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So when we put in our backyard a year ago, we had this great idea to build a vegetable garden and the usual thing happened as a result, I became obsessed with this new hobby and Ellie ridiculed it.  And after a year of growing stuff and spending way more time than could possibly have been required tending to plants and literally watching them grow I learned something about myself, I am a very impatient person. Growing plants is actually very very easy, since God is really the one who does all the work (or you know… evolution, if you are a godless heathen) in fact I read recently that growing corn (the most abundant crop produced in America) is the most productive form of work a person can do, because of how little energy and effort it takes to grow so much vs. what is ultimately produced. Farmers just plant the seed, and then they leave it alone for a few months and come back and harvest. In fact most corn farmers have second jobs like driving trucks because they go such long periods of time without doing any work. It is this extended inactivity that drives me crazy when it comes to trying to grow things myself. This is a picture of our garden as of a few days ago when we put in the batch for this season and as you can see things are pretty tiny. Its going to be a while before our plants grow to being able to produce much of anything- but that won’t stop me from going out every morning and surveying my “land” closely studying each plant and doing anything I can possible come up with to help them along. Last year I did this each day, poking and prodding every plant, digging into the ground to see what if anything was really there and watering watering watering! If I thought a plant didn’t look quite right I tried to fix it and sometimes even pulled out whole sections of stuff resolving myself to start over and do better with the next round.

This constant scrutiny and impatience is the exact opposite of what you need to have in order to be good at growing anything. The times our garden looked best were always after we went on vacation and things just were given time and space to do their thing. My desire to get involved in the process and make things better ultimately drove me crazy and only made things worse. And most importantly it just plain didn’t give God the opportunity to actually make things grow the way they are meant to. I’ve been seeing this same kind of impatience and incessant need to get involved in what God is doing in all sorts of areas of my life. Its hard to feel so excited about where God is taking our church and to so clearly see the vision He has given us to change this community, but to have to wait with patience as He takes us there is sometimes very very hard. I’ve recently been extremely convicted about what it means to be a godly man and husband and I’m excited about how that is already started to affect our marriage but as bumps in the road come along I find myself wishing I could fast forward to a few years from now when we have worked everything out. Nowhere do I experience this more than with our adoption process, as we spend so much time just waiting and waiting and waiting for things to happen. We just turned in our paperwork and home study to immigration and now we just have to wait until out appointment to get fingerprinted so we can wait some more as they decide that yes indeed we are not terrorists nor are we child traffickers. It would be great if we could just go get our fingerprints done now, but of course we can’t, we have to just wait for 3 weeks for some random reason and know that our paperwork is just sitting on a desk somewhere in limbo.

Its hard to spend this time just waiting. Though the paperwork was painful it caused some good discussion between us and made us feel like we were doing something at least, and though the home study was an indescribable emotional roller coaster, again at least something was happening. Now we are just waiting and once our paperwork is sent to Ethiopia the real waiting begins. I have never before wanted so badly to just hit a remote to skip chapters to the next stage of our life when our baby will be here but I know I can’t, and as a result I am being forced to learn something I thought I could go my whole life avoiding, patience. I think we really only learn patience when it is forced upon us by circumstances. Really I have no choice but to be patient, I mean I guess I could just freak out and run around in circles pretending that will get anything done, but I know it won’t so patience is the only sane option.  I can’t speed up this adoption any more than I can make plants grow faster, we can’t do anything to help our child be healthy happy or to feel loved, and its because of that that I have to just completely step back and trust that God is going to take care of our child who may quite possible be alive right now in another country where we don’t know them and can’t take care of them. We are starting to understand what the Bible means when it talks about how anything of consequence is not accomplished out of human effort but through the Holy Spirit and so now the challenge is to actually spend time praying that this would happen. Ellie and I have never been very good about praying together, mostly because of my lack of discipline in this area, and I think this may actually force us to start doing that since we are completely and utterly dependent on it for everything we need right now. And if you are wondering how you can help us as we are on this journey, just pray for our patience, our child and that we take the time to sit down and pray for them ourselves.

And if you like broccoli or onions let us know, we may have a ton of it in a few LONG months.

So the craziest thing happened recently.  We sent out a few emails to some folks telling them about our decision to adopt and a ton of people were like “Hey! Keep us updated on this whole thing, we want to know how its going and if there’s any way we can help!” OK well, this of course is not exactly what each and every person said, that would be weird and scary.  But for the most part we were overwhelmed by all of your support and encouragement as well as your desire to be in the loop as this whole thing progresses. So as a result we decided to finally take the big leap into the world of blogging. And this is it… the first post. We have managed to keep out of the blog world for a few reasons.  Partly because of the fact that Ellie has already been keeping up a photography blog which has taken some work, and also the fact that people can only read so much about an out of control Siberian husky and an orange housecat (albeit the greatest housecat that has ever lived).  The biggest reason though is that compared to most other blogs out there we thought it may just irritate people to read about how we get 10 hours of sleep every night, spend an unusual amount of time together at coffee shops just doing nothing and how often we are just sitting around going “what should we do tonight, should we go out to eat AGAIN?” Chili’s has been getting a good portion of our income for some time now…  But now we have more important things to talk about, like our forthcoming adoption from Ethiopia, and then whatever comes after that as we begin the adventure of starting and raising a family.

So be sure to check back every once in a while, especially if you are interested in knowing how the adoption is progressing.  As far as where things are at right now, we are just drowning in a sea of paperwork and lots of waiting for the next step. We just passed our physicals and blood tests with flying colors, though I (ed) was kind of expecting Ellie to fail the Hep B test, (she showed all the classic signs- jaundice, inflamed liver, itchy skin, etc).  Our social worker is coming by on Thursday to look at our house and make sure there aren’t any spike pits (that are uncovered at least) bear traps, knife collections on display dangerously low to the ground or swimming pools disguised as sandboxes.  After that and a few more meetings with her we are then we are waiting on the government to approve some immigration stuff and we can submit our dossier (which is the actual packet of documents/papers that tell the Ethiopian government who we are) and then if they accept our dossier we are just waiting for a referral of a child which usually takes around 6 months because of processing and stuff.

So thanks again for all of your words of support and check back soon! We’re off to Chili’s!