thankful and hopeful

Dear Family and Friends,

In December 2012 we started a journey to adopt a child who needs a forever home. It is a rollercoaster to be on this journey and honestly some days are hard and some days we are able to distract ourselves from the frustration of waiting. You see God has blessed us with 2 beautiful biological children and we truly thought our family was complete. Then we were at an Easter service at our church and there was this Ugandan kids choir that worshipped with our church and they were so joyful and thankful to be simply praising Jesus! My heart felt a strong tug and the seed of adoption was planted. I never thought adoption was for me and I honestly was kind of in the category of indifferent. I felt bad for orphans like any human being with a heart does, but I didn’t really think I had any role to play in adoption.

Let me stop right here and say that we do all have a role to play in the care for orphans, for some of us it means we should include them in our prayers (pray they find their forever home, pray they are well cared for, pray for their salvation, etc.), for some of us it means we give financially in some form to help care for orphans, for some it means using your talents to help in some way (maybe you have free time and can go visit orphans and read to them or serve a meal at a children’s home), or maybe you are like our family and you feel you are called to adopt.

Why are we adopting? Yes we feel called to it for sure, but more importantly than that we feel able. Christ first loved and adopted us and called us His own and therefore, we are able to love and adopt a child who needs a forever home, to call them our own. We have love to give and I guess we have figured the rest we would make it work some how with God’s help!

I also want to clarify something that really matters to us, our adoptive child will be just as much a member of our family as our biological children are, genes will not be greater than love and we will love all of our children equally. Also, we don’t care what race or background our adoptive child comes from so our family will most likely be mixed and we think its beautiful! We love the idea of being able to share our story with others and show other’s an example of Christ’s love through adopting.

I really thought this would not be such a hard process, and when I say process I am not even referring to the crazy amount of paperwork we have had to fill out. I am talking about the waiting. I thought because I am already a mom, that waiting would be easier for me. Turns out I was way wrong! It is hard to know you have a child somewhere that you already count as your own, that you pray for as a family and excitedly anticipate joining your family, but you don’t even know their name. We don’t know how old our child is, what gender he/she is, if they’ve even been born yet, if they are okay, if they are scared, if they are hungry, or worse…. It is like your family has a missing member and you have to just sit and wait. What gets us through the hard parts is our faith, that Christ is looking out for our child and that His ways and His timing are perfect and He knows best for us.

We recently became debt free in the early spring of this year and our intent is to remain debt free so we read a book called Adopt without Debt by Julie Gumm. She has some great ideas on different ways to fund your adoption without going in debt. One of the ways is to get a part time job. I stay home with our biological children Tanner and Kennadi and I home school them as well. In order for me to continue doing so, I have started working in direct sales with lia sophia jewelry. I get to work 1 or 2 evenings a week and help our family generate funds for our adoption that way. We have had 2 garage sales and we have had some amazing people donate goods for us to sell in those. We have had some sweet people (even people we didn’t know) donate money to our adoption fund. Talk about humbling, for someone to give you money so you can give a child a home forever, it was so amazing.

So now we are asking for help from you or someone you know maybe. We are going to make a blanket for our child (once we know who he or she is) and on the back of the blanket are going to be squares (hopefully a lot of them). We are basically asking for donations to have your name or personal message or both go on the back of the blanket on a piece of neutral fabric that we will provide. If you have ever wondered how you could help with orphans but didn’t want to commit to adopting or even sponsoring monthly, then this is a way you can help bring a precious child to their forever home.

We are sending out this letter to whoever we know and have an address for and along with the letter will be a fabric square, if you feel led to donate please put the money or check in the provided return envelop (already addressed and stamped) along with the square. Please write your name and a personal message if you’d like on the square and send them back to us.

Once we have all the squares collected and we know the gender of our child, we will put them together into a blanket. When our child comes home they will have a snuggly warm blanket made with love and it will always be a reminder of all the wonderful people who gave so that our child’s dream of having a forever home could come true!

Thank you in advance for supporting us and praying with us through the rest of our adoption journey. The road seems long at times and hard and at times we feel like we are getting no where, but in the end it will all be worth it because our child will know that they are loved by so many people, even people our child has never met.

Sincerely,

The Pierce family,

Nick, Amber, Tanner, Kennadi, and our dog Hank too J

P.s. we would love to share a picture with you once our child comes home so if you will give us your email address we would love to send you a picture.

　

　

　

You can contact us at:
Nick usmcpierce@gmail.com

Amber bigace3@hotmail.com



Nick 541-829-0635

Amber 541-829-0629
 P.P.S. I have not been good about keeping up with my blog, but whenever there is something big to share I will for sure put it on my blog at www.piercefamily4blessings.blogspot.com



Please also pray for Breath of Life ministries and Loving alternatives Christian Adoption agency, there agencies are ministries to these birth parents who are truly heroes! Also pray for the birth parents, I can’t imagine the strength it must require to place your baby in someone else’s arms, but I do know that these birth parents love their baby and that is why they chose more for them than they could offer themselves. We don’t know our birth parents yet, but we pray for the daily, we pray for their salvation, we pray for peace in this difficult decision and for assurance that they are doing the right thing and that when they see our profile book they will be certain we are the family meant to raise their child. Please pray with us for all of these things and thank you so much!