We Are Counting Down the Days

We are counting down the days!  On Monday, June 26, my husband and I head to the Kansas City Airport to pick up Aura!  Aura is a 15 year old girl from Poland who lives in an orphanage there.  We have had many orphans in our home over the past several years, but they have all been boys!  So I am excited to have a girl!   She has expressed her love for fashion and is quite the humanitarian so I have a feeling she and I are going to get a long quite well.  One of the things we are most excited about is she speaks ENGLISH!!   Man that is huge for us!  Oh we always managed with the ones who didn't, but it was a struggle. Plus, it was just an inconvenience to always have to use our translator to communicate about everything!  Funny how we throw around the word "inconvenience" when it comes to orphans.  Nothing really fair about that!

I know people wonder why we do this over and over.  It's very costly, inconvenient, time consuming, tons of paperwork and just downright difficult. But an orphan's life is pretty inconvenient and difficult on a daily basis. Their future is bleak. The odds are stacked against them. The hope for a future is very uncertain and most often ends in tragedy. They yearn for anything that resembles a family.  God has blessed me with a wonderful life!  How can I just sit back and NOT do something.  Actually God has blessed me so I can be a blessing to someone else, not so I can sit back and enjoy everything for myself!  He tells us in His Word to take care of the less fortunate, the widows and the orphans so it's nothing I should boast about, but rather just an answered call. My husband and I are school teachers, (well I was haha) and we have the summers off so it's always been fairly easy for us to do this.

The last boy we had was Pavlo. We had him in our home 3 different times. We wanted to adopt him, but he was too scared and uncertain. Unfortunately, when he realized it was a great opportunity for him, it was too late.  He was 16 so he could no longer be adopted.  I could just kick myself over and over for not going ahead and filling out the paperwork  so if he did change his mind, (which he did) we would still be able to adopt him. We do keep in touch with him though facebook, but it's very limited because he has little opportunity to communicate.  Reality is we will never see him again. I just always pray that God will send the right person across Pavlo's path who will steer him in the right direction. He was "saved" when he was here which was an incredible story for another time, but I do have a peace knowing that He prayed the sinner's prayer and accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior.  

So enough of the gloomy part, let's talk about what we have in store for Aura this summer! She will only be here for 6 weeks, and it will go very fast! I do hope she will enjoy spending some time in the boutique meeting people and helping me with the store. This is a very busy time for the boutique because all our merchandise from market starts to roll in so I'm sure she will love seeing fashion in America. One of my daughters, Paige, lives in the same town as us, and she has 3 children( one is an adopted orphan btw), so I know Aura will have fun spending time with them.  We hope she likes to swim because we do that often as well!  We have passes to Silver Dollar City and White Water so we will spend a weekend there which I'm sure she will love!  We do photo sessions every week of our new apparel so I am excited to let her do some as well. She's beautiful and I know she will photograph well. Unfortunately, we aren't allowed to put her on our website, but I can attach one on my next blog for you to see! We plan to surround Aura with a lot of love and affection, share the gospel of Jesus Christ with her, and who knows, maybe a forever family! 

Speaking of forever families, there was a family in Florida who was in the process of adopting Aura and the mother became ill so they were not able to proceed. Talk about another rejection for Aura :( So, we don't know how things will go with her, but when we host orphans, we must always be mindful that maybe God has laid this child on our heart for a reason. We definitely are open minded about adoption if we feel that is God's leading.

Aren't you excited to hear the end of the story? Definitely follow us on Facebook and Instagram because we will post lots of pictures of our adventures together. We cannot single her out, but she can be part of the bigger picture! If you are a prayer warrior, please add our family and Aura to your list because we are going to need it, not just about adoption, but her stay in America in general. Thanks for reading my blog, and the end of the story, (or maybe the beginning lol) will be on my next blog!  

Libby