Reflecting on 50 Years of Racial Progress and My Story

50 years.

In the grand scheme of things, this is an incredibly short period of time. It’s truly difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that just 50 short years ago, my mother and father lived in a society that had racism woven into its very fabric and into our very hearts.

It was just 50 years ago today that Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and spoke words that would be seared into the consciousness of humanity forever. Words that, as I read them today, stir something deep inside of me. Force me to recon with reality and ask hard questions.

Words like: “… for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.” – MLK

I often wonder where I would have stood 50 years ago.

I’m a southern guy. I was born and raised in the same small Texas town that my parents and their parents and their parent’s parents grew up in. A heritage that had been built for a century of mainly good hard working, church-going people that trained their kids to do the same. Our town didn’t have a single person of color as a resident for years. Although this is not necessarily evidence that everyone that lived their was seething with racial bigotry, it is still a fact that is difficult to swallow.

I wonder if this white boy, from an all white town in the south, would have even considered the fact that perhaps this black preacher on TV was speaking truth. Perhaps, just maybe, there was something off in our hearts that made us just go along with the norm of considering people of a different skin color than us inferior. Would the social pressure around me have just lulled me into a complacent attitude that said, “It’s just not that big of a deal… I shouldn’t ruffle feathers”?

So, that’s where I come from.

As everyone spends today reflecting back on the past 50 years of racial progress in our society, I look at my own heritage and history. Just 50 years after Dr. King stood in front of America and spoke words that may have caused people in my family to scoff or think that this just wasn’t the best direction for things at the time… I look at my sons.

I have living, breathing proof that at least some things in our society have changed.

I’m sure that in August of 1963 that my grandparents would have never in a million years thought that one of their grandchildren would be an African American. As kids at the time, my parents could have probably never have imagined in their lifetime that their son could have a transracial family, in the south, and live to write about it online for anyone to read.

I get thick tears in the corners of my eyes when I think about the fact that our two sons (brown and white) literally join hands each day and run around our house. The dream… alive and well in our very home.

But, it even weighs heavier on me when I am able to see my grandparents, who were white adults living in the deep south in the 60’s, sit with my boy in their lap and treat him as an equal in our family.

Only by the grace of God.

I don’t intend to insinuate that we’re living in race-free paradise here in America. It’s far from it. I absolutely believe that Americans are still judged by the color of their skin before the content of their character can ever be discovered. Every. Single. Day. I believe that my brown son faces more of a challenge in our society than my white son will ever be able to grasp… simply because of the color of his skin. It’s true. We see it with our own eyes.

But, I also live in hope that God will continue to rid of hearts of the seeds of racism that spout up into the way we interact with one another. I believe that it’s happening. I believe that it can happen.

Today, I’m overwhelmingly grateful for thousands of people 50 years ago that took a stand for what was, without a doubt, the right thing to stand for.

Your legacy lives on. It was worth the trip to the Capitol that hot day in August. Thank you.

Adoption Day!

Today is August 20th.

This morning we dressed up real nice, loaded the family into our car and headed an hour away to a small town Texas court house.

Today is the day that we stood before a judge with huge smiles on our faces… hand in hand as one family… to officially make this boy our son.

Joshua Deondre Price

Although he will still go by Deondre, Sara and I wanted to give him a name that had meaning. We felt like Joshua was a good fit for him. Joshua was a man that feared God and that had many obstacles to overcome in his life… many battles to fight. He trusted the Lord through it all… and that’s our prayer for our boy too… that he would walk with the Lord through all of the trials that he may face in this life.

This past year has without a doubt been the most life changing for us. We sometimes sit on the couch at night and try to imagine what life was like those days before we had children in our house. Did we really just eat delicious food almost every night and then watch 24? How was that even possible?

We think back to those early days of him being in our home. Scared. Uncertain. Untamed. He had been through so much, and we had very little clue about what to do with this kid that all but fell from the sky into our living room. Each day brought new challenges that made us realize that we were clueless.

Today we celebrate all that God has done to get us to this place. How He has changed our hearts and placed a love deep inside of us for a boy that we did not know existed for the first 5 years of his life.

It’s really crazy to think about what we may have been doing when he was born. For me, I had just completed my sophomore year at Texas A&M, and was spending the summer working for an inner city ministry in Brenham. During those three months, the Lord really worked in my heart and gave me a love for kids from hard places. I spent many days hanging out in the projects with kiddos getting my eyes opened to the reality of what many people right in our backdoor experience day in and day out. I think my mind would have been blown if I had known that at that very moment, God was bringing a little boy into the world that would one day share my last name and call me “Daddy” instead of “Mr. Ryan”. Crazy how He works to prepare us for things in life.

Adoption isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. There are so many broken pieces that need to be mended together, and many of those pieces simply may never get the right fit. But, days like this are high points. Adoption day is a happy day for our family and we praise God that Deondre is excited about being adopted by us… although it’s still up for debate about whether he is more excited about getting to drink Coke on this day or being in our family for the rest of his life.  😐

We’re grateful for all the craziness that you bring into our family, little boy. We wouldn’t be complete without you.

Worship Thoughts: The Solid Rock

As a worship pastor at my local church [New Life], I get the privilege of piecing together a selection of songs each week that can be collectively sung by a group of people in worship. In a very real sense, the songs we sing together represent what we believe about God. They make up the voice of our people collectively.

As I have grown as a leader of worship, I’ve really seen the importance of what it means to tap into the voice of our particular group of people and make sure that what we are singing is an accurate reflection of what our people believe and what we are going through. This is why I am passionate about writing songs for our church to sing corporately as well as bringing in more mainstream songs.

I believe that it’s really important to make sure that we sing things that give an accurate view of what it really means to follow Christ. Yes… it’s a lot of fun to get excited and sing at the top of our lungs about how awesome it is to be in love with God… how every day is better than the last… how our joy is overwhelming. But, the reality is, if you follow Christ for more than a few years, you’ll find yourself in seasons that make you wonder, if every day is supposed to be better than the last, then why am I experiencing so many increasingly worse days right now?

I find great solace in some of the hymns of our faith that, thankfully, are being brought back into our church’s voice.

One of the hymns that most resonates with me as I lead our church body is The Solid Rock.

I had sung this song countless times in my life. But, it wasn’t until this past year that I began to identify with it.

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.

When darkness seems to hide His face, I rest on his unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil.

His oath, His covenant, His blood, support me in the whelming flood. When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.

On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand

As we have found ourselves on this messy journey of fostering and adoption over the past year and a half, I’ve found that I have been relating to the Lord in a completely different way than I did before. As we swim in a sea of uncertainty and deal with behaviors in our child and in our own hearts that we wouldn’t have imagined dealing with at any point in our life, I find it difficult to sing songs that tell only one side of the story.

There is little hope for me to sing “every day with you is sweeter than the day before”… because all that makes me do is doubt that this God exists… or better yet, feel guilty that my life doesn’t match those lyrics.

But, when I can stand [or lay flat on my face] and muster up the words “when all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay”, I’m reminded of the bigger picture.

I can honestly worship a God that calls us to hard things and brings us through what seems like end-of-the-world storms… and be left with nothing else to say but, “All my hope is in You. All my strength is in You.”

It has been a beautiful thing to stand in front of a group of people whose stories I know… Parents dealing with bringing kids from hard places into their family and wondering where the light at the end of the tunnel is… Couples searching frantically for jobs and coming up dry… Women struggling to see the goodness of the Lord in light of their recent miscarriage… Students seeing for the first time that this world is broken. And yet, when we begin singing this song… when those different voices with all sorts of different stories combine, I can feel the energy from our people. A desperate cling to the hope found in our Savior.

It’s a really tremendous thing to be able encounter.

May our churches be filled with sounds and words that resonate with where we are and that point us to a God that is firm through the fiercest droughts and storms.

The [uncommon] Movie Moments of Adoption

Let me be clear… the vast majority of moments in our home are far from note worthy, melt-your-heart, “I’m saving the world” moments. We spend most of our time trying to make “time-out” work for us and reminding ourselves that God is in the middle of this whole journey, so we need to be patient.

We recently watched October Baby in theaters… which is a pretty note worthy moment in and of itself! We can’t even remember the last time we were able to make it to the movies since kids came into our lives. Granted, we went to an 11:20am showing and brought a 5 month old baby with us… yup, we’re definitely those people!

We loved the show. Cried several times through it.

On our drive back to the house, I looked at Sara and jokingly said, “Deondre better look us in the eye one day and say, ‘thanks for wanting me’ or I don’t know what I’m gonna do!!”  We laughed and reminded ourselves that it’s highly likely that those words may never come out of his mouth… I just need to swallow that pill now.

The reality is, those lumps that come up in your throat when you watch emotionally charged movies about crazy adoption stories where children are rescued and lives are changed… those teary eyed moments where you feel like real Shalom peace has arrived in a situation and all is back in place… those moments just aren’t frequenters to our home.

But…

Just the other day we had one.

Just the other night at dinner we had a movie moment with our 6 year old. Wish the film crew would have been sitting at our table, dang it!

As we were eating our dinner together, I just started talking with Deondre about adoption out of the blue. We have been dropping those conversations sporadically with him over the last few months to prep him for what is coming very soon.

I told him that in just a month or two, we are going to officially adopt him and his name will look like ours. I explained that we would go before a judge… and he would be a happy judge because this is an exciting thing. We may even have a party afterwards.

It wasn’t a big shocker that he was relatively silent through this whole explanation. Just staring at his plate like he always does when we talk about things he has no clue about.

After some silence and a few bites of dinner, I asked him how all of that made him feel.

He didn’t say anything.

So, we pressed him again… “Deondre, how do you feel about all of that? What does your heart feel about being adopted and living with us forever?”

He remained silent, but without any fanfare, he took his little brown finger and began drawing on the table next to his placemat (like Jesus telling a parable).

Puzzled for a moment, it finally clicked for Sara and I. He was drawing a smiley face.

Each day at school, Deondre either gets a smiley face, straight face, or sad face. His life basically revolves around smiley faces. For him, this was his stamp of approval on the whole thing.

At that moment, we felt it. It was one of those Shalom peace moments. Teary eyed, lumpy throat, “where is the film-crew?” moments.

Now, that moment was quickly followed by, “Finish your food or you won’t get dessert!”… but, we’ll take all of the small glimpses of grace we can get around here.

We’re so excited to be nearing the end of this fostering journey with our son and making it all official. I can’t wait to write that post into our family’s legacy!

Mingling With Brokenness

When I think back on the things that our little guy walked into our home with a year ago, the list was rather short. I assumed there would be a piece of luggage… maybe not the fancy kind that you see scattered throughout airports… but, I figured there would be something simple… something to transport his most valuable possessions and some underwear at least. That wasn’t the case though. He walked into our home with nothing.

However, it doesn’t take long at all to realize that children in the foster system carry around plenty of luggage… especially older children that have been yanked from their homes and moved across the state.

We’ve spent the last year unpacking bag after bag after giant airport-sized bag of brokenness with our son. The reality is… we’ll continue this process long after adoption… long after he has been calling us Mommy and Daddy… long after our home feels normal to him.

There seems to be the thought floating around the Christian sub-culture that adoption is this simple, clean, two-step process… fill out the paperwork… rescue a child from some horrible situation… give them their first hug and warm bed… then, Bam!, they’re yours forever and you can move on to the next thing in life. You’ve earned your little adoption badge to wear proudly around other Christians and you can take pride in getting a few extra stares when you walk around public with a child that looks different than you.

I gotta be honest… I think we really thought it was that easy… or at least I did.

But those blasted bags still pile up around our home waiting to be unpacked. When we walk around and keep stumping our toes on the luggage and dance around cursing their existence, our prideful little adoption badge does us very little good.

As I sit here over a year into this thing, I have to say that the thing about foster care and adoption that is so riveting and redemptive at the same time is this constant mingling we do with brokenness.

In our Christian sub-culture, we have managed to find a way to sweep and mop and polish away the dirt and brokenness of this world from our lives. We have shelves filled with books on theology and best practices for doing just about anything… We eat organic… We even buy organic toilet paper… We devote plenty of attention on making sure that with our kids, only good goes in and pray that crap doesn’t come out… We try our hardest to fight against materialism and avoid our consumer driven culture. I’m not knocking any of those things… heck, we do most of those things!

At the end of the day our formula works pretty well. Our kids don’t walk around cussing people out on a regular basis… Our bodies feel better and free from chemicals… We are able to know tons of things about God and share them with others. It’s a pretty good life… no doubt.

But, as much as we’ve tried to mop around those bags laying around our house or sprinkle homemade organic compost on top of them thinking that they’ll turn into something that’s healthy, they simply don’t.

Brokenness refuses to let us go on with our managed life.

We’re forced to throw our theology book against the wall in anger and tears and actually cry out to God and ask for answers that just aren’t written down in a book. We’re forced to realize that there are many things that we aren’t going to be able to control over the next 20 years of our life as parents.

Although my heart aches for our son and I would love nothing more than to scrub his heart down with a giant eraser so that he wouldn’t have to carry any more bags ever again… I know that God is doing something wonderful in our life as we mingle with brokenness. We are getting to see pieces of him that simply are invisible to us when we lead our managed lives.

A lot of times, stories of adoption are presented as a package with a nice bow on top… it’s labeled “redemption”, and hearts are left warmer because they simply see a sad story turned happy.

We know that God is still writing the redemption story happening in our home, but the beautiful thing at this point is that our family is getting to mingle with “broken”, and it’s the best thing that has happened to us.

The First Day | Remembered

On this day in recent history (last year) we opened our front door to meet a little brown boy wearing a big, blue, dirty Gap winter coat, bright yellow t-shirt with the name of his pre-school plastered across it, and a recently acquired pair of hand-me-down tennis shoes from the CPS office he had spent the afternoon inhabiting.

The moments leading up to that car pulling in our driveway could be described as uncertain and scared on our behalf. Sara sat on our couch with a look on her face that said, “Ryan, you really don’t know what we’re getting into, do you?”. She was skeptical, nervous, worried, and flat out tired from a full day of working with teenagers that didn’t know how to show respect to an adult. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t be able to sit down if I had to. I paced our living room, glancing every 5 seconds or so out the front window to see if that car had arrived yet. We had no idea how this process would go down… what this child would be like, look like, feel like.

The car arrived… we looked at each other and debated if we should go meet them in the driveway or wait for the doorbell to ring. I’m pretty sure we debated long enough for them to get out of the car and begin making their way up our sidewalk before we opened the door and met them on the porch.

There he was… this miniature person… scared out of his mind… hiding behind the only constant he had during this crazy day that he had experienced. It was the case worker that pulled him out of school early.

She looked up at us with a gentle smile and informed us that he is really shy and had only said a handful of words to her throughout their day together.

He walked slowly through our front door… clinging to the caseworker’s leg. CPS had given him a few little cars to bring along and a black and orange blanket that had been handmade and donated to the system… some things for him to hold on to as his own. She also slipped us a small grocery bag with a pair of sock, undies, and an extra change of clothes… but, that was it.

There wasn’t much time for introductions… we quickly gathered around the living room and started to sign papers. It was probably at that point that Sara and I realized (but didn’t let on) that we had no clue what we were doing. We were signing papers… that’s something that adults with responsibility do. We were signing papers in order for this lady to be able to walk out our front doorwithout this child she brought in.

Meanwhile… this little guy had found a safe haven under the coffee table that all the signing was taking place on. He hid… clinging to the blanket and toys that he brought. He laid there and cried. As we tried to listen to the important things being discussed about the papers, we both were having to surpress the lumps in our throat that were being sent up to remind us that there was a real child under our coffee table with tears running down his cheeks. In a matter of minutes, it would be our responsibility to help that child make sense of everything that happened in the last 24 hours.

Within about 30 minutes, it was just the 3 of us. All the caseworkers had said their goodbyes and wished us luck. We had shown him his new room… pulled out our limited number of toys to try to entice him… but, our tokens were beginning to run out. Luckily, it was about to be dinner time and the only thing we could think of to take his mind off of things was to bring him to Gattitown.

Bear in mind… at this point Sara and I had yet to hear his voice. The only noises we knew from this little child were wimpers. At some point in the getting ready to go process, a word was released. I was so excited to hear his little country-ghetto voice appear.

And so we set out… placing a child for the first time in the newly bought booster seat that would now grace the back seat of the car that had seen me through college. This marked a new season in our life.

Looking back on that night is difficult for us. It’s difficult to remember the pain that such a small child felt. It is still incredibly hard for us to understand what it must have felt like to be picked up from school and driven in a car for an hour and a half to a cold, bright, florescent-lit office to sit for the remainder of the afternoon… and then to be dropped off in a home with two white people. No goodbye to the family that you had spent the last 5.5 years with… not even an explanation of why this all occurred.

Every few months, we are reminded of that afternoon when we dig to the bottom of his t-shirt drawer and find that worn down yellow t-shirt with the name of his hometown written on the front. It’s way too small for him to ever wear again. But, it won’t be thrown away. In between those faded threads are the only parts of his early life that he still has.

We hate that even still… as incredibly far as we’ve come with him… with the completely different child that resides in our home today… even still when the caseworkers drop by for a monthly visit, the fear in him shows its ugly face once more. The memories associated with caseworkers unravelling normal. We hurt for him. We pray that one day his life will feel secure and he will know that there will be no more unravelling in this home.

So, here we are… one year later. As this day approached, Sara and I went back and forth on whether this day should be celebrated or even talked about at all. We celebrate the fact that this blessing was sent to us one year ago. We celebrate the incredible progress he has made in this past year. But, we have decided that the celebration will be between mom and dad. To expect him to celebrate such a horrific day would be cruel and unusual.

We look forward to being able to celebrate a different day very soon… the day when his adoption becomes final and his name reflects ours. We pray that day will be one filled with amazing memories that we can all look back on and truly celebrate.

National Foster Care Month

Well, apparently May is National Foster Care Month. Who knew?

I just found out about 3 seconds ago while perusing someone else’s blog. It’s not like we get big notifications about these things as foster parents.

So, I figured it would be good to try to be more intentional during this month to write about our experiences so far with our little guy.

This has been a tricky thing to do. For confidentiality reasons, we aren’t really allowed to mention his name or post pictures of him online. It’s always a fine line of what we should even write about as well. So, I’m going to attempt to just write about what our honest experience has been.

We still feel passionate about the calling of foster care. We think that way more people should be opening their homes to little kids that need a safe and loving place to call home for a little while or forever.

But, over the last few months we’ve learned a LOT!

We chuckle at how quick we were to judge other foster parents for things they would say. We are WAY more understanding of the wide range of emotions that play into this experience.

Just like probably every fostering situation, our time with D has been filled with awesome experiences, and leveled out with just as many difficult times that have found us sitting on the couch after he goes to bed looking at each other with tears in our eyes trying to figure out why the heck we’re doing this, and where to go from here.

There are still dueling emotions deep in our hearts that say we love him like a son battling the ones that find it incredibly difficult to give him a truly heartfelt hug.

These are emotions that you could never understand without being in this position.

Throughout this month, my hope is to write openly and honestly about OUR experience as foster parents. The good… the bad… and the ugly.

We feel that there needs to be more honest dialogue about what fostering really looks like. It often gets glamorized or completely demonized. Glamorized in hopes of getting more people to sign up and care for the thousands of kids that need a place to stay. You can’t fault people for that. Demonized because people don’t want to feel guilty for not fostering, so they just talk about all the horrible foster homes that just do it for the money.

But, the reality is that it is often more hard than easy. We’re having to realize that this is ok. As Christians in America, we are far to accustomed to following Christ into situations that end up being pretty easy. We went into this fostering process knowing that Christ calls his followers to care for the orphan, but in the back of our mind thinking that it would be easy because we were following God.

We’re now understanding that following Christ is much harder than we have been led to believe. And it’s through the difficult times that we can be sure that we’re exactly where we need to be.

So, hopefully I’ll put a little structure to this series and not just ramble throughout the month about fostering.

Our honest prayer is that each person who reads this blog will be forced to stare the orphan crisis in America directly in the eye and figure out what their role is in caring for those that are truly on the bottom and in need.

Horse Obsession!

Our little guy is absolutely OBSESSED with horses. The first few days we thought it may just be a fad. Turns out, horses are here to stay. If you meet D, YOU will soon become a horse to be pulled around the house… ridden on… locked in the closet because you’ve been a bad horse… you get the picture.

Early on, we were told that it would be a good idea to get him a stuffed animal of some sort so that he could have something to hold and confide in when he gets sad. So, we decided to get him the horse pictured above. He was SO excited about it. However, just as important as finding the perfect horse was finding a rope to tie around his neck to lead him around the house. Awesome. We have such a cowboy on our hands. Not what I was expecting!

The same day that we got him the $15 horse, we decided to give his family a call so that he could talk to them since he misses them tremendously… one of the first things he told them was that he “got a horse”. He didn’t bother to tell them that it was about a foot tall… and made out of cotton. We were whispering in his ear that he should tell them that he “got it” from Walmart. Eventually he did, and they all laughed and we sighed with relief that they no longer thought that we were trying to buy his love or something!

We’ve been trying to figure out how to make his room more personal for him. Last week, the thought went through my mind that I should get some horse photos printed that I shot several months ago for a client. So, I ordered some big prints and surprised him the other day. His face lit up as if magic had landed right in his room. He has been staring at the horses and dreaming up stories about them every since.

I love the power of photographs.

I love watching his mind speed through creative scenarios that he makes up.

Sugar. Tee-Tee. Old Man. Horses.

Well… Happy MLK Day to all…

What a crazy few days we’ve had around here. Sara and I looked at each other the other day and said, why does it look like we are parents of a newborn? We were completely worn out and felt like our entire day revolved around starring at and playing with D.

Things are starting to level out though. Just when I get really frustrated with the way he acts or talks to us or something, I have to remember that just 3 days ago this 5 yr old was yanked out of his normal and placed into something that could not be more abnormal. Shoot… as a 26 yr old, I would probably not be behaving much better!

We’re learning and laughing a lot.

Our first breakfast consisted of me trying to get him to eat… while not having a clue what he normally eats. We agreed on toast. I paired it with a cold glass of organic milk and thought we would be good to go. He just starred at it. We talked for a bit and figured out that he normally eats oatmeal. Awesome. We have that. So we cooked it up. It was the instant kind that is already sweet with lots of sugar. He took one bite and said, “where’s the suga?” We went back and forth for a bit until I sprinkled a tiny bit more in from our huge container (the health major in me was cringing… this was everything I was trained to NOT do). “Put the WHOLE thing in there… I ain’t eatin’ that!” Then he took a sip of his wonderfully organic milk… “There ain’t no suga in this… where’s the suga?!?”

You get the picture… it was quite the sugar catastrophe that I wasn’t prepared for. Gradually, we’re eating less and less sugar. Here’s for hoping!

Other fun things:

As we’re getting out of the car from shopping the other night, D tells Sara, “I gotta potty!”… Sara: “Alright, let’s go in the… D! Not on the driveway!!” Before she could even respond, he had whipped it out and was spewing all over the driveway. Can’t punish him for something that he thought would be normal. Now he knows that’s not OK.

He’s definitely still in the “figuring things out” phase. Learning that referring to me as “Old Man” doesn’t go over well. Realizing that when he sneaks into my office and gets on the computer, he will quickly end up on his bed in time-out.

All in all… he’s a really smiley kid who loves to play and have fun. He pretends that everything is a horse and enjoys yelling at his imaginary dog.

So this is our life right now. Always something new.

putting things on hold

I was about half way through writing my post for today’s Friday Photography Insight when the phone rang yesterday. For the past 3 weeks, we have been officially licensed foster parents… just waiting for the call.

If you’re a client and have called later at night thinking that surely I would not answer my phone and you actually had to talk to me, that’s because I definitely thought that YOU were our caseworker calling us with a possible foster placement. Lots of disappointing realizations to say the least.

But, as I was sitting at my computer writing about ISO (that’s what the next post will be about), the phone rang and I answered.

A 5 year old boy… we’ll call him “D” here on the interwebs.

Sara and I had a game plan for when such a call would come. I would immediately text her phone and say “CALL ME” (had to be in all caps)… I would also send her an email and any other thing I could do to get her attention. As soon as she could pull herself away from her class she would call me and we’d make the final decision.

She called back pretty darn quickly. I answered and heard her yelling in the background to her kids, “I SAAIID SIT DOWN!”. I knew at that point that she meant business! We decided that there was no reason why we shouldn’t accept the placement, and within a matter of hours, we had a little 5 year old sitting in our living room.

It has been a whirlwind of a day… it’s been emotional and hard… but, it’s also been hopeful and exciting.

So, the next few days will involve us getting to know each other better. If I don’t respond to an email super-fast, you’ll have to just get over that! 🙂

Here’s to the journey ahead… a journey that promises to pull us closer to the Lord for our strength and dependence. We appreciate all prayers for us and for D.