We have a referral for our daughter!!!

We really have some updates this time!  We have a referral and pictures of our little girl!!  Isn't she precious?

 She is in a foster home in China right now.  We don't know if any other children are in the same home, but we know she was placed in foster care only 2 days after she was found.  Praise the Lord for answering our prayers!  I had prayed and prayed that our little Anna would find her way into foster care at some point, and now we find out she's been in a home for almost 5 years!  There is a very big difference between life in a foster home and life in an orphanage!  

She's almost 5 years old, and will be 5 by the time we bring her home.  We do not know when we will be able to travel to get her yet.  It may be a couple of months, or it may be 6-8 months.  We're pretty much at the mercy of their Social Welfare system, but that's okay.  So far the paperwork took Forever, but we got our log-in date on Friday, Feb 14 (what a great Valentine's gift!), and the following Wed, we already had a referral!  Kazammo!  I can NOT put into words how ecstatic we are! 

Part of her Chinese name is Wen Jie, and we really like both of those names.  All this time, we said we were going to name her Anna Faith, and we do like that together, but now we are considering Anna Wen Jie.  Wen means "quiet, knowledge", and Jie means "clean, pure."  So we are still debating on her name, but we have time to figure that out.  

Anna had a kidney surgery as an infant on her left kidney, and now both kidneys are functioning correctly.  She's had regular 6-month checkups since the surgery, which was almost four years ago, and all is well.  So here is our prayer request for our new daughter: 

1 - For her overall health, including her kidneys and anything associated with them, for the rest of her life.

2 - For the Lord, and hopefully her foster parents, to somehow prepare her heart for her forever family and new home. 

Consider a 5-year-old child being uprooted by two people she's never seen before, who take her away to a country where nothing looks the same, not even the people, and no one even speaks her language.  To say that would be hard is an understatement!  And to top it off, she won't be able to ask us questions and we won't really be able to counsel her through it at first, because we simply won't understand each other's language.  We have translator apps already installed on our ipods and phones, and I'm sure that will help; and we know a couple of Chinese speaking people we can talk to, but we aren't sure if they speak the same Chinese she does. In other words, we will get through it, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking it will be easy.  The transition must happen, and she will mourn the loss of her birth country and her foster family, and I'm sure we will mourn them for her too.  But if anyone in China were going to adopt her, they would have done it by now, and she needs a family forever.  She needs us.  She may not even like us at first, or have any idea what to think about us, but she's going to love us eventually!  We're hoping and praying the Lord will help to ease that transition as much as possible.  And we will love her through it when she's sad.
 

A word on prayers, support, and finances:

This adoption, in total, will cost more than $31,000.  We have paid a whopping $12,000 on it so far.  That, my friends, is amazing!  We are not in the class of people who have $12,000 sitting around in a bank account.  We have worked hard for the past several years to pay off this much!  We've had a few successful fundraisers, and we tried a few that didn't pan out.  We've had friends donate anywhere from $5 to $100 or more.  One of my kids' friends made homemade bracelets and sold them and donated the profits.  I think his donation totalled $6.  Another little friend went to her piggy bank and got out $100 to give to us to help bring her best friend's sister home.  I felt guilty accepting this, but she was decided in what she wanted to do. HOW can we not be good stewards of That?!  Since we began this process, we opened a separate bank account that was used strictly for adoption costs, and nothing else.  God has been good, and has provided so far.

And so many friends, family, and people who've heard the story and who care, have prayed and prayed - for us, for the adoption process, for our daughter, for our family.  We cannot thank you enough.  Sincerely, from the bottom of our hearts, we thank you.  Thank you for every kind thought, every single dollar donated, and every prayer for our little girl.  It always means more than we would ever realize when others pitch in to help out, but people, I'm telling you now - it means more than we can put into words for you to help any one of our kids.  And we have not held our little Anna in our arms just yet, but she is every bit our daughter.  And we are thankful to the Lord for everyone who has made a difference in her life. 

So now we owe over $18,000 more.  A few years ago, that would have frozen me into a panic.  I would been so overwhelmed, I would not have been able to move forward.  But while we were working and saving to pay what we have so far, one thing has been pointed out to us over, and over, and over.  God is in control.  Every time we thought we were not going to be able to pay the next bill, we were able to pay it.  We didn't always pay it as soon as we wanted to, but it happened in God's time.  Many times, we saved more than we thought we could, then something strange would happen like a water heater breaking or a car needing work, so it seems like we always only had just enough.  But again, when it got down to the wire and another bill was due, we had the money to pay it too.  When the last bill for several thousand dollars came due, we thought we had finally reached the point where we would not have enough to cover it on time, and the agency would just be waiting on us before we could move forward.  I had put some money back from a few extra private lessons at the Taekwondo school, John had done some extra website work on the side, we had a little Christmas money we had gotten as gifts that we hadn't used, and when we pooled it all together along with what we had built up again in savings, we had exactly $40 more than what we needed.  I could just picture God chuckling and saying "See? I got this!" 

So with some more money we've saved since the last payment, plus a tax refund check we just received, plus a surprise bonus this year from John's job (praise the Lord for these things!), we will be able to cover the next bill of $8,000.  That leaves about $11k left. 

Here's the pinch.  China has to have the rest before we can travel to get our daughter.  So we've gotta pull out all the stops.  We'll be closing our Adoption Bug t-shirt account, so they will send us all profits we have accrued through our t-shirt store since it began.  If you have considered purchasing a t-shirt, but haven't done so yet, please see the link to the right of this post!  The Adoption Bug site was started by another adoptive family who sold shirts to fund their own adoption, then kept their online store up and running to help other families out.  And the shirts are good quality t-shirts.  Check it out!  

A friend of ours has generously given of her time and made an afghan that she is raffling off for $5 per ticket.  Another friend has offered to help put on a yard sale.  If you're local, please let us know if you have anything you'd like to donate to the yard sale, which we'll have when the weather gets a bit warmer.  We'll be happy to come and get it!  Also, let us know if you'd like a raffle ticket for the afghan! 

And lastly, if you feel so led, and would like to make a donation, fyi, they are tax deductible, and can be made directly to the adoption agency.  A check would need to be made to Small World Adoptions in Mt. Juliet, TN, and on the Memo line, it is essential that you write "for the child to be adopted by John and Mary Besse".  Without these words, it would be a donation to the agency, which is still great because they would put it to good use, but it would not go to our specific child.  It is easy to look at big numbers and think that nothing will make a difference.  But $5, or even $1, is infinitely more than $0.  

Obviously, these things will help tremendously, but will not yield $11,000, so we'll be getting a loan for the rest.  We ran into a speed bump in this.  We wanted to apply for a loan a few weeks ago, and found an erroneous claim on our credit report that caused our score to drop 100 points!  Thankfully, we have that resolved and removed now, and our credit score is corrected.  We are hoping for an interest-free loan, if possible, but it is not easy to acquire such a loan, because organizations who loan money to adoptive families only have a limited amount of funds to loan.  But we're saying our prayers, and we know that somehow, we'll get there.  We would appreciate prayers in helping this last big chunk to arrive here before it's time for us to travel.  

The finances are necessary for our adoption, but more than anything else, we ask your prayers.  This year, 2014, has been crazy so far.  We have seen changes in our lives, changes in schools, we've seen illness and sadness, we've met new people and made new friends, and come closer to our old ones.  We've seen death, divorce, heartbreak, all way too close to home!  And we've gotten amazing news, and beautiful pictures, of our next little girl!  It's been an emotional roller coaster!  So we do what we do - we add to our list of prayers to remember each day, and we keep on living.  We remember the joy there is in life, and what a blessing each and every day we have here is.  We remember that none of us are truly orphaned, because God our Father adopted us as His children.  And in the end, we know that no matter how lost we've felt, or how long we've been lost, that our Father will come to collect us and take us home with Him.  Until then, we love, and live each day in the way that would honor Him best.  We ask God's blessings upon Anna, and upon us so we can help her and love her the best we possibly can.