I hope everyone will indulge me for today……I have to brag on my precious friends in our small group.  This weekend, we put on a fundraiser for Bill and Sara.  Totally done, idea-to-event, in under three weeks. Now, when I say “we,” I mean the collective we of our small group….I can’t take credit for much of anything, because, well, I didn’t really do much. In contrast, Tess O’Day is my new heroine.  Not that she wasn’t before, but over the past couple of weeks, I’ve remembered that impossible is simply not in this girl’s vocabulary.  She rises to a challenge.  She […]

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“There is not one example in the Bible of God calling someone to do something and then using debt as a tool to accomplish it.” – Dave Ramsey These words slammed Julie Gumm in 2007, just as she and her husband Mark embarked on a journey to adopt a sibling pair, aged six and eight from Ethiopia. The gazelle-intensity learned in Financial Peace University provided Julie and Mark the practical foundation for living debt-free and financial freedom to serve others. With these tools and faith in God’s provision, Julie and Mark committed to adopt their children without borrowing a penny. […]

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I have heard a rule of thumb that you should expect about a month per year of age for a young person to adjust to a new adoptive family/country. Four years old = four months of adjustment. Fourteen years old = a year and a little more. We are almost to the 14-month mark, and I’d say our experience is pretty close to the average. So much has happened, and we have all changed in the past year…it’s hard to even know where to start. Since Lena and I returned in the middle of January, we only took about a […]

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I have heard it said that time moves faster with each year… Age 4: Crammed in the backseat of a light blue Volkswagon Beetle with my three closest carpool-mates, looking at my friend’s 7-year-old sister with awe, I think “I will never be that old.” Age 14: Three years still seems a long way off, but now my thoughts are filled with “I can’t wait for graduation!” Age 24: The years begin to flow together, but I still think I have a whole life ahead of me. “Maybe in three years I’ll think about settling down and building a family…” […]

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Day “I don’t know” through Day “I’ve lost count” – Sunday, 10 January, 2010 through Saturday 16 January, 2010 If I’m being honest, I have to say that the second trip was rough. Seriously hard. After a week of “regular life” which included blowing nearly half of my working hours fighting with payroll over the paycheck they failed to issue while I was on leave, I boarded a 7:30 AM flight to JFK, with a 10-hour layover and then a 10-hour direct flight to Kyiv on Aerosvit Ukrainian Airlines. I truly believe I was the only person on that airplane […]

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