Three months

It has been a little over three months since my life changed forever.

For years and years I have dreamed of being married and being a father. I actually had a goal to accomplish both by the time I was 30. As year 30 came around I remember thinking to myself that this goal wouldn't really play out like I wanted it to. After a while I was content with my life as it was, but I was always wanting a family. The girls I dated didn't pan out into wife material for me, so I started to pray about being a father. Maybe it wasn't in God's plan for me to be married, but there are plenty of children in this world who need a father. We are called to help with widows and be a father to the fatherless. This thought started to grow in me more and more. I volunteered with Safe Families which is a temporary foster program that helps families and children. Their main goal was to reunite the children back with the families-which I was fine with, I was content doing my part. Little did I know that by being faithful in serving this organization and these children, my life would soon change.

I remember the call like it was yesterday. It was like a normal call from Safe families...I have a child in need, can you help? This time it was different. It was children, not child and I was being asked to consider a long term placement, maybe even adoption. It was a lot to take in, I mean it was something that I longed for-but it still was a large task. I said I would need time to pray, and they were in agreement. Back and forth the pulling and fighting began between my heart and my head. I needed it to make sense, everything needed to line up just right but I couldn't get it to. After a few weeks, I called Safe Families on the night before I was going to meet the boys. I explained how I wasn't able to meet the boys and how I didn't think this was the right time for me. She asked what was going on, and I explained that I didn't know how I was going to financially do it. I didn't know what it was going to cost to raise two 15 year old boys, and that I would loose a roommate if I did this. So I would have less income than I did currently with two more mouths to feed and care for. Some of it was my reasoning and logic but there was a reality piece to this that was so unknown. She asked me to pray and that maybe I was to be involved in some other way. I prayed and felt comfortable meeting the boys.

Just to be a mentor, I kept telling myself over and over again as I walked up to the door to pick them up. As the front door opened, God opened the door of my heart forever. As I met these two young men I could sense that something bigger was about to happen. Looking back I never knew what it was going to be, and surely didn't think we would be where we are today-but from the moment we met, I knew God was at work.

The next phase happened so quickly that you would have thought it was months later. But after a few weeks of hanging out, they moved it. Soon we were moving down the road of adoption. I still had no idea how this was all going to work out, let alone how the finances would happen. But I did know that all I needed to do was to trust God and allow him to work in me. And work he did!

The work that the Lord did by mending our hearts as one family, in such a short period of time, has been hard to describe.
It has been as if we have been together for years.
On October 3rd, our final adoption hearing, the court will catch up with what we all three of us already know....We are family!

I love those boys as if they came from a part of me.

We might not share the same blood, but we do share the same heart!