Two Months Down

Many of you know about our family's decision to adopt and if not, this post will be our official announcement.  Long story and lots of wrestling with God, but we have decided to adopt an older child from Ethiopia.  Dustin and I are from the "We are the World" generation and I think of the pictures on the news of the effects of a horrible drought in Ethiopia.  I was probably 11 or 12 years old.

Aids and poverty have almost wiped out an entire generation of parents in Africa.  

Did you know there are 143,000,000 orphans in the world?  There are 5,000,000 orphans in just the country of Ethiopia.  To put it into perspective, there are about 400,000 children in the US foster care system and about 100,000 of those are available for adoption.  (Yes, we first checked into being foster parents before we decided on Ethiopia.)

I read just today that if 7% of all the Christians in the world adopted then there would be no more orphans.  We sometimes feel like we are not even making a dent in the statistics, but we know that God has a child waiting for our family in a country far from here.

So here we are, two months into the adoption process, wading through piles of paperwork and enjoying our last days of summer with our kids.!