Raw honesty is rare in the adoptive community, and when I find it, I just want to share. In her post “After the Airport,” blogger Jen Hatmaker says: “…if you ask me if these are the happiest days of my life (which a ton of you have), and my eyes kind of glaze over and I say through a tight-lipped smile like a robot, “Yes. Sure. Of course. This is my dream life”…I am lying. I am lying so you won’t feel uncomfortable when I tell you, “Actually, I haven’t had a shower in three days, I lost my temper with my uncontrollable […]

Read More

I carry you with me Tess O’Day 2010 Copper, Tree Moss, Cherry Wood. A tribute to Ari’s birth mother and all of the suffering mothers of Africa. In Africa and other places in the world, a starving woman is not likely to survive a pregnancy and birth, so many terminate the pregnancy without any help from a doctor. I honor, love, and respect those who take a leap of faith and TRY to hold on. That is true true love right there.   I admire artists who can evoke visceral reactions and tell stories through imagery. In this piece, Tess […]

Read More

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 […]

Read More

“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. […]

Read More

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 […]

Read More