Funny how closely the process of "waiting" for the birth of your baby, and waiting on the paperwork to be complete for an adoption/fostering is! You wake up every morning and wonder if this is going to be the day I get the email saying my fingerprints are cleared? Will this be the day I get "the call" from the placement coordinator? I remember waking up every morning at the end of every pregnancy in tears because I had slept all night and not gone into labor! I can understand now why they call the adoption process a paper pregnancy! Praise God with the paper pregnancy I am not nauseated 24/7! There was no such thing as morning sickness around here!

Admittedly, I was having a lot of regrets over the permanency of our decision to be done having babies. I was in la-la land thinking that it would be much easier to just be pregnant and just have our own. -can we say pity party?That was until last week!

I have been doing a cleanse of my entire innards for almost 30 days. It has been going very well despite a bit of pain here and there while my organs were getting the yuck out. I must've gotten to a new place and woke up so terribly nauseated! it was miserable! But God in His grace used that moment to remind me that our permanency decision was for a reason-pregnancy and Nat do NOT get along! And the most important-we have the opportunity to change the lives of children who will desperately need loved even if it's only for a short season. Our prayer is that we can shine a light on "normal" and that we can influence them for Christ. Those seeds go deep and hopefully will follow them around forever.

 Psalm 146:9 He relieves the fatherless and the widow

Isaiah 1:17 Learn to do good, seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, DEFEND THE FATHERLESS, plead for the widow

Reading these scriptures reminds me that it's not just a child who will need help. Many of these kids will come from mom's who are pretty messed up. I pray that I will find myself praying for them, just as much as for the kids. We definately are in this to adopt, but to think we have the chance to help an entire family, and for those parent/s to know that their child/ren are somewhere they are truly loved. If we can give even just one parent a chance to turn their life around then we have done our job in Christ's kingdom. I've always said I am not called to the foreign mission field-there is plenty to do right here in America!

Be blessed!

natalie and co.