Over the Summer

So....I'm really not good about keeping a blog updated! So much has been happening since my last post. The girls have all started school....Courtney in 8th grade, Caity in 5th grade, and Chloe goes to Preschool 2 days a week. I started teaching music classes to the 1st-5th grades at Gray Road Christian School last week and add the PreK and K5 this week. All piano lessons have started back up again too. This should be a busy week! I'm very thankful for the "job" that God has allowed me to have so that my girls can attend the great schools that they are at. (Plug for Gray Road Christian and Greenwood Christian Academy!!!)

Adoption News: The summer was spent getting our dossier (huge amounts of paperwork) ready to send to Ethiopia. We are waiting on our final document (I-171H)!!!!!!! Once we have that document I will make a ton of copies of everything and then, in God's time, send it off! I say "in God's time" because we are waiting to see Him provide!!!! God continues to send in financial support from friends. It's so amazing to see Him work! It's also very humbling!

We have just been approved to begin our next big project....BOTH HANDS! If you've never heard of this...YOU NEED TO! It's something very exciting that God has placed in our laps. We're in the process of getting a team gathered to support us and doing the project mid-October. Time is important because we need to avoid the holidays and we don't want to wait until the beginning of next year. We've also filled out a few grants that we will not hear about for several months....but the hard/busy part is done.

If you're asking, "What can I do?"....here are some specific things we need:

1. PRAYER! Prayer for us to be patient as we wait on God and His timing in bringing a little boy to our family.

2. SUPPORT! Consider joining our Both Hands team! Every donation we receive through this is tax-deductible and 100% of the donation goes towards our adoption.

3. BUY or SELL! We still have about 70 cookbooks left....that would bring in $700!!! That would great help in having the funds available to send our Dossier to Ethiopia.

Thanks for your love and support! "Taste and see that the Lord is good"!!!!

On our way!!!

I can't believe it's been so long since I've updated our blog. I guess with Facebook it seems like everyone gets the scoop anyway! :-) So.....some of this will be old news to many of you, but we are praising God for every step of the way!

We were officially accepted to the Ethiopia program through America World Adoption Agency. We've sent in our first payment, been assigned our Family Coordinator, applied to The Miriam Project for our home study, and started the "paper chase" process. This last week has been a busy one! We have a few appointments this week and hope to hear when our first home study visit will be. It seems like there is so much to do and we're gradually wrapping our brains around what should happen and when. The entire process can be so confusing at times, but I'm thankful for great friends and a great agency that will help us and answer many questions.

Our cookbook sale, Taste and See, has gone great! We've sold over 250 cookbooks. At this point, we have about 100 cookbooks left for sale. Our total profit for the cookbook fundraiser, when they are all sold should be $2,700!!!!!!! We are so pleased!

This morning we, along with our friends' Andrew and Rachel Hancock, hosted a "Walk for Adoption" for our family and friends. We met at Independence Park at 9:30 and most everyone walked around the track once....some did many laps! (overachievers!!!!! haha!) We had many family and friends donate snacks and drinks to hand out. We also had many help in various ways....making signs, keeping track of the donation boxes, and helping with the snacks. God has blessed us with such a great team! I am so thankful for the body of Christ!!!!! I don't have the total donated for this event yet, but we are once again amazed at God's provision!

So, we continue the paper chase and wait for God's direction at every point. We know God is bigger than anything we face through this process! We trust in Him!

Taste and See COOKBOOK!

We have collected many recipes from family and friends and are ready to launch our cookbook fundraiser! The cookbook is being submitted this week and should take about a month and a half in production. They will be here in time for Mother's Day gifts.....so plan ahead! :-)

The cookbook will be a soft-cover, spiral bound, 250 recipe cookbook. The cost is $10 per book. We are taking pre-orders so that we have a general idea of how many to order. If you are interested, please email me at christy.kraus@gmail.com. If you are out of state there may be a small shipping fee....I will get that info. for you.

Please feel free to share this post or our blog/story with your family and friends! We are excited to see what God has in store for us. Lord willing, we will be "moving along" with the next phase soon!!!

Looking forward to seeing God's plan for us unfold!
Christy

Waiting...

Well, it's been a few months since we've posted. We've been faithfully working on our debt and longing for the moment when we would be able to say we've been accepted and are waiting to hear back from the agency. Waiting. It's a funny word. It shows just how patient you are, and how wrong your previous opinion on your own level of patience actually is. Waiting. It's what we've been doing - not for the day to come, but just for the day to even begin. Waiting. That can be a rather depressing word, and yet God's word is full of admonitions for us to do just that - wait:

"Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness. Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in Him, and He will act. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for Him;"

I made Psalm 37:4 my life verse a long time ago. "Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart." I've tried, and failed often to make Him my pleasure. I've seen times when He has been just that, and my desires are for nothing more than Him, and I've seen Him work desires in me that I have never had before. This adoption is one of those desires. And yet I failed to take the passage as a whole!

He starts by commanding us to trust Him. Does this desire not require trust? He tells us to live and to be faithful. Does this desire not require faithful living? He tells us to commit our way to Him, to trust in Him and know He will act. Should we expect anything less if we truly are following His leading and faithfully living in that light? And He tells us He will use this in our lives to mold us and make us new. We, just have to wait.

"Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness." God put us in this very time period that our faith might be tested, and in so testing might give us the patience we need to wait. When we look at all that God has done in this process so far, and see all that He has provided, how can we see this as anything but a wonderful thing?

Yes. We wait. Yes. We have a strong desire. But as has been my prayer since the beginning and will continue to be my prayer, I ask that God works in us to make us ready for our little guy. Looks like He's been answering my prayer.

His,

Kevin