God is so good....

I am no longer completely thrown off by seeing God respond to the specific prayer requests we have been asking. I still remain completely astonished and amazed that he does it, but no longer am I surprised. He has been so good to us. I must share with you how often God makes himself known to me.

In this time of waiting, I have to admit that the evil one has tried to attack my heart. Fear and doubt have been his tools. There has been a lot of down time, we were so busy for so long and now the quiet is deafening. Much to my shame I have accepted the offer to slow dance with satan as he uses his tools on me, but my God is stronger than I give Him credit for, and he has continually counter -balanced these tools. This is a fun story to tell, just because I have given up coincidence. We know the names of the boys we are going to consider. Well, we know their first and last names. For fun, I put their first names and our last name into a name generating program we found on line to come up with a middle name.

Two things you should know before I finish this story:
1. Nathan's favorite boy name of all time is Xavier. Noah would have been Xavier, Macy would have been Xavier, Molly would have been Xavier, children that were not born would have been Xavier....you get my point. He loves the name Xavier.

2. We do not want to mess with the identity these boys have established, however we would like to give them a name (we gave all our other children a name), so we have contemplated legally changing their middle names when we change their last name.

So, I put in the names and push the enter button to see what middle name would pop up. Enter, wait....Xavier. Huh, let's try again. Enter, wait....Noah. Wow. One more time....Enter, wait...Nathan. Ok, now it is time to call Nate and tell him this neat story. We have been praying for God to clearly show us if these boys are "our boys". That seemed pretty clear, huh?

The next story comes after two weeks of really going in circles with Satan and his unfair use of fear and doubt. We were heading out of town for a few days without the children and we were dropping them off at Nate's parents house for the time. We spent the night with Trevor and Amanda and went to church with them. The sermon could not be more suited for this current battle. Letting go of control, realizing how God is bigger than anything that we fear. The preacher actually said, "there are some of you who are thinking about adopting, but are worried that there might be health issues, situations that will cause you pain--don't you realize your doubting God to allow this fear to control your thinking?" I hear you, Lord. I hear you, I don't want to doubt. I have faith in you.

I do not know how this will all end. I do not know if these two little boys are OUR boys, but I do know and feel compelled to share that God is OUR God. He is in control of the boys lives and He is in control of our lives and I KNOW that what happens will be for His glory. I could go on and on of how these boys are just what we feel is best for our family--when you consider ages, life experiences, etc. I could tell you over and over how we have asked for specific situations to happen, and they have. I can tell you over and over how things we have specifically asked for have been blatantly denied--answered clearly NO!, which is again an answered prayer in which we asked that we be defeated clearly in the things that were not God's will.

God is good and we are putting our faith in Him.. What a blessing.