The news is out

The news is out, the Arthur's are adopting, I sent the inital email notifying each of you about our blog. Now let me explain how all this started. This may be one of my longer posts so hang in there. About 18 months ago, Brad and I joked about the possibility of adoption. I say joked because our dream since we were 16 was two kids, boy and girl. And that is exactly what we got. So.....four and a half years ago when Riley was born our plan was fulfilled. I now need to insert, we didn't check with God before we decided on just two. Back to this crazy idea, our church started a Crazy Love campaign that would continue for about a two year period, ending on Valentine's Day 2011. The idea was Jesus showed crazy love for us so our church wanted to show crazy love to the world. Brad quickly decided in January that he was going to travel to Haiti in April to help build an orphanage. Mind you, he had just told me about 6 months before he would Never  go on a mission trip without me. Again, that wasn't God's plan! Funny how that works, huh?

Brad returned home a changed man, his love for the Lord was stronger and his connection to his family greater. His heart was broken by what he had seen; children naked, starving and alone. Our talks became more frequent regarding those children and their need for love, a home and the Lord. Church would show videos of the orphaned children in Haiti and around the world. We would be in tears everytime. We began praying asking God was the feeling emotional or was this a path that we were supposed to be on. Our feelings continued to become stronger. I must say that we tried to ignore them, the enemy and fear worked on us but our hearts were leading us in a different direction. We set up a meeting at church with our adoption ministry and began discussions of cost, country and course of action. Feeling extremely overwhelmed, not knowing how we were going to pay for the adoption or what country to adopt from we said this it, this is God's plan and he will provide. More to come on the next post....I promise to try and be alittle less serious next time.

One last thing, check out the video below. I saw this on a friend's blog and it is amazing.