We are now in Changsha, which is the provincial capitol of Hunan province. Tomorrow morning, we will go to the Civil Affairs Office and meet our children!  I am so excited,  I can’t even sleep!  Today was spent getting up at the crack of dawn to catch an early flight from Beijing, settling in at the hotel, gathering and giving our paperwork to our guide, and changing our dollars into Chinese yuen.  After doing all of this, it was only about noon local time, so we decided to go exploring with the other family with whom we are traveling.  We set out down the street and found what looked like a fast food Chinese restaurant.  We, of course, couldn’t read anything on the menu, and no one spoke English.  This is the second time since we have been here that we ventured out and just walked into a restaurant to eat.  Todd is a seasoned traveler, so he wasn’t worried about ordering.  We simply pointed to various items on the menu, held up a finger to indicate we wanted one of each item, and then we waited to see what would arrive at our table.  A couple of days ago when we did this in Beijing, Simeon and Lillah were pretty sure they wouldn’t be eating anything.  Once the food arrived, however, they were delighted to use their chopsticks to pick up delicious beef and celery and various dumplings with different fillings.  It was all quite tasty.  Today, we ended up with a couple of soups that appeared to be rice-based, one with chicken and the other with some kind of fruit.  We also had a spicy mushroom and beef dish and some spicy noodles.  We finished almost all of it, even the spicy food, and left only a little of the fruity soup.  I have been impressed by the children’s willingness to try new and different foods.  The chopsticks have been a big hit, especially with Simeon.  If there is a fork available, Lillah will use that, but today we had only chopsticks, so we had to make do.  I have been thankful for the chopsticks skills I acquired while living for 7 years in California!

I am going to try and get some sleep.  I can’t believe we will meet our sweet children in the morning and begin the true adventure.  We are ready for the challenge!

It has been an extremely busy few days.  We had so much to do to get ourselves out the door to go to China: Settling certain kids with grandparents, making sure everything was set for the kids who would be staying home and the people helping them, gathering the correct documents, etc.  To complicate matters, I had to fly to Florida to attend to a legal matter regarding my father.  I arrived in Florida on Tuesday evening, the court hearing was Wednesday afternoon, and I was scheduled to fly out to Dallas Wednesday evening so we could get to the airport early Thursday morning.  I was settling in at the gate for my flight Wednesday evening, when all of a sudden the sign that had just said “on time” changed to say “cancelled.”  I thought it must be a mistake, because there were no announcements made over the loudspeaker or anything, but I did notice that there were no airline staff at the gate working to get the plane loaded and ready to go.  I made my way to the airline counter, and was told that there was nothing they could do since the entire regional airport network shut down after 8pm.  We checked every nearby airport with no luck.  Finally, we decided I would need to drive in order for me to make the flight to Detroit which would take us to Beijing. After a miserable, somewhat scary overnight (11-hour) drive, I made it safely to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, where Todd, Simeon, and Lillah were waiting for me in the security line.  Todd’s Dad and my sister-in-law were amazing, meeting me outside, returning the rental car for me, and helping me find Todd and the kids.  We are very thankful for everyone’s prayers!

No one really slept much on the plane rides, so we were pretty exhausted upon arriving in Beijing yesterday.  We walked around a little bit to stay awake, got some yuen out of the bank, and bought some dinner at a local restaurant.  The food was amazing, and the kids loved it!  They enjoyed trying to eat with chopsticks.  We all crashed around 7pm local time, which isn’t too bad, but Todd had a hard time sleeping past about 11pm.  I was sound asleep for almost 9 hours!  The kids were so excited, they could hardly contain themselves, but they slept for a bit before finally waking up at around 3am.  Yay for jet lag.

This morning, we enjoyed an amazing breakfast at our hotel.  There were tons of selections, including western choices as well as traditional  Chinese foods.  Then we met our guide along with the other families with whom we are traveling, and we toured Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.  It was an incredible day.  The Great Wall was the most amazing thing to see in person.  Pictures cannot do it justice.  We climbed hundreds of very steep steps to make it to the top of the section we went to.  The kids were so over-the-top excited.  I was amazed at their energy level.  This was not an easy climb, but they got to the top and down while keeping the spring in their steps!

Tomorrow we will fly out of Beijing and into the city where our “gotcha day” will be on Monday, and we will finalize our adoptions and meet our children!  We are so excited!  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beZ5hF-qZDY

This song has touched my heart ever since the first time I heard it.  I remember sitting at a Steven Curtis Chapman concert, and hearing it for the first time, watching this video.  The words spoke to my heart and I began to cry.  I knew deep in my heart that God would call us to adopt someday.  I had no idea how the story would unfold.

We are just a few days away from our departure date!  I have so much to do, I can’t even think straight half the time, but I am so excited!  I can’t believe it’s already time, but then again it seems like forever since we began this process.

I am filled with different emotions: excitement, joy, apprehension… I can’t wait to get there and bring these two children into our family.  I know that it is going to be a process for them to feel that they belong with us.  I am praying that they will feel loved and accepted and safe.  I’m praying that they will know that they are now forever home with their family who loves them.  I pray that they will come to know our awesome God.

The last couple of weeks have been filled with a lot of things that have challenged and grown our faith.  Two weeks ago, while I was at Nationals with our speech kids, Todd found out that his position at Intel had been eliminated.  I felt awful that I wasn’t home when he found out.  We were in a bit of shock, wondering what God was doing.  We were just about to leave for China to adopt two special needs children, which we are doing out of faithfulness to the call we have felt from God Himself.  What is up with the timing of this?

After a difficult couple of weeks, full of interviews and prayer, Todd was offered two different jobs yesterday morning!  He actually gets to choose between two good positions (still at Intel)!  What a blessing.  God has grown our faith and renewed our certainty that God is calling us to all of this, and that HE will take care of us.  What a blessing!

We felt blessed and at peace yesterday as we booked our airplane tickets, and we finalized our decision to bring two of our children (who are closest in age to Eden and Daniel) along with us for this incredible journey!  Simeon, our 9-year-old, was so happy he leapt into his daddy’s arms and kept saying, “Thank you!  Thank you!” over and over.  What an adventure awaits us all!

Right before we leave for China, I have a family matter regarding my father happening in Florida. I will be flying to Destin Tuesday evening, then flying to Dallas Wednesday evening.  I will meet Todd there, where our youngest 3 boys will get to spend a couple of weeks with their Mammy and Graddaddy.  Please pray that my flight to Dallas Wednesday is on time.  The older kids have various things going on, and different people will be helping out with them.  Pray for us all as we will be apart for a couple of weeks.  This is the part of the journey about which I am not very excited.  I will miss everyone so much.  My little 2-year-old is such a Mama’s boy!  This is going to be hard on him.

We are so excited about our journey, and we know it is going to be exciting and hard.  I will be posting updates as things go along, and I’m hoping to be able to add posts while we are in China.  Please pray for us as we embark on this journey and adjust to life with our new children.

“A Father of the fatherless…God makes a home for the lonely.”
Psalm 68:5-6

We are deep in the middle of the adoption process.  No longer at the beginning, yet it feels like we are a bit of a way off from the end!  So far, most of our paperwork is in the final stage, which is at the Chinese consulate of whatever in which it originated, and we are waiting for those documents to be returned to us.  We have completed our homestudy and are waiting for our social worker to send the final approved homestudy to us and our agency.  I will say this: everyone told me that was the easiest part, and it truly wasn’t bad at all.  Those of you who know us know that our house is far from perfect, and most of the time it can be quite a mess.  In preparation for the home study, we cleaned out a whole lot of clutter from the inside of the house, and did a lot of the outside cleaning up and projects we had been wanting to finish.  We had met with the social worker individually already, so when she came to our house, we had a joint interview (Todd and I), and then she met with each of the children individually.  The day of the homestudy, I think our house was just about as clean and pleasant as it has been since we built the addition!  I felt so good about everything.  I had gone around and covered all the outlets, stored our knives up high, put all the medicines (prescription and OTC) in a lock box high in the pantry.  The children were all super well-behaved, and they all expressed their excitement about the adoption.  It went so well.  I was so relieved to have that part behind us.  It was a wonderful feeling when the social worker told us as she left that she thought our family was amazing, and she couldn’t wait to help us add to it!

For the last several weeks, we have continued to pray for wisdom regarding whether we should adopt a second child at the same time as Xiao.  God led us to a 12-year-old girl, and we have been praying that God would speak clearly as He has through this whole process.  The girl we have been praying about was brought to our attention by someone who has a connection with the foster family and orphanage where she lives and goes to school, so we didn’t find her on the waiting child list.  They have been able to tell us a lot about her.  She seems really sweet and seems like she would be a really good fit for us at the same time with Xiao.  I felt pretty sure about it from the beginning, when we first learned about her.  We wanted Todd to feel peace about it, so we continued to pray.  This wasn’t something we wanted to rush into, and we certainly didn’t want to do it if only one of us felt called to do so while the other was not comfortable.  After several weeks, much prayer and counsel, we have decided that we will be moving forward with the adoption of this little girl as well as Xiao.  We are both at peace with the decision and are excited about moving forward.  Yesterday, we sent in the paperwork for her, and we are waiting for all the funds to come in to get all of it sent to the Chinese government for preapproval.  I will write more about her soon.  We want to thank everyone who has been praying for this decision, and we now ask that you continue to pray for us as we all prepare our hearts and our home to welcome these two precious children.  We know it is going to be very hard, so we covet your prayers and we will definitely take you up on your offers to help as we bring them home.

We are doing a few things to raise money, if anyone would like to support us.  We are going to be holding a garage sale on December 12th.  If anyone local has anything to donate to the garage sale, we would love to have things to sell, especially furniture and other larger items.  If you have anything to give, please feel free to contact me and we can arrange to get it from you.  Also, if anyone wants to help us prepare for the sale and on the day of the sale, let me know.  We will be having the sale in Circle C off of Davis Rd. at the home of some dear friends.

We are also selling t-shirts!  We will get about $10 for every shirt sold!  The shirts are being sold through Bonfire Funds, and it is awesome because all we have to do is design the shirts and as long as we sell at least 11 shirts, they will go to print and ship directly to our supporters!  We designed a shirt with no personal references on them so that they can be sold to more people, so if you know anyone who would like to support adoption, or even anyone who has adopted themselves, this shirt would be great for them! They say “Every Heart Deserves a Home” with a map of China and a heart inside China on the front.  The back reads, “A Father of the fatherless…God makes a home for the lonely.”  Isn’t that awesome?! You can go to this link to see the shirt and purchase.  There are options in both short sleeve, women’s short sleeve, long sleeve, hoodies, and youth sizes!  Spread the word!  Share this link with everyone you know!  We would love to sell lots of these shirts to help us get closer to our goal and bring our children home!   It would also be great to get photos of everyone who buys the shirts to have for the kids to see someday that all of these people were thinking of them before they even came home.  Go to this link to buy a shirt, and please feel free to share and spread the word!

https://www.bonfirefunds.com/erdner-family-adoption

So far, this adoption journey has been an incredible story of God speaking in our lives.  I can’t even begin to really explain how intimately God has been speaking to me during this time.  It was amazing to me that just a few months ago, I began to pray again about adoption.  It was something I hadn’t been actively praying about for quite a while.  But God laid that on my heart, and so I prayed.  Just a few weeks later, all of the events began to unfold that led us to Xiao.

I have to admit, I have my moments of fear.  Not doubt.  I don’t doubt that this is what God is calling our family to do.  Every now and then, however, especially when I read stories of the struggles others have had with adoption, I wonder why God is calling us to do something so difficult.  We move forward, nevertheless, in faith.  We are certain He has called us, and so we are certain that He will equip us and give us everything we need to get ready and to parent Xiao.

With our agency, you can adopt two unrelated children simultaneously.  The fees are significantly lower than they are to bring the first child home.  So, of course, we have been considering this from the beginning of the adoption process.  We are putting forth all this effort, we are paying all of this money, and we will be traveling and taking this huge journey.  We felt that we should at least consider giving a second child a forever family.

As soon as we started talking about a second child, I began to look at the waiting child photolisting, which can be a really bad thing to do in some ways!  Originally, speaking with Xiao’s host mom, we thought maybe a younger child, 2 to 3 years old would be “easiest” to bring home at the same time as Xiao.  So, I was looking for a younger child. A couple of weeks ago, I found two little boys who I thought could be good matches.  After I received the file on one little boy, another family decided to adopt him, so he was no longer available for adoption.  I began to pray about the second little boy.  He had a metabolic disorder that would require a special diet.  I thought we could manage it.  This little guy is 19 months old, and so cute.  As I shared his file with Todd, I prayed that God would really make it clear if we should adopt this baby along with Xiao.  I wanted what was best for Xiao, but also to bless another child with a family.

The little baby’s file was being returned just a few days after I found him, which made our decision urgent.  I asked friends to pray, and so did Todd.  He was feeling uneasy, and I was feeling like I really wanted to adopt that baby.  We were torn.  It is a heartwrenching thing to think that you are considering a human life and deciding whether or not you can take him out of a life with no family or leave him there in the orphanage for who knows how much longer.  It is really difficult to think about.

Over the weekend, Todd was still feeling uneasy about taking the baby.  I received a message from Xiao’s host mom, and I spoke to her on the phone for a long time.  She shared with me that she felt that adopting a baby with Xiao would not be the right thing.  She said that it would be easy to love a baby, and Xiao would most likely arrive with some challenging behaviors at first.  We could be tempted to favor the cute baby over Xiao.  She had some other concerns about us adopting this baby along with Xiao.  I took everything she said to heart and continued to pray.  I wanted so badly to take that cute little baby home as well as Xiao.  The answer would come to us even more clearly the next day at church.

We had a few people from our church praying about our decision whether or not to move forward with the baby.  With the file being returned the following Wednesday, we really would have had to have everything in by Tuesday.  We went to church last Sunday, and I asked a Godly woman whom I respect a lot to pray for us specifically about the baby.

The sermon last Sunday was very fitting for what is happening in our lives right now.  We have an incredible pastor, by the way, Pastor Stephen Armstrong, who teaches the Bible verse by verse. His ministry is versebyverseministry.org, and you can listen to his sermons online.  We have been studying the book of Judges, and over the past couple of weeks, we have been focusing on the story of Gideon. Most of us think of Gideon as a hero.  In reality, Gideon was a typical Israelite of his day–weak in his faith, and not ready to just jump up and follow what God was telling him to do.  In this story, so familiar to most believers, God proves over and over His will for Gideon and He confirms for Gideon, in His graciousness, what it is He wants Gideon to do.  Yet, Gideon is still unwilling to move forward.  He is fearful; he lacks faith in the God who has given him so many signs.  Finally, in Judges chapter 7, God tells Gideon to go down to the camp of the Midianites, their formidable enemy, and listen to what they will say.  In this incredible story, Gideon goes down to the camp at night, and “happens” to overhear two men talking about the battle.  They mention Gideon by name and say that God has given Midian and all the camp into his hand (Judges 7:13-14).  There is no explanation for the words these men of Midian speak except that God has put the words in their mouths.  Gideon went to just the right tent at just the right moment to hear just the right words he needed to hear in order to give him the confidence he needs to go into the battle God has for him.  It is a truly amazing moment, if you think about it.  In fact, Gideon is so overwhelmed with the sovereignty of God, with the omnipotence of a God who can orchestrate such details to come together in such a way to convey a message to him, that he bows in worship right then and there (Judges 7:15).  And then he goes and takes action.

The sermon that Sunday, based on those events in the book of Judges, was full of encouraging words to obey God, to have faith and take the steps that seem impossible.  Without taking the step of faith, you will never see the miracle.  Those are words that are so real to me. In my life, I have seen over and over the fruit of living by such faith.  I am ready to walk again in faith as we move forward with our adoption of Xiao.  As it came together that Sunday, God actually spoke very clearly to us that we were not supposed to adopt the baby along with Xiao.  The godly woman I asked to pray that morning came to Todd and said she had been praying fervently for us, and that God had told her that that baby was not our baby.  The same day, our pastor told Todd that sometimes obedience means we do not take a certain action, meaning we should not take the baby.  That night as Todd shared those things with me, I felt humbled that God would choose to speak so directly and so clearly to us.  I felt a little like Gideon at that moment in his story.  I sensed that God had spoken directly to us, just as He had sent the words to the men at the Midianite camp for Gideon.  I was floored that He would speak so directly to us about what we were to do.  I don’t think I have ever heard His voice so directly spoken to us, almost as if He was standing there saying the words Himself.  I was so sad for the little baby, that we were not to be his family.  I shed tears for him.  But I also shed tears of gratefulness that God would direct us so clearly when we needed Him to make it known within a certain time frame. Since we were on such a tight deadline with the baby’s file being returned just a couple days later, we needed to make that decision quickly.  I think I would have had a really hard time with it if we hadn’t heard so clearly from God that the answer was no.  I was able to let go of the baby with sadness, but with confidence that God had said he was not for us.  I am praying for him to find his forever family very, very soon.  He is so precious.

As for how I’m feeling now, I am not convinced that God does not want us to adopt another child with Xiao, but I am confident that if He does want us to do so, He will make it abundantly clear.  And so that is my prayer now.  The need is so great.  Yes, we are already taking in one child, and we are doing a big thing just in doing that. But I can’t help but think we should keep our hearts open to taking in another child at the same time.  We are so blessed and have so much to give.  I know it will drain us quite a bit, but we will be giving life only just to a couple of children when there over a million orphans in this world.  I feel it is just a small thing we can do.  I will continue to pray up until our dossier is ready to go that if there is another child that we are supposed to adopt at the same time, God will show us as clearly as He showed us that we were not to adopt the baby.  I know that God will continue to be faithful, and that He will show us His will.  And I am more than confident, I believe with all my heart and soul, that He will equip us and give us everything we need to parent Xiao and any other children He may have for us.  He has always been faithful, and I have no reason to doubt His faithfulness now.

“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.” Hebrews 10:23