Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Help Us Build Our Adoption Puzzle!!

We wanted to create an opportunity for many of you to share in the joy of bringing Baby Michnovicz #2 home. This beautiful painting was created for us by Jared Michnovicz and Eric Lamb and has been turned into a puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle will represent a partner who has donated to our adoption. There are 1,000 pieces to the puzzle, and each piece will be $10.00. The name of each donor will be written on the back of a puzzle piece or pieces. We will eventually frame the completed puzzle with a double sided frame so that someday our child will be able to see the names of so many that were a part of him/her coming home. Please consider how you might be a part of this adoption journey. If you'd like to purchase a puzzle piece, you can click on the "Donate" icon to the right. Whether it's one piece or many, we are so thankful for your generosity. Our goal is to “sell” every one of the thousand pieces, and we believe that God will make this possible! To Him be the glory!
 

We asked Eric and Jared to paint a "reflection" image because we want our adoption to reflect God's adoption of us into His family. Could we have been given a greater gift? :) "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will - to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves." Ephesians 1:3-6


Our Adoption Story
 
Ever since we've been married, we've known we wanted to adopt a child at some point in our lives. We did not know where that child would come from or when God would bring us that child, however. Two years ago, God gave us one of the most wonderful gifts we could ever imagine in the form of our daughter Gabriella. We LOVE being parents and feel that it is one of our responsibilities to take children under our care (biological or adopted) and raise them up in the way they should go, according to God's Word. In April of this year, we figured we'd “just start the adoption process,” knowing that sometimes the process can take years and figuring we'd have one or two more biological children before we completed the process and were ready to adopt. As we started the paperwork, we began praying that God would lead us and give us clear direction as to the timing and details of our adoption. After about 3 months of praying and working through the adoption paperwork, God gave me this crazy, undeniable peace and joy and EXCITEMENT(!) about adopting a child now. I've never felt God's leading so clearly. And, as always, God is faithful, and gave Jotham the same peace and eagerness to adopt a child around the same time. After more prayers and discussion over the next couple months, we felt confident that we should go with God's leading that our next child would be adopted! What joy we felt in making that decision! Much to our surprise, the adoption paperwork and home study went far more quickly than either of us thought it would, and here we are........ paperwork and home study done!
 
You may be wondering where our child will come from... Well, originally we hoped to adopt a child from Mexico, as my sister lives and runs and orphanage there. However, we quickly found out that this wasn't legally possible at this point in time due to different laws and regulations, etc. So then, we thought that if we couldn't adopt from Mexico, why not adopt from New Mexico, where there is a large hispanic population? We pursued this for a while, and then, in our adoption training, we heard that there are many more families waiting to adopt in NM than there are babies placed for adoption.... BUT, they told us that if we were willing, there was a huge need for African-American babies to be adopted from some of the other states in the U.S. After some discussion and prayer, we decided that we just didn't feel right about waiting around for a baby that might look like us when there was such a huge need elsewhere. There was no other choice for us. We wanted God to use us to meet the greatest need. 

Now, on to how you can help bring our little one home! We estimate that the total cost of the adoption will be anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000, and our goal is to raise as much of that as we can.... Which brings us to the puzzle. The details of the puzzle project are outlined above. If God has prompted your heart to donate, we are SO thankful. God is using you for His Kingdom and His plan. We believe that God only needs our willingness to carry out His purposes, not the resources. He'll provide.
 
And as we wait for Him to provide the resources, we pray. We pray that He gets all the glory. We pray for His guidance and direction – in our lives and in the lives of the birth mothers looking at our profile. We pray for wisdom and understanding as we raise a child of a different racial background than our own. We pray that God would give us more than enough love to love Gabi AND this new child. We pray that God would knit our hearts together with the heart of our future son or daughter, just as He knit Gabi together in my womb. We pray that our future child will, most importantly, be a child of God's Kingdom and will grow up to love and serve the Lord.
 
Please pray with us.
 
Much love and thanks,
Jotham, Kara, and Gabriella

2 comments:

  1. Kara I am SO EXCITED for you both! God has such an amazing road ahead of you both, now doubt he will amaze you in ways you cannot even begin to imagine now. We will be praying for you guys and please keep us updated. Welcome to the adoption family!
    Heather Janson

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  2. Oh, my, GOODNESS!! Of course I am a little out of the loop since I don't get to be in your daily lives (sad!) but I am SO excited and challenged and encouraged by this step that you are taking in faith. I love it so much and I'll hopefully get to talk to you guys soon more about your new family member coming. Wow and lots of love from the Boyd family!

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