A New Journey

About 5 1/2 years ago I started a blog so that family could watch our first baby girl grow and learn new things. I've since lost that blog and gained 2 more precious babies. Today I start a new blog for a new journey. I've been wanting to start this one, but had a hard time finding a blog name/title. I've asked Jarred to help me come up with something and here's what he came to me with..."Rocks by the River." I kinda chuckled when he mentioned it and then I realized he was for real...HA! He told me the story in Joshua 4 where God told Joshua to choose 12 men to take up rocks from the Jordan and place them by their camp for the people of Israel to see and remember what God had done for them. This blog is our "rocks by the river" for us to remember ALL the things God is doing for us throughout this new journey He has set us out on for His glory!

With all that...some of you already know where I am going with this. We are on a new journey together to bring a sweet child to their 'forever home.' Jarred and I have always talked about adoption and definitely wanted to adopt one day, but we weren't sure how/when/what that would look like for our family. So here is our story of how we got to this point...

After our sweet Savannah was born we talked about our next steps. We weren't sure if we should have another baby of our own or step into adoption. Well of course God knew exactly what we should do. I found out I was pregnant so that was our answer and we put adoption back on the back burner. We then had our sweet little guy, Seth! We were back in the newborn stage and just trying to survive day to day. We hadn't really talked anymore about adoption until Seth was a year old. God was then stirring in both our hearts again. I had come across Francis & Lisa Chan's book "You and Me Forever." It's a book about marriage and your relationship with Christ. We started reading that together. The first chapter we read talked about them adopting...and saying that God tells us to take care of the widows & orphans, and that we should "DO SOMETHING." Wow..ok! So then we just kept getting little whispers from God saying to do something to help the orphans. We prayed and talked to each other about what we had been feeling about adoption. We both agreed that it was time to get serious and look into starting this process! WHAT! Francis Chan said in a video we watched that he thinks you should be pursuing adoption until God says no and closes that door. So that is what we are doing. So far the door is WIDE open.

We are so blessed to have several friends from our church who have already walked the adoption road. I know God has placed them in our lives at just the right time. We've been able to talk to them and ask questions and get advice. Thank you for that!! Right now we have found an agency that we are so excited to be working with, our social worker is super sweet and really seems to care about our family. We are now about to start the long home study process. This will probably be the longest part of the whole journey. I plan to put a timeline of everything on the blog so that you can look at where we are in the process.

We are so excited to have y'all come alongside us on this exciting new journey!