Hoping and Waiting

So, for those of you who saw my updates on Facebook about trying a different avenue for leaving the country it looks as if this avenue will not work out. We will be re-grouping on Monday to see if there might be some more options but at this stage it doesn't seem as if this will be possible and we'll be exploring new ways, or just wait for the original ways to work.

I've been reading through Psalm 139 daily because of a suggestion from Sandy VanZyl (Thanks Sandy!). It's been encouraging, as scripture can often be. Specifically verse 16:

 "Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;

 And in Your book were all written

 The days that were ordained for me,

 When as yet there was not one of them."

God has my days ordained, as well as the days of my children. I can't see what all these days look like at this point, but God is holding them in his hand.

This week Scott has been at Timberlake with Shalom and Calvin. They were also able to spend time as campers. I'm excited to hear what their experience at camp has been like. We pray for them every night and look forward to the day when we can be reunited. In the meantime some friends here in South Africa invited us to come to a camp with them for the week. It has been a very relaxing, refreshing time. We have been able to get away and be surrounded by God's beautiful handiwork. For me this is one of the ways to most quickly be encouraged and feel closer to God. 

My sister Eva reminded me of something that my dad says often, "Utilize every opportunity." I think it's often said in relation to physically taking advantage of every opportunity for exercise, but in this case I'm using it in relation to our current circumstances. I plan on utilizing this opportunity to get closer to my two youngest daughters. This is a perfect opportunity for Busi and I to bond in a way we wouldn't be able to with everyone else around. I plan on utilizing the opportunity to learn more about God and His purposes for His children. This will also be a good opportunity for Scott, Shalom and Calvin to be able to do some bonding and growing together that they wouldn't have with the three of us around. So, even though this is not ideal, it is what God has given us right now, and I want to utilize this opportunity!

We love you all and covet your prayers!

Hannah

Delays

So, once again we are being told that we need to be patient and wait. The judge did not see any reason why it would be such a bad thing for our family to have to be split up. He doesn't think the special medical needs we have with doctors appointments and such back home are really a good enough reason to expedite anything for us. He doesn't want to acknowledge that by letting us take Busi home it is helping one of his own not just helping foreigners. The good news in the waiting this time is that our daughter is with us. She is here with her forever family and even though this all means it may be awhile before she's able to see her home and that we're all able to be together in our home, she is still with her family. This time it is not a waiting for her to be with us, it's just simply waiting to go home. God has put us together as a family and He will bring us all together again soon.

Right now the plan is for Scott, Eva, Shalom and Calvin to return home on Friday on our original flight. Busi, myself and Charis will wait and return home when we are given the proper paperwork to leave the country. Scott is speaking at Timberlake the 6th-12th and Shalom and Calvin will go with him to camp. After that he'll be looking for some wonderful friends to help out with the kids when needed : )

Continue praying for our family as we will be split up for a time. Pray for safe travels for Scott, Eva, Shalom and Calvin on Friday. Pray for myself, Busi and Charis as we find things to fill our time with while we're here. Pray that Home Affairs will expedite our paperwork on our own even without a judge making them. Thank you for all your prayers that you have already been pouring over our family. We feel them.

We can't wait to return to all of you!

Hannah

Court on Monday

It looks like our lawyers will be in court for us on Monday to fight for us to go home together as a family. Home Affairs is really digging in on this and not wanting to help us out at all with doing their job. Please keep praying for us and the other family who is here and in the same situation as us.

We have loved being here in Cape Town. We are not fighting for our rights because we want to leave here so badly. We have got connected with a church here and met some really wonderful people. Scott has been able to meet with several pastors and has been loving going to different churches and experiencing different youth ministries and sharing ideas. The kids are enjoying time at the beach to collect seashells and all the other new experiences that they've had. Eva and I have "enjoyed" being able to do a lot of running and exercising together. Eva even makes me run the flights of stairs in our building every night. Our time here has been good for our family. We are forced to spend much more time together as a family and this has only been good for us. We have gotten to know Busi better this way than if we had made it home a lot sooner.

At the same time there are some things that we would like to get back to. For me it's this feeling of being unsettled. I love going on holiday as much as anyone else, but it's always wonderful to be back home again. I miss my washer and dryer, I miss my kitchen with my utensils and spices. I miss my friends. The longer this goes on the harder it has become on the kids with missing their friends and their toys and everything else. The idea of not going home as a family makes me sad. I know we have friends and family who will be there for Scott and the kids and help them out in anyway possible and they will survive without me (even if it means that they don't eat quite as healthy as when mom's around), but it's not quite the same as being united as a family.

The one thing that really keeps me going through all of this is that God's hand is on it. The timing with this whole adoption has not been what we would have chosen, but yet God has not been surprised by any of this. He is still in control of the timing and everything that is going on with this adoption. We may never understand why we are going through and have gone through what we have, but we can be confident that God is in charge and knows what's going on.

Please continue to pray for our situation. We can't wait to introduce you all to the newest member or our family and hopefully for some of you we'll be able to introduce you in 1 week! God is a God of miracles!

Please Pray!

I really thought that doing a blog would be something I would take the time to do and something I would be good at. As you can see I very rarely update and I'm not so good at it. I do want to try to do at least a little bit of updating while we are here in South Africa though just so those of you who want to follow what's going on actually can. :)

We arrived in South Africa on May 17th. We stayed in Johannesburg for our first two weeks. We met our daughter for the first time after being here for only 1 full day and we hit the ground running after that! We are now in Cape Town and enjoying winter all over again. Their winters are very mild compared to winter in Nebraska, but still we are quite chilled much of the time. Since their winters are milder they definitely don't cater to the cold and there is heat very few places. We are staying in an apartment right across the street from the ocean and we have still managed to make sand castles, search for sea creatures and shells and even do some "swimming." Things don't really dry very quickly here so it always seems like we have wet clothes and shoes laying around. We've been able to make our own meals for the most part and most of the ingredients we find here are the same as we would be using back home. The people here are wonderful and we've been invited to some family gatherings and meals. We've enjoyed worshiping with a wonderful body of believers here and Scott has had a chance to meet with and share in the ministries with several different pastors.

It has not been seamless adding an 8 year old to our family, but it has been going well! The kids all get along quite well. Busi is always desirous of hugs and cuddles and we've been able to spend some good quality time together as a family. I don't think this would have happened in quite the same way had we not been required to stay here for so long. Even though there are times we really just want to be back home and enjoying summer activities, I'm afraid that if we had done that immediately we would have gotten so caught up in activities that we wouldn't have bonded together so quickly and spent so much quality time together.

Our big prayer request right now is that Home Affairs will move our papers through quickly. Even though Busi is officially our daughter we still need to wait for official papers showing her name change so we can then get her passport and visa so she can travel home with us. Home Affairs has been showing some resistance to all families trying to adopt right now and it slows the process down quite a bit.  There is another family here from California who is in the same dilemma that we are in. Please pray that Home Affairs will speed or paperwork along, not just for us and this other family, but also for families in the future. We desire to travel home together as a family, but if we need to Busi and I will stay longer and the rest of the family will travel home on July 4th.

Our internet situation is not the best here, but I will try to continue to blog a couple of times a week and keep everyone updated on what is going on with us and some of the activities we have already done. I don't know that I'll be able to upload photos, but I'll also try and upload pictures separately on Facebook so you can see a little of what we've been doing.

Please pray!
Hannah

A long overdue update!

It is hard for me to write updates when I don't feel like there is a lot to update about. I did mean for this blog to also be a place to write family updates as well or just write thoughts down, but that has also not been something I've been good at. Lord willing, before long, we will have a lot of new updates of our family. We did find out the day after Thanksgiving that things with our adoption our now moving forward once more. Everything had come to a stand still since last January and now they are moving forward. Our daughter is officially adoptable now we just need to wait for all our paperwork to go through. Hopefully by the end of January we'll have a pretty good idea of when we'll be able to travel. As with every step along the way there is uncertainty and a lot of waiting that takes place. In the meantime we are preparing our children and ourselves as best we can for this next step. Thank you for all the prayers and we will continue to update as we know more!

Sabbatical Journeys -- August 2013, part 2

Scott here again... finally making good on a five-month-old promise.
ADOPTION UPDATE:
Things have started to move forward recently, and although it's going to take a little bit of patience, we are slated to travel hopefully in February or March. We will have been at the whole process for two years in November.
GARAGE SALE FUNDRAISER:
The longer the adoption process takes, the more we start to have redundant fees. To keep ahead of those expenses, we're going to have another Garage Sale Fundraiser this Friday, August 16.
I started to describe our first leg of the sabbatical. At that point, we didn't have much of a time frame for when things would move forward with the adoption. The elders of our church encouraged me toward resuming the sabbatical in June if we didn't have any further progress on the adoption. Basically the idea would be to work out the time in South Africa later, but they didn't want to stretch out the process too long. With that I am in agreement. Continuity is fairly important in this sabbatical process.
The rest of our travels were as follows:
* From Champaign, we traveled on to Indianapolis and stayed for a few days at John & Liz Crocker's house. John was our former interim senior pastor.
* We then made a side trip to the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati. This was generally driven by my desire to keep moving toward education on God as Creator.
* We trekked back to Champaign to stay with Jeremy & Janelle for a few more days. I had some extended prayer & reading retreats during this time.
* Our journey home took us south through St. Louis (and a visit to the Arch), and then down to my Aunt Janice's beautiful home near Springfield, MO. It was a peaceful place to connect with the Lord Jesus in prayer and through Scripture.
* The trip back north to Nebraska took us through KC. We stayed for a night with Ted & Hannah Mabie.
Besides just catching up with family and friends, we visited several different churches. I also set aside chunks of time for reading, reflection and prayer.

After breaking from the sabbatical for April & May, I jumped back into it from June 17 until August 13. This time was spent both at home and away, most notably at Timberlake. I took several days for personal reflection and study, and our family was also out there for my week as camp pastor. I might have to blog separately on what I learned through that process, but it was summed up in my theme for the week: God wants your heart.

Connected with that idea though, I've grown through spending time in reading some books that I don't normally get to read, particularly toward missions, the poor, orphans, and how we can serve the Lord with our lives. Of particular benefit were William Carey's An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, K.P. Yohanan's Revolution in World Missions, and C.S. Lewis' Letter's to Malcolm: Chiefly about Prayer.

Lastly, I have grown significantly in daily prayer during this time. Through a series of events related to friends with sick babies, we began to pray each day at 4:15 pm for several families. Sometimes this has stayed limited to the babies and families, but when I have been by myself, I've especially taken the opportunity to hear God in prayer. Other thoughts there, but again, for brevity's sake, I'll tie it up with one line: I've grown a bit in my relationship with Jesus by disciplining myself in prayer time.
Okay, Hannah. you can have the blog back now.

Sabbatical Journeys -- March 2013, part 1

This post is from Scott. Rather than start my own blog for a once a while idea, I thought I'd just hitchhike on Hannah's :) I tried to change the font, but I might be stuck with this girly one. Do me a favor and read this is a growly, manly voice.

We are blessed to have a church that is looking out for our spiritual well-being! We have been at Grand Island Evangelical Free Church for seven years coming up on June 8th, so we were eligible for taking a three month Sabbatical. For those who might not know the process, the idea is that as we continue to pour out into the lives of others, there is a danger of becoming spiritually stagnant. You start to rely on your "same-old" tried and true techniques for helping others grow, and you lose sight of a having a spiritually alive walk with Christ yourself.

For the record, I don't think that has happened, but that's just the point... a time of intentional discipline, prayer, reading, and self-reflection helps to keep that becoming a problem. Hopefully it kick starts some new disciplines in my daily life after Sabbatical that will continue on past the time away.

I think it was providential that the first part of this time fell during the Lenten season in the 40 days prior to Easter, as I was already practicing a new discipline anyway. This year my goal during Lent was to give up any food between supper and breakfast. I know, it is somewhat lame from a two-thirds world perspective, but still helpful for me personally anyway. It's not about dieting or losing weight (though I welcome that!), but about denying myself in a simple daily way that takes my mind off of myself and puts it more on Christ. I have truly found that in practicing one simple discipline like this has helped me to grow in other disciplines as well without specifically trying.

Besides the Lenten disciplines, I have sought over these past three weeks to have some intentional extended times of prayer and reading. This is a bit challenging with three kids of age 7 and under, but we had some help... we traveled out of town and stayed with family and friends, and Hannah's sister Eva joined us for the second part of our travels as well. She is always great help to have around because she has exceptional initiative.

We started our journey toward Chicago, but stayed with Scott & Anita (my sister) in Omaha the first night. After a brief visit to see Jessie Todd and her precious baby Lincoln in the hospital in Des Moines, we pressed on and spent a few days with the Carothers, for whom Hannah had been a nanny after high school. I feel like I'm just going to have to say this about everyone eventually on this blog, but they were so great with the kids. Here are a couple of pictures :)

Okay... Now that I've got the ball rolling, I'll try to do the rest of the journey in shorter clumps. But I'll stop for now.