Our new child

You may recall my moment a few days ago in which I felt my heart was wrenched out of it's chest and trampled on. No? Well, take a moment I'll wait for you to catch up. Read it? Ok, here we go.

So we've been prayerfully considering how the Lord wants us involved in caring for the needy, the widows, and orphans. There are so very many needs and ministries. On top of which, I felt torn because - well... if I'm "spending" money for someone's need, then I'm saving slower for our adoptions right?

Oh silly me.

God only asks me to follow His leading, take the steps and do the work, the provision comes from His hand after all and not my own.

In some quiet time the other day I shared with the Lord my heart ache thinking of the children in Ethiopia right now, I just feel so frustrated and small. Very, very small. We had been deliberating, by the way, if you haven't been following my blog on whether Ethiopia or Liberia would be the country we adopted from. We decided on Ethiopia and *think* we have chosen an agency, more on that later.

So when he posted about some of the crisis going on in Ethiopia it tugged on my heart a little more forcefully than news stories of poverty, devastation, and disaster usually do.

I asked the Lord, as He has put Ethiopian children and families on our hearts, if we should sponsor a child there after reading a particular story of an Ethiopian woman who has lost a child every year for the past four years and is now beseeching God to save her malnourished, weak 3 year old. I felt this very solid feeling of peace that we should definitely sponsor a child through Compassion.

So I bounced the idea off my husband. $32.00 a month isn't much, he agreed but seemed hesitant. With some small debts we finally paid off we want to aggressively start attacking some other debt. So I mentioned "Well you know.... we could cut back on the pizza, coffees out, snacks here and there or golf less" He said "Oh sheesh, you've guilted me into it ok, ok!" I told him guilt wasn't my objective.. I was actually being serious. Children are starving to death and I can't turn a blind eye anymore.

When you think of it though... we have so much luxury. So much. I have 5 children and haven't lost a single one to starvation, not to mention numerous other things I take for granted. I assume I have rights without question to clean water, uninterrupted electricity, a warm place to live, a cellphone for emergencies with free long distance, and Reese's Big Cups.

So I went to Compassion's website immediately. Then it got hard. Very hard.

There are so. many. children.

How do you choose just one? I'm not sure how other people have chosen in the past. There is an advanced search where you can sort through the information with all sorts of different criteria.

This is what we decided. We looked for children who's father was no longer in the picture and a part of a larger family. Part of the orphan crisis in Ethiopia is due to women who aren't able to care for their children. If they remarry, the new husband is often unwilling to provide for children that aren't his. Work is not as easy to find for women. And thus because of one of those reasons many children are given up for adoption while their birth mothers still live.

We found a little girl that when we read her description knew she was the one, who I will refer to as "D" for now.

D lives with her mom and siblings, we don't know exactly what happened to the dad. She is 6 years old, and has 5 other siblings. She is not in school. Her mother is only occasionally employed. Her favorite game is playing "house." Which is just like our little girls here.

So we welcome now little D into our hearts and home. Love her and her family with our prayers. And pray the Lord will stretch every dollar as far as possible to help her and her family. And we also hope and pray that because of our sponsorship that her family will be able to stay together, instead of her and her 5 siblings becoming orphaned.

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