Thankfulness

"Give THANKS to the Lord, for He is good. His faithful love endures forever" Psalm 136


Jason and I have A LOT to be thankful for this year. First and foremost, we are thankful for God, who sent His son Jesus to pay our debt. We are absolutely nothing without Him. Second, we are thankful for our family and friends who are just LIKE our family (you know who you are!), who have been loving and supportive during this very eventful year.

And of course, we are sooooo thankful for these 4 precious babes that are our world:

The Bible says that children are a gift from the Lord, and boyyyyyy do we fill blessed! Each of them have their own little personalities, and being their parents is a complete privilege. We are also thankful for the many things the Lord has taught us in the past year. Mostly, He has taught us about obedience. Deciding to start the adoption process was ALL about obedience. We knew it was going to be hard. And expensive. And possibly inconvenient and painful at times. But the verse that "sealed the deal" for us was Proverbs 24:12 - "Once our eyes are opened, we can't pretend what to do. God, who weighs our hearts and keeps our souls, KNOWS WHAT WE KNOW and holds us responsible to act". Wowzers. Once we read that, we KNEW that we had to be obedient to His calling for our family to adopt. He KNEW we were being convicted about the orphan crisis in the world. And after all, not obeying is DISOBEDIENCE, and heck fire - I know better than to be disobedient to the Lord's Will. I mean, I don't want to be standing at the Pearly Gates someday and say, "Well God, adoption was going to be hard. And expensive. And possibly inconvenient and painful at times. So we decided not to." Yeah....not going that route, folks. And because of our obedience to Him, look who we had at our Thanksgiving table this year!!!

Wow. What a gift indeed! What an AMAZING reward to our obedience! And to be thankful for Miss Macy, means that we need to be thankful to one more person today. Someone who is now another member of our family. And that would be our daughter's birthmom. I really debated on whether I should show her picture or even discuss her on our blog, but I think as a rightful member of our family, it is okay. Our sweet daughter indeed has two mothers, and we don't ever want her to forget about her first momma. This precious, quiet, little lady tried her very hardest to raise our daughter for over two years. And when she finally realized that she couldn't give her daughter the life that she had wished, she relinquished her in hope that someone else could provide her with it. When we asked her, "What would you like us to tell (Macy) Bereket someday when she asks us why you relinquished her, her answer was, "Because she is the youngest, and she deserves a better life than what I can give her here". Can you imagine the pain? No matter how selfless an act it is, it's still painful. This sweet lady has been a mom for over fifteen years. I can't imagine how hard it would be to take your youngest baby somewhere and have to leave her. Honestly, I can't imagine. But she understood what was best for her child, and because of that we have the honor of being her parents. It makes me very happy knowing that we will be able to have communication with Macy's birthmother throughout the years. We promised her we'd send her pictures and updates, and she was very appreciative. And today, we are thankful for her.

So this year, Thanksgiving is even more special to us. We have one more kiddo at the dinner table, but we also have all the lessons that we have learned in our process of bringing her home. And for all of that, we give thanks.

Happy Turkey Day, ya'll!