A Lot Can Change in 2 Weeks

2 weeks and 1 day ago, my husband and I watched The Drop Box on Netflix. It rocked our world. Go watch it. You have to read subtitles for most of it, but it's worth it. Trust me. We had recently opened our foster home again, but we had zero calls for placements, in almost 2 months. That was definitely a first for us! After watching The Drop Box and seeing this precious pastor truly give his life for all of these unwanted children, many with special needs, we started praying. We prayed that God would use us. We will take the risk that others can't or won't take for these children with special needs. We prayed together through tears that God would be glorified through our family and that we would do anything, He just needed to show us.

The next evening I messaged a fellow adoptive mother in another state, who has even more children than us :), many with special needs. I asked her where we needed to start this journey. She sent me back a couple websites, one being www.chask.org. I went to the waiting children and the first child listed was a beautiful baby boy in Oklahoma, just a little over 100 miles away from us. He was almost 1 month old and was born with hydranencephaly. It is a rare condition in which the brain's cerebral hemispheres are absent and replaced by sacs filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The majority of children with this condition don't live past 1 year old. We prayed and decided to find out more, so I sent the lawyer for this baby a text message at 9pm. I asked him to call me the next day and explained that we were a family with 7 children and we lived in _______, a small town in NW Oklahoma. He wrote me back and said, "You must have heard about this baby from a friend I had lunch with today in ______." (I know it's hard to follow with the blanks, but for privacy reasons, I don't feel the need to share our exact location.) The lawyer for this baby had lunch in our small town with what turned out to be a mutual friend of our family on the same day that we found this baby through a friend in another state. Whoa. This was CLEARLY God. We later found out from this mutual friend that he had even told this lawyer about our family at lunch, just hours before I sent him a text message. How crazy is that?!

We officially spoke with the agency in the morning and we were able to submit a family profile immediately. 11 days later, we got the call that we had been chosen to adopt this baby boy. We went and met the birth parents and our future son, Judah William, the next day at the hospital. We are overwhelmed, excited and mostly anxious to see the miracles that God is going to do in our lives and this baby boy's life. Obedience and living fully surrendered to His will is terrifyingly awesome! To watch God provide everything we need, including the finances to cover this private adoption within hours brought me to tears more times than I could count. We are in the process of getting a power of attorney established and then we will be bringing him home!

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