Back Home and with a Passport Praise!

Koen and I are back from Fort Collins, Colorado for our Campus Crusade for Christ conference. Keith is driving back, but because he wasn’t feeling well today, didn’t make it very far.

My renewed passport came today!! Only 3 weeks and without expediting it, when it was supposed to take 8-10! That’s a praise! I was worried it could take months, and I would need it while they had my old and new one. So, I'm thankful to not have to worry about that!

Also a praise, but sad for us, is that my Grandma passed away on July 14th in the evening, soon after my mom, sister, and I had visited and said goodbye. I’m thankful she is with Jesus, but I will miss her, and am having a hard time remembering her when she was younger and still full of life. This is Koen with my 95 year old Grandma Beth (my dad's mom) in December. We will miss her.

On Monday we meet with our social worker to finish up the home study (I think we should be finishing up anyway). And, our agency recommended we fill out the I 600A form and send it to them, so when they receive our home study they can submit it to the gov right away.

Koen started walking about a month ago now, but while we were gone really started to prefer walking over crawling. Now that we're home, I'm realizing how much harder it's going to be to watch him, and there are so many more no-no's!

That's what this conference was- for all the ministries under Campus Crusade for Christ. Crusade has a ministry under it's umbrella called Hope For Orphans, that is just getting started and is partnering with existing orphan aid ministries. One of their focusses is to train people to start an orphan ministry in their own church. But, they are also wanting to partner with Crusade staff like us that work with college students, in order to send college students to needy orphanages in the world on mission trips. The vision is that many more students are interested in doing humanitarian work, than are students to do typical evangelizing mission trips. And, even non-Christian students are often excited about humanitarian work. So, believers involved in our ministry on campuses will invite their believing and non-believing friends to join them on these trips, and often the non-believing friends are moved by the lives of the students they are serving with, and it opens the door for them to know and receive Jesus as their Savior. Not sure if that makes sense when I explain it, but I'm excited about it. We talked with the Orphan ministry's representative and are probably going to help get these trips organized and recruit students to go. We're excited that we can combine our role with college students with our passion for helping orphans. We've been praying God would show us what to do with this passion, and He is starting to answer.

Koen in the apartment we stayed in - walking everywhere!
On one of our mornings off we went to play in the river. Koen loved the rocks.
Fellow staff from the northwest gathered for an afternoon at a ranch.
One afternoon we got to join other adoptive families at a farm. This is a hay ride full of adopted kids from inner city LA to Uganda to Russia.... The event was sponsored by Hope for Orphans.

*A Few Vain Efforts

Today we tried to get our police clearance – yesterday too. The Mill Creek Police Dept sent us to the sheriffs, who sent us to the county records dept in Everett, where we went today. The lady there had never heard of them doing it for the general public, only their employees, and made some calls for us – to the state patrol, who directed us to a website. We looked at the website, but are not sure this is really what we need. So, we wait for Monday to make a call to our agency with more questions. I ask them a lot of questions!

And, I talked with our social worker today. Sounds like it will take him about 2 weeks to compile our home study, and within a week or so we will do phone interviews. We need to be reading a book that I ordered today as part of our education.

I’m nervous about my passport. It expires next June (08). To renew it I have to send in my current one – so I can’t need it for the next 3 months at least. And, then I have to have the new one’s info added to our Dossier, which I hope is done soon.

Koen’s been happy the last 2 days. It’s nice. But, I feel like my body is falling apart. My ankles have been killing me the last week or so – aching all the time, and it hurts to drive. And then we got a new baby jogger so we’ve been enjoying the novelty of it and jogged for 10 minutes 2 days in a row. My knee hurts again – won’t straiten, and feels like the cyst is back. My elbow and wrist hurt too. I think I have arthritis, and it scares me because I’m only 29. I don’t want to hurt like this for so much of my life. Maybe when I’m 60!