our adoption story

As Christians, we are all adopted into God's family.  It is a permanent adoption that gives us the ability to be heirs with Christ.  We will never know all of our brothers and sisters this side of eternity.  The Gospel of Christ stirs us to seek those who do not have a relationship with Him in order that they too can become eternally adopted by God.   If not for adoption, the child God will give us could simply be another face in the crowd of strangers - one that we would want to have a relationship with Christ.  How, then, would making him/her our child be any different?  It isn't.  We should want our child to become our brother/sister in Christ.  They are still our children, but the things we want to do in order to raise godly children is tied in with how we should treat others as brothers/sisters in Christ.   We will provide for them, but we will lay down our life for them (1 John 3.16).  We will help them to see their sin, but ...

So as some of you know and others of you don't know, Josh and I are starting the adoption process. We decided to start this blog so that our friends and family could keep up with us throughout the journey. Our prayer as we go through this journey is that first and foremost we see God working more and more each day and that the people in our lives see God. To catch everyone up, this decision did not come instantly nor did it come without some struggle and pain. We have been trying to have a family for five years now. We thought that we would have a family as soon as Josh graduated from seminary and then after we had a few biological children we would adopt a child. But little did we know those were our plans not God's plan. Through the past five years we have struggled, prayed, cried, tried some fertility treatments, and in the end no baby Hornbaker. Over the past year, through much prayer the Lord has guided us toward adoption. That in of itself was quite a process. One minute...