Court Date...Easter in Ethiopia!

OUR COURT DATE!!! 4/27!! EASTER IN ETHIOPIA! WOW!!! I admit I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever get one.  For those of you new to the verbiage of this process in Ethiopia, COURT DATE means the 1st of our 2 trips; it means our piece in the “legal adoption” of our children; it means meeting our boys for the first time; it means we step into a place of being a total foreigner and witness firsthand orphanage life and life in Africa.  Most of all, I hope it means we see the work of our God.  I have to believe that will be where the most profound excitement and reality will be. 

In the midst of the darkest of situations, our family arriving before a judge and saying WE DO want to parent these boys who were once orphans and strangers.  WE DO want to be a part of their lives and weather the storms;  WE DO choose to love, when they reject it completely.  WE DO choose to pick up where their birth families no longer can; WE DO to the unknowns.  Ironically, it’s what Jesus said on the cross to HIS Father in heaven...WE DO FATHER...WE DO!!! In spite of what crazy sinners they are...WE DO!

I’m sobered friends.  I’m sobered over and over in this process how little I deserve what God gives me through His son.  I’m sobered that I truly have NOTHING to fear because even death has happened...my death to sin.  What else can happen? Sure it might feel like death some days, but it’s not.  There is no more dying.  Adopting older children is not going to be an easy road.  We ‘know’ that.  Still, we know that the ‘easy road’ is not our goal anymore either.  The easy road is comforting (and a relief sometimes), but most times, it’s not where I’m carried and experience God’s leading.  So if it’s hard, I’m banking that there’s a reason we need to be led and carried;) If it’s not, then may we boast all the more in His mercy!

Often I think about those first moments when we lay our eyes on their REAL eyes...
and to be honest...I can’t stay there long, because when I stare at their eyes in their pictures I lose it..b/c there’s just some sparkle that somehow I see my God.  He leads us all the way....to Himself. 

So, now we begin the scramble to travel plans, decisions re: taking the kids, preparing to meet them (and then leave them) and continued prayers as they have no idea probably how God is moving.  Oh how I’m like our boys.