Finding S
I first saw S when our agency director posted some pictures of waiting children. For those of you who aren't familiar with adoption lingo, "waiting children" are children who are generally older or have special needs and are harder to place in adoptive families since most people would like to adopt younger, healthy children. When I saw S's picture, I was immediately transfixed by her smile and how she seemed to radiate joy through the picture. I emailed our agency director and started firing off questions. The more I learned about S the more I felt like she may just be our girl.
I started seeing little signs… things that most people would view as coincidence, but I don't really believe in coincidence most of the time. We have 3 girls and 2 boys. All of girls were born in Jan/Feb and both boys were born in August. Little S’s bday is in the same month as 2 of my daughters but the date is the other daughter’s bday.
Another little sign, our agency director had originally posted in her waiting children email that S would do well in a larger family and shouldn't be the youngest child... she would do best with a younger sibling since she loved helping out with the little ones at the orphanage. S is 7. Our kids are 5, 10, 12, 13, and 15... sounds like she'd fit right in, huh?
In one of the pictures, she is writing her Ugandan name, K-a-y-e… This was meaningful to me because all of our girls have the same middle initial of K and we had planned to give our adopted daughter (if it turned out to be a girl) a K name that was also in memory of my mom’s name, Faye.
As if that wasn’t enough, I also learned that S has a beautiful voice and loves to sing. That runs in the family too… our oldest daughter sings. We are also a hard core soccer family and I saw a few pictures of her with her soccer ball.
We wanted to say yes at this point, but still felt a little nervous about whether this was really our girl. God spoke to me in a very specific way to let me know that she was indeed the child He had chosen for us. He had already sent us several signs letting us know this is our girl, like I mentioned above, but we still felt like we had to think it over. God’s big sign to us started when I was at Walmart picking up the Justin Bieber Christmas CD for the girls one night. I noticed the contemporary Christian CDs were right next to some of the Christmas music and the Casting Crowns CD caught my eye. I had heard of the Casting Crowns, but didn’t really know much about them aside from hearing they were great. So, on a whim, I decided to pick one up. I had 4 Casting Crowns CDs to choose from and after some deliberation, chose the latest one since it had the title track to the Courageous movie on it.
The next morning I was driving to work and popped in the Casting Crowns CD to check it out. While I was driving I started praying for God to let me know if this little girl was who He had chosen for us. A little while after I ended my prayer, the final track of that CD came on and I knew that God chose her for us. The last song on the CD is called “So Far to Find You”. I was overwhelmed by the lyrics to this song. I got to work and looked it up. I was shocked to find that the song was actually written for the lead singer’s adopted daughter from China. I immediately called my husband and told him what had happened. We knew without a doubt that she was our girl.
There is another very interesting twist to this story. I uploaded the video of this song to my Facebook page with a message about how this song had touched our lives and answered our prayers. I had several people comment from my hometown of Samson, AL (population 2,000) about how much they missed Mark and Melanie. I was a little confused. I knew a Mark and Melanie. Mark was the youth group leader at the church I grew up in, but I had no idea how it related to that song or my Facebook post. Mark was serving at our church when I graduated high school and went to college. I got married after college and moved away, so I never knew the rest of Mark and Melanie's story. As it turns out, Mark Hall, the lead singer for Casting Crowns, was that youth minister. God used my small town youth minister to send a message to me 20 years later! How awesome and amazing is that?!
The only thing that stands in our way of getting our girl home is the financial aspect. We took a major hit with our last adoption attempt. The financial impact of that, coupled with an overseas move from HI to GA that left me without a job for many months, has seriously impacted our ability to save for this adoption. When we started our Uganda journey we did not expect to find our child so quickly. Now we know she has been there waiting for us all along and we are anxious to get her home. We thought we would have close to a year to save up, but we only have a few short months until we will be assigned a court date and asked to travel to Uganda. We know that if this is truly God’s will for our life, He will provide a way. We hope you will prayerfully consider helping us get her home by participating in one of our fundraisers or making a donation through the PayPal button below.
I started seeing little signs… things that most people would view as coincidence, but I don't really believe in coincidence most of the time. We have 3 girls and 2 boys. All of girls were born in Jan/Feb and both boys were born in August. Little S’s bday is in the same month as 2 of my daughters but the date is the other daughter’s bday.
Another little sign, our agency director had originally posted in her waiting children email that S would do well in a larger family and shouldn't be the youngest child... she would do best with a younger sibling since she loved helping out with the little ones at the orphanage. S is 7. Our kids are 5, 10, 12, 13, and 15... sounds like she'd fit right in, huh?
In one of the pictures, she is writing her Ugandan name, K-a-y-e… This was meaningful to me because all of our girls have the same middle initial of K and we had planned to give our adopted daughter (if it turned out to be a girl) a K name that was also in memory of my mom’s name, Faye.
As if that wasn’t enough, I also learned that S has a beautiful voice and loves to sing. That runs in the family too… our oldest daughter sings. We are also a hard core soccer family and I saw a few pictures of her with her soccer ball.
We wanted to say yes at this point, but still felt a little nervous about whether this was really our girl. God spoke to me in a very specific way to let me know that she was indeed the child He had chosen for us. He had already sent us several signs letting us know this is our girl, like I mentioned above, but we still felt like we had to think it over. God’s big sign to us started when I was at Walmart picking up the Justin Bieber Christmas CD for the girls one night. I noticed the contemporary Christian CDs were right next to some of the Christmas music and the Casting Crowns CD caught my eye. I had heard of the Casting Crowns, but didn’t really know much about them aside from hearing they were great. So, on a whim, I decided to pick one up. I had 4 Casting Crowns CDs to choose from and after some deliberation, chose the latest one since it had the title track to the Courageous movie on it.
The next morning I was driving to work and popped in the Casting Crowns CD to check it out. While I was driving I started praying for God to let me know if this little girl was who He had chosen for us. A little while after I ended my prayer, the final track of that CD came on and I knew that God chose her for us. The last song on the CD is called “So Far to Find You”. I was overwhelmed by the lyrics to this song. I got to work and looked it up. I was shocked to find that the song was actually written for the lead singer’s adopted daughter from China. I immediately called my husband and told him what had happened. We knew without a doubt that she was our girl.
There is another very interesting twist to this story. I uploaded the video of this song to my Facebook page with a message about how this song had touched our lives and answered our prayers. I had several people comment from my hometown of Samson, AL (population 2,000) about how much they missed Mark and Melanie. I was a little confused. I knew a Mark and Melanie. Mark was the youth group leader at the church I grew up in, but I had no idea how it related to that song or my Facebook post. Mark was serving at our church when I graduated high school and went to college. I got married after college and moved away, so I never knew the rest of Mark and Melanie's story. As it turns out, Mark Hall, the lead singer for Casting Crowns, was that youth minister. God used my small town youth minister to send a message to me 20 years later! How awesome and amazing is that?!
The only thing that stands in our way of getting our girl home is the financial aspect. We took a major hit with our last adoption attempt. The financial impact of that, coupled with an overseas move from HI to GA that left me without a job for many months, has seriously impacted our ability to save for this adoption. When we started our Uganda journey we did not expect to find our child so quickly. Now we know she has been there waiting for us all along and we are anxious to get her home. We thought we would have close to a year to save up, but we only have a few short months until we will be assigned a court date and asked to travel to Uganda. We know that if this is truly God’s will for our life, He will provide a way. We hope you will prayerfully consider helping us get her home by participating in one of our fundraisers or making a donation through the PayPal button below.