is selling prints of:

            1                             2                             3

The one in the middle was created on her digital drawing pad. The other two are pencil. All are printed on high quality photo paper. 

Size                cost            shipping/packaging (if we need to ship it)
4 x 6                $5                  $2

8 1/2 x 11        $10                $3

13 x 19            $20                $5

Payment can be made through Paypal - Let us know what picture you would like (1, 2, and/or 3) and what sizes. 

Puzzle pieces are also still available to sponsor. Click here to see previous post for details on our fund raisers. 

Thank you for continued prayers and support! We hope to hear about our Letter of Approval from China by the end of July. We are taking each day one at a time. It is so hard to plan when the future is still so unknown!

Please be praying for our family. There is definitely some spiritual warfare going on and I am praying that we will continue to just TRUST that all things are being filtered through Christ. Our home is just stuff. Our possessions are just things. Praying that the many "comforts" that are breaking down will be fixed when they can be and not missed too greatly while we wait! We don't know where the $18,000 will appear from, but we serve a God who has all things worked out already. We are praying for the empty jars to be filled in God's timing and not our own. This is a huge test for me, as I am the thinker/ planner and I trouble shoot everything! It is so hard to plan the unknown, so I have to wait.

I pray for our daughter in China, that she is not fearing the unknown. That she will have peace in her heart and already a softening to God. We hope to contact her soon and start to get to know her.

James 4: 13-16
¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

We are praying that we continue in his will day by day. 

36 Days and counting...

It is day 36 of our LOA (Letter of Approval) wait. Others in the LOA wait are receiving theirs in about 60 - 70 days but really the numbers are dependent on many factors. Some agencies check the lists and let waiting families know when they are OOT (Out of translation) and OOR (Out of Review) before the long awaited LOA! But, apparently, our agency is not one to give us the micro steps in the process. I am not expecting to hear anything until our LOA is on its way. Sometimes I am thankful so I don't have to feel like I need to check my email every 5 minutes in case I miss the email giving me every minute detail! Part of me really wants that assurance our documents are moving along in the process and getting attention. 

While I am not sitting and waiting for micro steps in our adoption process, I am finding two weeks have gone by and I haven't anything to update! We actually have been quite busy on the home front with multiple projects that desperately needed our attention. We have been thankful this summer has not yet been too hot as our A/C unit (15 years old) has decided to not turn on. Joel is in the process of obtaining the parts we need and we are hoping for a friend to come help us replace fluid, coils and compressor to get it working again. We hope to save a lot of money by shopping around and making sure we understand everything, so we don't pay more for stuff we don't need. Our upstairs bathroom toilet was supposed to be a quick replace but we found that the previous house owners had installed it wrong and it had been leaking. 2.5 weeks later we now have a new tile floor and the new toilet finally installed. Thankfully we were able to do all the work ourselves and only had cost of supplies! God has been good to us and we are very thankful for the internet and our ability to complete our own house projects! 

We are continuing to research Chinese culture and language. We have done a lot of reading of stories of older adopted children who talk about what their adopted parents did or didn't do in raising them. We hope to continue Chinese studies and language and not let her heritage disappear from her life. We hope she will want to continue studies of her birth country once she is home. 

We are still planning some fund raisers to help with the travel costs. The grants that we applied for have not come through so far. I am still working with booster.com to sort out the T-shirt issue. If you bought one of the dark blue shirts and it shrunk, please email booster.com and let them know it was not satisfactory. Apparently the emails I have sent in complaint of the shrinking problem is not enough to get them to resend t-shirts to everyone. I am so sorry they shrunk so much! So email them today!

Please continue to keep us in prayer. Once our LOA arrives (hopefully around the end of July!) we could be traveling within 10 weeks. We will have a donation site set up with Connected Hearts Ministry where they will post our adoption story and have a link for donations. All donations will go directly to our agency to help with our travel costs and adoption fees. All donations through this site will be tax deductible. So, if you would like to make a donation, start saving your change now so you can help bring Joy home when the site is up the first two weeks of August 2014. I will post the link and instructions when our story is up. It will only run the first two weeks of August. 

Our Origami Owl ongoing fundraiser for the month of June has raised our funding totals by $200!! All moneys raised from the sale through my site is going towards our adoption costs! Thank you to those who have had parties with your friends and families! If you would like to host a party or just make an order online, contact me! Here is the link for my July online party fund raiser!

We also will have a puzzle fund raiser! We just had our family photos taken by Alexis Springer Photography and we will have one of our photos made into a puzzle! If you would like to Sponsor a puzzle piece, they are $10 each!  We will write your name and your favorite verse or proverb on the back. When the whole puzzle is complete we will hang it up in Joy's room so she can see how many people have been praying for her and have been a part of this journey! If you would like to sponsor a puzzle piece you can use the "Paypal" link in the top right corner of this blog and let us know what you would like us to write on the back of it! We are so excited about this fundraiser because it just shows the hands and feet of Jesus and how he works in each of our lives!!

A sneak peak at a couple of the wonderful photos from our family day Photo shoot!! Alexis is AMAZING!!! :) 

 Siblings waiting for their new sister!

Can't wait till we are ALL together in the same picture!

We are so thankful for all your prayers and support during this journey. We know that when Joy is home the real journey begins and we long for that day when we will be a family of 5! 

Psalm 36:5-10

Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
    your faithfulness to the skies. 

 Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
    your justice like the great deep.
    You, Lord, preserve both people and animals. 

How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!
    People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast on the abundance of your house;
    you give them drink from your river of delights. 

For with you is the fountain of life;
    in your light we see light.

Continue your love to those who know you,
    your righteousness to the upright in heart.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Joy. We are waiting for our dossier to get through translation and review before getting our Letter of Approval! Praying this is your last birthday without your forever family. We know you have your Foster family and pray that you enjoy the cake we sent! It is so hard waiting until we get our LOA before requesting to talk to you and contact you. Pictures hopefully soon to follow!! Love you so much already! Mom

Time Flies but Stands Still... Waiting

Waiting. Nobody likes waiting. Waiting is something that happens every day. Waiting for the sun to shine, waiting for the coffee maker to finish, waiting for this and that! One would think we would be used to waiting!!! 
Right now we are waiting for our documents to be translated and then reviewed. We are waiting for that moment of approval that we can proceed to the next step of our journey. We are preparing as best we can for the unknown. It is exciting and nerve wracking all at the same time. 

We are waiting to hear word of any grants we may receive. We have not heard anything from any of the multiple grants we have applied for, so if you could please be in prayer about that it would be much appreciated!

While we wait, we are enjoying some down time from home school. Jared is enjoying hours of Game play on his computer and Jess is enjoying practicing her guitar and doing art projects. I have been able to get a lot of things done that have sat by for a "rainy" day or projects with more than one hour put together to get it done! :) The house projects list is thankfully getting a little smaller, but we are putting big things off to save as much as we can to put towards our next big adoption cost of the orphanage donation and the travel costs!

One other item you could be praying for as well: Our AC is broken and we are looking into fixing it ourselves, Joel is excellent at researching "How to" and getting things done, but this project will require a professional once we order the necessary pieces. Just the labor fees are ranging from $1300 - $1800!! That doesn't even include the parts. So, please pray that we will be able to fund this on top of all the other costs that are piling up. God provides and we can trust Him! 

If you would like to support our journey, you can donate through Paypal. The link is in the right hand corner of this blog. 

I also have an Origami Owl Fundraising party going on right now during the month of June. 40% of all purchases go toward our Adoption fund. So share the shopping link with your friends and family and help us raise our goal while getting some beautiful custom jewelry! http://www.JHarrison.origamiowl.com/parties/JoleneHarrison366483/collections.ashx

In August we will have a donation site set up with a Non profit organization and your donation of any amount will be tax deductible and 100% of your donation will go directly to our adoption costs through our agency! We will post the link to our story and donation link in August!

Hopefully this month will be the last Birthday Joy will have without her forever family. She has waited so long and we pray for her and her foster family. I just long to hold her and get to know her. I hope she is looking forward to meeting us and being with us as well. So much to think about!

Some words that encourage me. I am so thankful I know of God. Without Him, I don't know how I would handle life! 

Psalm 65

¹ Praise awaits you, our God, in Zion;
    to you our vows will be fulfilled.
² You who answer prayer,
    to you all people will come.
³ When we were overwhelmed by sins,
    you forgave our transgressions.
⁴ Blessed are those you choose
    and bring near to live in your courts!
We are filled with the good things of your house,
    of your holy temple.

⁵ You answer us with awesome and righteous deeds,
    God our Savior,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
    and of the farthest seas,
⁶ who formed the mountains by your power,
    having armed yourself with strength,
⁷ who stilled the roaring of the seas,
    the roaring of their waves,
    and the turmoil of the nations.
⁸ The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
    where morning dawns, where evening fades,
    you call forth songs of joy.

⁹ You care for the land and water it;
    you enrich it abundantly.
The streams of God are filled with water
    to provide the people with grain,
    for so you have ordained it.
¹⁰ You drench its furrows and level its ridges;
    you soften it with showers and bless its crops.
¹¹ You crown the year with your bounty,
    and your carts overflow with abundance.
¹² The grasslands of the wilderness overflow;
    the hills are clothed with gladness.
¹³ The meadows are covered with flocks
    and the valleys are mantled with grain;
    they shout for joy and sing.