We began our adoption process in 2006 and were originally intending to go to Taiwan to bring home a perfect little baby girl, or so we thought.  If you know someone who has adopted or adopted yourself you know very little goes as planned or happens on quick schedule.  There are certainly some exceptions to this but trust me they are the exception not the rule.  We signed up and waited and waited and then when we got done waiting we waited some more.  This continued for 2 years and, like traffic in LA or Atlanta, we made little to no progress.  After much waiting we finally looked at one another and asked each other an interesting question, “Did God call us to adopt a perfect little girl or did He ask us to adopt a child?”  When we answered the question with, “we were called to simply adopt”, things changed.  Tisra quickly found an agency with two waiting little girls in India.  Both were classified as “special needs” and therefore were more difficult to place.  We got a picture on December 24, 2008 of a little girl in Cuttuck, India.  Turns out she was our daughter.  We aggressively began the paperwork process and were beyond anxious to bring our daughter home as quickly as possible.  Funny thing happened when we saw her picture, she became our daughter- wholly and completely.  I can only describe it as a God thing, I had feared that in adopting a child it would take longer to bond or to feel that connection.  Here I was with only a picture and it was as though she was my daughter from birth.  So from December to the following October we entered a sea of paperwork and documents and waiting on Indian courts.  Many good lessons were to be learned during that time.  As we prepared to travel in October 2009 we really both thought we saw the finish line to what had been a long multi-year journey.  We breathed a sigh of relief.  Our time in India was incredible, it was a country that- never in all of my dreams of travel- did I ever intended to visit, but here we were traveling all around this country!  We packed an incredible amount into two weeks.  For those familiar with the TV show The Amazing Race, it was exactly like that: the constant travel, the constant challenges, and brake-neck pace.  It was almost entirely too much to process when we were there.  It would take weeks and months to really process everything we saw and did there.

When we returned home we began the process of assimilating a 2 year old, with whom we had no history, into our family.  We lost the next 6 months to a year working on that challenge.  During that time in between the new tasks and challenges we began to process what we had seen and were exposed to- it was a whole lot of different than Williamson County TN.  Tisra and I had both been to various parts of the world in our lives, some similar to India but something about this trip was different. I think the biggest  difference was the permanent reminder we had with us.  Here was this incredible perfect little girl with us each and every day reminding us that- if not by the grace of God – would have been abandoned in the streets of Cuttuck, India.  We constantly saw the results of being obedient in such a real and tangible way.  We both noticed that with time, the old things in our life seemed to have less and less importance and our hearts longed to be somewhere else, not even specifically India, just somewhere else.  We had been exposed to walking out Christ’s love and being like Him, and it was like a drug.  Individually and together we found both of us slowly growing in this direction.  The talks between us would come as whispers at first, scared to speak it too loudly for fear of the weight of the the words and what their impact might be.  With each day, week, and month though, neither of us could ignore what we felt.  Our hearts yearned to be like Him and we could not see settling for anything less.  So the conversation took form and we simply told God to give us a chance, to make a path clear.  Time passed and life continued.  We sought out options we thought made sense and continued to feel restless at not finding a fit.

In October of 2010 I was in Haiti on short week-long trip, and Tisra stayed behind with the children.  At this time a lady by the name of Sarah had posted a need she had online.  Sarah runs Sarah’s Covenant Homes in , India.  She has over 100 children with special needs in the orphan home, and all of sudden had lost some caregivers.  She posted this need online and Tisra began a series of conversations with Sarah over what their needs were, and how they might be met.  When I came home Tisra began to share this with me and I suppose we both knew this might be “it”.  Over the next few days and weeks it became evident that this was an opportunity God was putting before us and the choice was ours.  God’s confirmation came from things like my 5 year old daughter randomly praying one night “God give us an opportunity to go to India and help the kids at Sarah’s Covenant Homes” (she had no knowledge of our intent) to sermons so specific from our Pastor that it was almost scary.  We finally knew by December that this was “it”, and reached out to Sarah to say we were interested in coming. The words were spoken and it was scary and exhilarating all at once!  It felt as though we had leapt out of the airplane and free fall was beginning.  Now we had to figure out what we were doing.  We said “yes” but what were the next steps?

We quickly realized we had some big hurdles to figure out:

A.) Finances – Both Monthly and our “Launch Fund”
B.) Our House in Franklin
C.) Whittling down all our possessions to suitcases.
D.) 65 Million other details

Finances – We had the good fortune of knowing Mike and Jen Greenberg.  They had spent a year living in South Africa doing any number of cool things and had attended a class on raising support.  They encouraged us to go to the same class, so we did.  This laid out a fantastic foundation for us on how to proceed.  We quickly saw some new challenges after attending the class, one of them being my job.  I worked for a great company, but if we were going to be raising support for the next 4 to 5 months how could I do that with a full time job at a company that planned on having me around for a long time?  Most places don’t like a 5 month notice.  God answered in a big way.  My friend called me in early January and offered my a 6 month consulting job.  The timing matched our need perfectly and, financially, it was huge jump as well.  So after 14 and half years at HMS I resigned and moved on.  We then began the process of meeting with as many friends and family, and even acquaintances, as possible to share our story and the story of SCH and asking those folks to take part by financially partnering with us.  This could not have been a more foreign experience for either of us.  We knew this was necessary though so we pressed on.  While an incredibly hard and trying experience, we quickly learned so many things about ourselves and were so stretched in ways we would have never had a chance to be if we had just been handed a big lump sum.  We have become so fortunate and blessed to make so many great connections in these last 5 months.  God has allowed us to build an incredible team of supports and partners in this new adventure.  I cannot imagine going through this without them.

Our House – We did not buy at the height of the market, but it was close.  Thankfully Nashville had not gotten too crazy either on the way up, or the way down.  I come from CA where let’s be honest- it got crazy!  We struggled with the idea of renting but knew if we sold it would be for no profit.  Renting seemed daunting from 9000 miles away and we had friends with less-than-positive experiences.  In stepped our neighbors, and suggested a couple that they had known for 20 years.  Not a bad character reference.  They were currently staying in the home of missionaries to Africa and they needed a new place to live once they returned in June.  This all sounded great, except the June part.  We were not quite ready to head out that early.  Our plans had us going in October.  Tisra even looked into short term rentals and quite honestly they were financially prohibitive by a long shot.  We called our potential renters and said we wanted to do it but did not know how.  We got a phone call within the next week or two from our friends and associate pastors at our church.  It seems as though God told him to give us their house.  They committed to move out of their house and allow us to stay there as long as we needed to.  Crazy huh?  So we called back our new renters and said “lets roll!”.  In the weeks leading up to our move we had the opportunity to meet with a new friend for lunch.  During that time at lunch M began to share with us some experiences of friends of his who recently spent a year in Africa. Tisra quickly began to put the pieces together, and realized he was talking about our the family who owned the home which our current renters were in.  It was then we realized that all these families were interconnected and knew each other!  The family in Africa, their renters who would now be ours, and our neighbors.  Small world to say the least!  We now had a connection to this group of friends 20 years in the making.  It was then that M began to ask us if we knew the story of the family moving into our house.  We replied that they seemed like a nice family but that was it.  M proceeded to tell us a story that raised the bar for walking in faith.  Imagine being told by God to fly to Uganda one day, and having no connection to Uganda and being so obedient that you just do so?  Then, arriving in Uganda- and having no earthly idea what the next step is- only to be greeted by an African man who introduces himself with “Did God tell you to come here?”, you answer appropriately “Yes.” His response, “Good, because God told me to come and meet you.”  This started a decade plus long friendship.  Alex, the African man, is now the spiritual advisor to the President and First Lady of Uganda and runs an orphanage in Uganda that feeds thousands of children every day.  I was floored at this story and still am today.  This was who was renting my house!  Not that he is a greater man than I, or needs undue reference, but certainly a powerful example of obedience and an example of faith.  Someone who could go beyond relating to what my family was doing.  Quite simply a God-orchestrated event.  One I could not have architected myself had I tried.

C.)  Whittling down our possessions – Turns out our original plan to not move until October when we left for India would have ended in disaster.  When we had this new opportunity to move in June to temporary housing we had the chance to separate possessions into long and short term items.  This was absolutely NECESSARY and gave us an opportunity we would not have otherwise had.  We learned what we did and did not need, and had a few months to refine that. During that time we had a neighbor put us in contact with the owners of a long term storage company; they agreed to donate a space to us to house our belongings while we were gone.  We used this time to continue to pair life down to the “needed” and the “not needed”.  Turns out you really truly don’t need that much.  That time was also incredibly valuable for our children too: it gave them an opportunity to remove the band-aid of suburban cul-de-sac life slowly.  The amazing thing is even with all these opportunities to slowly whittle things down, we still found ourselves racing to compact the night before we left for our cross country trip.  Had we waited until October, we would have melted down for sure.

D.) The 65 million other details – I won’t insist on going through all of them since I am not sure there were actually 65 million and let’s be honest there is just no way I could make all of them interesting enough to read.  One continued example of God taking care of the details was my car.  If you have ever sold a car you know it isn’t alway the easiest and pain free tasks.  I dreaded successfully pulling off the timing of the car.  I needed a vehicle up until the day we left, but ultimately needed to sell it.  How do you arrange that?  Well during a break in a meeting one day at work, someone asked me about my car and other possessions, “what are you doing with them?”  He honed in on my car and the make, model and price.  I responded to each one and he said “Sold”.  It was honestly that easy.  No negotiation. No hassle. It was just done.  I mentioned needing it for a few more weeks until we left, and- sure enough- he had a spare truck he was willing to loan me!  Just that easy.  Didn’t see that one coming. So many other details are so similar it has been amazing.  If someone today asked me how to do it all over again I am not sure I could blueprint any part of it.  Too many things just fell into place and required nothing more than our faith that it would be handled.

Currently – We left Nashville in September to head West.  Our plan was two fold: to raise awareness and continue support raising as well as some vacation time and goodbyes with family.  We knew we would be in India for the next two years, at least, and knew some R&R would be needed.  We made it to Las Vegas and spent a few days with friends there (by the way check out http://specklebirdart.com).  There we applied for our employment visas, this process as it turns out can take from 5 days to several weeks or months.  We have the misfortune of applying for a rather rare form of Employment Visa, a volunteer employment visa.  This visa application has an extra step in it, one that requires it to leave the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C and travel to India.  No word back yet on when we can expect it.  Not exactly according to plan, but, hey, we are rolling with it.  Prayers on this issue are greatly appreciated.  We have our finances in place, and our stuff in storage, and are ready to travel, but currently can’t make it into the country!  As I said, we are learning to adjust to the curveballs as they come.  We are trusting God to be in control and we are soaking up the time with Grandma, Granddads, brothers, sisters, cousins and friends while we can.  We have even begun to use the time we have here to build momentum. Tisra and I have both begun working on several projects for SCH even from here.  We are telecommuting from 9000 miles away.  The time has been very productive and in-between the honest moments of struggle, I am still thankful we said “yes” last year and begun this journey.  We are not in India yet, but that is where our heart is.  We will work hard here to make the most of this time and enjoy the moments God has given us.  We know we will be there shortly.  Did I mention Sarah the dynamo behind SCH is pregnant with twins and is due in the next few weeks?  All in God’s timing, we trust Him.

For those who have partnered with us in prayer, money, and in many other countless ways, I wish Thank You carried the weight we mean it to.  You are our enablers, we stand on your shoulders and we gladly share each and every blessing with all of you!