bodner003

Introducing our custom-made t-shirt, designed to help raise money for our adoption! This is a super-soft t-shirt and can be ordered in adult and youth sizes! The cost is $20 per shirt, regardless of the size. If you don't live in our area and would like your shirts shipped, please add $4 to the cost of your total order. We are taking orders and payment now and will place one big order in a few weeks. I'll keep you posted on when they will be arriving. To order, click on the "Donate" button on the right side of this blog homepage. If you are on a smart phone, you'll have to scroll down and click on "View web version" in order to see the donate button. This will link you to our Paypal account. As you make your payment, please indicate in the note how many shirts you are ordering and in what sizes. You are also welcome to mail us a check with your sizes included. Please message me for our mailing address, if you'd rather pay this way. This may be our on...

(Written Feb. 17th) We received a tidbit of new information today, regarding baby Yaru's abandonment. It turns out there is a baby safe-house (similar to a "drop box") right outside of her orphanage. She was left here, on Feb. 5, 2015 with her date of birth and a note saying that something was wrong with her liver. Here is a picture of that safe-house. China is working to process her paperwork quickly so she can be ready for a family to step forward. We have no guarantee that her file will be reserved for our family but we have many advocates trying to make this happen. We also have no guarantee of the time frame in which her paperwork / file will be ready. Her file must be complete before an adoption can take place. It could be weeks or months. Please pray that her paperwork gets expedited very quickly and that her file becomes available for us. In the meantime, we are racing through all the steps that need to be done on our end in order to be eligible for her file (when...

We are completely overwhelmed by the response we have received since sharing our news yesterday. The FB messages, emails, phone calls, text messages. The encouragement. The offers to help and specific requests to tell you immediately where to give! Y'all. Few words could express our deep gratitude. It is hard for us to accept financial help. We feel like this is a decision we made and should find the way to make it happen. However, I've also come to terms with the fact that this attitude is very prideful. This is God's journey, not ours. Yes, God has called us to pursue this sweet baby. But He is not only calling us. He calls our community to be a part of this miracle as well! And if your God-given gift is finances, why should we hinder you from using that gift? We have the faith and courage to GO (all glory to God who has given us these spiritual gifts) but others are blessed financially and are just as instrumental in saving the life of this little soul. We are cur...

(This post was written on Feb. 14, 2015. It could not be posted real-time because we are only now sharing this publicly.) “Who am I, Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?” (2Samuel7:18) On February 5th, a 2-month old baby girl was abandoned in Inner Mongolia, northern China (the same province where Emily is from). She was taken in to a local Social Welfare Institute (orphanage), where she currently lives. It was immediately clear to the staff that she was very sick. Many events would transpire within a matter of days from her abandonment. We had no idea how her story would become intimately intertwined with ours. Important to mention before I continue with the events, is an instrumental lady in the story. Her name is Hannah and she is an American who works in Inner Mongolia, China, caring for orphans in various institutions. I met her when we were in the process to adopt Emily and she was actually the one who helped me find out where Emily w...

"...once our eyes are opened, we can't pretend we don't know what to do. God, who weighs our hearts and keeps our souls, knows that we know, and holds us responsible to act." (Proverbs 24:12) The faces. The cries. The conditions. The stories. The pictures. They all haunt me. It's true that once you've seen, you never forget. We've been changed. Forever. We "saw" almost one year ago. We had no idea how truly changed we'd be after that trip to China. Of course, we went for Emily but she wasn't the only soul who would enter our hearts and stay there for the rest of our lives. We will never ever forget what we experienced in those orphanages. I remember the faces of so many children. Precious, image-bearing children who have experienced tragedy on a level that I will never understand. Some faces were sad. Others were stoic. Some cried. Many never cried because they learned that no one would respond anyway. Faces with Down Syndrome. Faces with...