~The plans are mans but the odds are Gods!~

What a journey it has been for us, the past few months. God is so good and we have been through some amazing adventures with the adoption process of Pete. Yes, i said adoption, for those who didn't know, we are trying to adopt a little 2yr old boy named Petey. We met Petey when we did some respite care for the Strom Family, a family from church who does foster care.

This all first started with Dorri wanting another little one in the house, she approached me one day and brought up the idea of doing foster care/adoption. I told her that I would think about it but initially my thought was "NO WAY!". I was content with the two kids we had and enjoyed our family life the way it was. So like any good wife would do, she began to pray. She also got her friends to pray. When we watched Petey one night and the wheels began to turning in my head. Jan Strom told us that Petey was going up for adoption, so Dorri began to inquire again about the possibilities. The Lord had really done some work in my heart though the men's discipleship James study and how we are to care for the widows and children in need. I remember telling Dorri I was about 90% sure I wanted to do this. But I still had some doubt about it. The process was moving very fast once the wheels began to move. So I said yes to my wife and the next thing I know she was making calls about adoption and the Lord sent us a lady who ran her own private adoption agency in West Salem. We found out we had to move quickly as 3 families would be chosen very soon for committee. We found out it could take months to get a home study done and jump through all the hoops. Would they wait for us to finish all our requirements?

So we met with Bev from Red Thistle Adoptions and she gave us the details of what we needed to do. Also letting us know she needed $300.00 to get started . Dorri had just finish working the Mothers day week at the flower shop and had just got her check which was enough for us to get started. We met again with Bev, our adoption worker about a week later and was told we needed another $1500.00 to complete the adoption. Wow!! Where in the world were we going to get $1500.00 in a week. we had $800.00 stuck away and needed another $700.00. So Dorri had a great idea of doing a bake sale, but i was thinking "No way are you going to earn that much money doing a bake sale". So the email went out to all the ladies in Dorri's email listing and boy, did we get back a ton of support (thank you to all who supported us with prayer and money and donations). The owners of the flower shop where Dorri works, Anderson McIlnay Florist agreed to let us have the bake sale in front of the shop. When all was said and done with all the love and support of our Church, friends and family we earned exactly what we needed $719.00. God is so good!!!

Dorri and I did back to back Saturdays of foster care/adoption classes needed by the state to adopt or do foster care, had home inspections, interviews, did background checks and fingerprinting, had our cats vacinated (didn't need to worry about our kids vacinations hmmm...)had physicals, wrote our autobiographies, made a family scrapbook and then waited.

The next step was for us to wait and see if we were selected for committee. This is where 3 familes are selected for the child. Right before we left for Arizona on our High School Mission Trip we found out there were 33 families waiting for Petey. We were overwhelmed but knew that God had a plan. A month later we found out our family had been chosen as one of the 3 to go to committee. Then 2 weeks after that one of the families dropped out. Then 2 weeks after than we found out that the last family had opted out. Which leaves us the sole family left to adopt Petey. We will still have to go before committee and are currently awaiting a committee date. Things look very promising but we are not getting our hopes up and trusting that God knows best just as He always has. We covet all your prayers and ask if you would please continue to pray that we would continue to trust in God's timing and not ours and that no matter where Petey ends up that he would be a man of God and raised in a Godly home and transitions would go smoothly.


God has opened so many doors for us and has grown us so much in this process. it reminds me of this scripture

Romans 8:28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.


A quote i remember from Pastor Jim Cecey "the plans are mans but the odds are Gods.