Coming Home

Last Tuesday, October 14 we finally mailed our application to Gladney, our adoption agency, as well as our CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services) application, not to mention a series of checks that make me dizzy just thinking about.  What does this mean?  It means our son is coming home!!

I know this may be hard to comprehend, it is hard for me as well.  So, after months of prayer and waiting until God aligned all our hearts and minds, Suzanne and I have begun the process of international adoption for Ethiopia.  Suzanne has desired to have another child since she forgot the pain she went through delivering Eli.  Honestly, I've been selfishly content with our two beautiful children.  Then came the day that God began to challenge my thinking.  The next thing I know, I'm talking to Suzanne about adoption.  Not only that, adopting a child who doesn't even look like us, from somewhere else in the world.  Before I know it I'm sitting on my couch on April 16, just before wur*ship, asking Ashleigh and Eli if they would like to have a little brother or sister.  Over time we have chosen to adopt a boy between the ages of 2-3 1/2.

(I want to thank Pete Cocco, our Fall Retreat speaker from Encounter campus ministry at Illinois State University and adoptive parent of two kids from Ethiopia, for helping me understand this.)  So, if Ashleigh or Eli were taken away from Suzanne and I, and we learned that they had been dropped in the middle of another country, we would do whatever was necessary, or in our power, to get them home to us.  Well, that's exactly how it is now that God has called us to this.  Somewhere in the middle of Ethiopia, we have a son.  We don't know his name.  We don't even know what he looks like.  But he is no less our son than Ashleigh is our daughter, or Eli is our son.  He is alive, somewhere.  Now, we must do whatever we can to bring him home.

Please pray for our family as we go though this process of bringing __________ home.

(Oh yeah, sometimes I call him Tre', as in #3, just to be able to call him something.)

Also, check out Suzanne's blog Journey to Ethiopia to follow our adoption process at suzannestem.blogspot.com