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.

Dossier Complete!

Our dossier is done! We have it sent in and it should be sent to South Africa this next week. (for those of you who don't know what a dossier is it is basically a ton of paperwork that tells all about us, from police reports to recommendation letters. Then we get it all notarized and then we get it all state sealed.)

This whole process took longer than we were hoping. Everyone tells you it is a long process, but for some reason I still like to think that it'll be different for us. I start to think that we have some magic blessing from God that will help everything come together much smoother and faster than anyone else before us. It turns out though that God's timing, once again, is not our timing (shocking!). I was pretty discouraged last week after going to the State Capitol and realizing that we still had some paperwork we needed to get done a little differently. I feel like we had checked and double checked and still there was more to do! It's great to have friends that can remind you that God has His timing for a purpose and a lot of this whole process is out of our control . This is a good thing for me to have to deal with, because I would like to control everything and I need reminders every once in a while that God is the Lord of my life and it is better that way.

So, now we once again wait. As we wait we pray. We pray for our little girl that is worlds away from us in more ways than one. We pray for her protection. We pray for our family here that God will prepare us for this new addition to our lives. And we thank God that He is in control and not us.