how did we get here?

As I sit to write this, my home looks different than it did a few months ago.  On the surface, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary, a contained clutter of trucks and cars and photos and furniture that make up this rental house I've tried to make a home.  But a closer look reveals a stack of photocopied birth certificates on the desk, a workbook, a couple books on attachment underlined and dog-eared.  If you were to get more personal and poke around a bit more, you'd find a necklace in a dish on my dresser with an initial 'B' and a charm of Africa; within our file cabinets you'd find numerous new-but-worn files neatly labeled 'dossier in process,' 'dossier completed,' 'IFS application,' and 'homestudy.'  Sit down with us for a while, and you'd see that while we look to be a family of three, our hearts are full of the desire to be a family of four.

We are adopting.

How did we get here?  A hundred little stepping stones.  The Riches' adoption of Hope that started in while we were in Kenya.  Taking pictures for our friends' profile book in Long Island to share with birth mothers.  Numerous conversations that ended in "someday." A hand raised and Matt sliding across the pew to accept a Show Hope packet, signing up on the spot to sponsor adopting families.  Watching our friends travel to China to pick up their daughter.  An expectation that we would be expecting - but we weren't.  Reading Jen Hatmaker's book "7" over Christmas break and a twelve- hour car ride where Matt and I talked about how we could point our life towards less stuff and more Jesus.  We made a decision to volunteer with World Relief Nashville to befriend a refugee family, which is a whole different story - and Matt said, "Let's look into adopting."

And so we did.  And now we are planning for another little boy - this one from Ethiopia.  We started in February with applying to our agency, getting accepted, and starting the homestudy process.  I spent a couple months gathering paperwork, we were fingerprinted by the government, got approval from immigration to adopt, and have sent our dossier to our agency.  That is a two-sentence synopsis of six months of process that I will probably detail soon.  We hope our dossier will be on the lawyer's desk in Ethiopia sometime in July, at which point we will officially start waiting for our referral - to be matched with a child, whom we anticipate will be a boy under two.

The road is long and winding and we can't really see what's on the other side of the hills.  I don't know how long this trip will take or what curves lie ahead.  I do know that God wrote Africa on our hearts long ago, that we fell in love on the dusty roads of Kenya.  How fitting of Him to bring us a child from Africa, too.