New Chaos!

It's a new year!

2010 (although I'll continue to date everything 2009 until April or May).

I began my real life new year not by making a resolution for myself, but for my 2 year old. Because we all know it's more fun to change other people than to change ourselves! So the resolution imposed on him is this: he will no longer wear diapers except for sleeping. I'm sure I'll be blogging more later about his resolution.

But for now, I'm going to kick off this new year in my blog by sharing some other, even more life-changing news.

We are about 3 months into the process of adopting a little girl from Ethiopia!

I couldn't agree more, that's crazy!!!

So why are we doing it?

Because we have an empty bed, an extra seat at the table, clothing in a wide variety of child sizes, leftovers after nearly every meal, and room in our hearts to love another child.

Because there are 147 million orphans in the world and the reality of that breaks our hearts. We cannot adopt them all but we can decrease that number by 1.

Because at the same time our daughter crawls into bed and prays for a sister, there is a little girl in Ethiopia waking up to another day without a family to love her or care for her.

Because we are blessed with clean water pouring out of the faucets in our home, abundant food, quality medical care, and excellent public schools while in Ethiopia 60% of the children are stunted because of malnutrition and half the children will never attend school. Ethiopia’s doctor to child ratio is 1 to 24,000. Ethiopia has struggled through periods of famine since the 1980s with over 1 million deaths since that time.

Because as we were learning about Ethiopia we fell in love with its children; they are some of the cutest kids we’ve ever seen!

Because after 2 years of hearing Him whispering and shouting in many, many ways, we are so very sure God is leading us to this.

Because He adopted us!

"In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will." Ephesians 1:5

We are excited and nervous about this new adventure and would love your prayers. We are working with an agency and drowning in paperwork, but hopefully in the next 9 to 15 months we’ll travel to Ethiopia and bring our new daughter home.

And we all just thought it was chaos before!