COMPLETELY Funded & 7 Months DTE!!!

I am so thrilled to announce that our daughter's adoption is COMPLETELY FUNDED! Yep....every single penny! Unbelievable to me.....believable that God is faithful....unbelievable that we got to be a part of such a grand miracle.  The fact that we are funded before we're even close to seeing her face blows my mind!!!

But get this....I know from my life and scriptures that God is able to do EXCEEDINGLY, ABUNDANTLY BEYOND what we can ever ask or think. (Ephesians 3:20)  Yet, I was still so shocked when once we hit our goal, families and individuals continued to give because they wanted to start now on donations for us to take to Ethiopia for humanitarian aid! WOW.  What is so special about it all is that not only will their donations benefit our daughter Selah directly but now their donations will impact many more children in various parts of Ethiopia.  Thank you God!

When we first started this journey, I knew we could afford to take care of our daughter once she was home but taking care of the large expenses associated with the process of adoption....now that's another animal altogether.  The decision to save our money AND fundraise was a hard one because it was going to make me MAJORLY uncomfortable.  But I got over it and really moved into it when I realized it was not about me.  Christ paying the price/ransom for my life was downright uncomfortable, possibly even humiliating but He was obedient to what His Father asked Him to do.  He knew it was never about Him.  It was about 'them'...me...you.  To have such a perfect example in Him really helped me to move beyond my hangups and ultimately blessed SO MANY people who have now become so emotionally invested in our adoption and aware of the need of orphans.  In fact, yesterday, a friend at church, Gwen, talked about how Selah, our daughter, has really now become daughter to so many of them.  That just melts this mama's heart.  This video by Eric Ludy time and time again confirmed that we had made the right choice for our family to do whatever necessary to rescue and fight for our daughter. 


We couldn't afford to drag our feet. Like Ludy shares in the video, I was personally challenged to call up every one of my family and friends to get to my daughter (well....close to every one of them...I talked to many, even the ones that I terrified to call because I didn't know what they'd say). Some said no and it was heart-wrenching but for every no...it got me closer to the ones who would say yes they'd support our adoption in some capacity.  As we saved our share, we've had donors who have given 75 cents and we've had a couple of donors who gave $5,000.  EVERY SINGLE donation was instrumental and made a major impact.

To top all of this off, we suspected we were fully funded on the date of our 7 month DTE anniversary! We were still in the process of doing some counting with Lifesong for Orphans and incoming donations but I didn't want to publicly call it too early until we were sure.  Just to document it, I sent my cousin, Shelly this Facebook message late that night:

Thanks to so many of you for being on this journey with us.  It's been an amazing ride and there's still more to come as we figure out ways to best impact Ethiopia. Stay tuned!!!

Love y'all!