We sent in our application for our "home study" today!

The study should take place sometime at the beginning of July if all goes as planned. This, of course, adds to our ever-growing list of financial needs!

We're praying for God to provide another $4,000 or so in the next 1 1/2 weeks. An overwhelming thought without God involved. Fortunately, God IS indeed heavily involved! This was all His idea, after all. Needless to say, our prayer life has increased greatly! =O)

$1,800 of this is for Erin's mission trip to Rwanda.
The rest is for the home study and for government paperwork.

We continue to covet your prayers for finances and wisdom! Stepping out in faith like this is really teaching us a lot!

We sent in four signed documents and our first big payment yesterday! It's so amazing how God works - He gave us exactly what we needed to meet our first big payment. No more, no less. Amazing! I don't think He wants us to stop relying on Him. =O) A huge thank you goes out to all of you who have given already. Between your donations, our yard sale, and the discount we got b/c of me being a pastor, we were able to send in the initial program fee without it crippling us!

We will be assigned to and hear from our Family Coordinator within a week or two and will begin the long "Dossier" paperwork process. In the meantime, we need to come up with another $175 to take a required online course entitled, "The Intercountry Country Journey" designed to help us prepare for all that is to come...and another $1,900 for Erin's mission trip.

We're trusting God to provide for all this, and for the many, many more payments to come! Erin's money has to be in within two weeks, so we're really trying to relax and trust! He's been faithful this far, so there's no reason to doubt Him!

We love you all!

A lot has happened in the past 24 hours! First of all...we have officially been accepted into AWAA's Rwanda program!!! It wasn't as easy as you may think. We went through quite the grueling thought process trying to figure out exactly what direction to go. AWAA had contacted us and wanted to know if we'd be interested in changing courses and pursuing Ethiopia instead of Rwanda. Ethiopia's program is much more established and there are few restrictions. Based off our financial situation and some health concerns, AWAA thought Ethiopia might be "safer." But Ethiopia is also more expensive, would take longer and is not what God laid on our hearts. We sought advice from a few family and friends and we prayed A LOT. It became very clear that we should continue on this path. It's a risk...but so is Ethiopia as it requires more money. If the Rwandan government ends up rejecting us, we will be set back $3,000 or so and have to start much of the process all over again. But we MUST proceed with what we believe in our hearts and minds we are supposed to do.

If you have given or are planning on giving to our cause, please understand that none of this is official until we bring the child home. We know that makes giving to this cause hard, but we hope you understand that we have to follow our hearts and what we think the wise thing to do is. We truly have peace about this decision and hope you understand.

Since we have now been accepted into the program, we recieved a ton of paperwork today! We have four documents (a grievance proceedure, the Rwanda Agreement and Disclaimer forms, and a Client's Rights and Responsiblities form), that we have signed and will send as soon as we can with our first payment of $1,125. We have almost reached this amount through donations and the yard sale! (AMAZING!)

Once we have sent the paperwork and money in, we will be put into contact with our "Family Coordinator" and begin the real paperwork. =O) It's so crazy that we have only been in this process for 3 weeks! It seems like so much has happened.

We continue to seek guidance and wisdom from God. It occured to us yesterday that it's quite possible that our child is just about to be or has just been born. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it!

Hottest day of the year. Nice day for a yard sale! With several donations from a few other families, we had a great yard sale to raise money for the adoption/Erin's Rwanda missions trip! A special shout out to the amazing Beaumont family who not only donated several big-ticket items for the yard sale, but also endured the scorching heat with us...even sold lemonade!

One of the coolest things about the yards sale was a Hispanic couple we met who bought a couple couches from us for $50 each. They found out we were doing the whole thing to raise money for adoption from Africa, and they were just SO excited for us and SO encouraging. We even exchanged phone numbers! They asked that we keep them posted on how things go, to let them know if we need any help, and they asked to call them when we get the boy so they can come meet him. They asked a lot of questions and told us that "everything has a purpose" and to "trust that God will provide." Very cool.

Here are a few pics from today!

Well, it may not seem like much, but we actually heard from America World Adoption! It's exciting to us, just because it's our first contact with them. They actually got the application! Here's the e-mail we received last night:

Dear Jeremiah & Erin,

Congratulations on your first step towards adoption! I wanted you to know that we have received your application and have begun processing it. The next steps are that within 10 business days you will receive a call from our intake coordinator, Amy Pearson, regarding acceptance into the Rwanda program. Upon acceptance, she then sends out two emails that contain agreements that will need to be signed and sent back. If you have any questions before then, please feel free to give myself or Amy a call.

Thank you and we will look forward to talking with you soon!

Deborah Huisman
Administrative Assistant

If you're here, it means you went a step beyond just finding out we are adopting. Thanks! We are so excited! Right now, not much has happened other than turning in our initial application and attempting to contact EVERYONE. Yeesh. And yet, even though nothing has happened, it all seems so huge to us! We've each had 2 or 3 nights already of not sleeping well...not necessarily because we're worried, but because we're stepping way out in faith here and because there are just SO many exciting things to think about. Can't wait to see what happens next!

We will update this blog at least once a week if not more, so please keep stopping by!

To our dear family and friends:

We have a lot to catch you up on, so we'll get right to the point! God has done a lot of work on our hearts in the past couple of years in regards to what it truly means to love people. We could easily fill a book or two with all that we have learned and how we have grown, but we know that if we make this letter too long, you might just stop reading!

Three big things are on the horizon for us. We'll list these in order of life-impact, though they just happen to also be in chronological order!

1) On July 3rd, we will be having a 23-year-old move in with us! This is a friend we met out in Colorado a few weeks back who is need of a rather dramatic change in his life. We'll spare you all the details of how this came about, but just know that we truly believe God is behind it. We just don't see the point in having vacant rooms in our house and he needs this, so he'll be living with us for a little while.

2) Erin will be heading to Rwanda, Africa for a missions trip September 15-25! We feel really sheltered here in our American bubble sometimes, so when the opportunity came up for Erin to go on this life-changing trip, we jumped on it! Financially, this will be very difficult to pull off (we need another $2,000)...but not as difficult as number 3. =O)

3) We have decided to adopt!!! While we are still planning on having our own biological children, this is something we have wanted to do for awhile and we've decided to not put it off any more. There are just too many children in the world who need a home and we feel like we have a lot of love to give! We don't want to continue putting off helping a needy child simply because we want to have biological children first.

Not only are we adopting, but we are adopting from Rwanda (through American World Adoption)! Why the sudden fascination with Rwanda? Well, we had been wrestling with whether to adopt domestic or international due primarily to the fact that domestic adoptions are so much cheaper. But sometimes you just have to step out in faith. Obviously, there is a great need for loving parents to take in the orphaned children of the United States, and we may pursue that route someday as well, but for now we feel led to help an orphan from another country as they generally face great risk of disease and poverty. We had just decided on international adoption at the same time that we made the decision for Erin to go on this mission trip, so Rwanda seemed like an obvious place to look into. The trip will provide Erin with a great opportunity to get a feel for the culture as we dive into this whole process. And it turns out that as expensive as adoption in Rwanda is ($17,800-$26,255), it is actually the cheapest country to adopt from outside of the states.

Needless to say, we covet your prayers for wisdom and direction as our lives are about to be flipped upside-down! We have only just sent in our initial application. Our next step is to set up a home study and hopefully be approved to proceed with the adoption which would take place between 9-14 months from now. We have also been shamelessly praying for our financial situation and would appreciate your prayers in that area as well. Even though it is an enormous amount of money, we believe strongly that this is what we're supposed to do and that somehow God will will take care of us. If you are willing and able to help financially with Erin's trip or our adoption, we would greatly appreciate it...but we covet your prayers above all else.

Some of you have not heard from us for quite some time...we apologize! But we really wanted to let everybody in on what God is doing in our lives and ask for your support. Please know just how much we love you all! You can keep updated on the whole process through our blog at addingasmith.blogspot.com and you can always stay connected through mail, e-mail and Facebook!

We love you all!

Jeremiah and Erin Smith