God's Perfect Plan

When I was sitting in Nanjing, China on August 20th, I felt like my whole world was caving in.  I prayed that I could make it through whatever events were going to unfold and that I could hold on tightly to my faith and let God work it all out.  Nothing made sense and I was completely devastated that we were going to be sent back home without our son.  I was scared that they were going to let him die and there was nothing I could do, except pray and ask my brothers and sisters in Christ to do the same thing.  And that is what countless number of people did.  Thanks to those prayers, our little boy is not only alive, but thriving in the China Care Home in Beijing, where his pacemaker is definitely doing its job!  Praise the Lord! 

Not so far away, Ethan has a little sister who will be coming home AT THE SAME TIME as he does.  We got word last Thursday that China is going to expedite our paperwork for Reese and we will be traveling no later than January to bring our babies home!  Praise the Lord!  This is something we gave completely over to God and I honestly got to a point that I was at peace with whatever the outcome of our request was.  I knew that God's plan would prevail and I decided to just not worry about it!  We are so excited to head to China to complete our family!  Yes, 6 is our magic number and we can't wait to have all our kids home together! 

We had the pleasure of being a part of an amazing fundraiser Friday night.  The "Band Together for the Fatherless" event was one of the most awesome things I have been a part of!  Almost $8,000 was raised last week for the Ledbetter family and a lot of that came from this concert of 5 worship bands in our community.  They each played 3 songs and there were adoption videos played in between.  The Spirit was definitely present!  I think Danielle said it best when she took the stage and said that it was a little glimpse of what heaven is going to be like when we are all just living together and worshipping our Lord.  What an enormous blessing to be a part of something so incredible!  Everyone that was there agreed we need to do it again and get even more churches involved.

I am so thankful to God for comforting us over the past few months and for giving us hope.  This is the only way we have gotten through moving on after the events of August 20th.  I hope that our story will be an inspiration to someone who may need to see a real life example of leaning on God during a difficult time.  We have been through so much on our parenthood journey, but through it all, God has been there working it all out, putting each piece of the puzzle together, and opening all the necessary doors.  He is so good, all of the time and I am humbled by His love for me and our family. 

We hope to receive the LSC letter tomorrow and are praying that we can travel by the end of the year.  Can't wait to post Reese's sweet pictures!  We requested an update today, but GW says it takes several weeks to get it back, so we may not know any new measurements or have updated pictures before we travel, but we thought it was worth a try!