God's Smiling Face

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

~William Cowper

I know I've already shared this picture I took in Nepal. Before it was just a shot of an impressively blue sky and radiant sun. But after what has transpired in our lives the past week, it's an expression of our God's mysterious plans to bring tangible hope to a dark situation. (If you're not sure what exactly I mean by a dark situation, you can read here.) We thought that on December 11 we would be welcoming our biological baby in our family; instead on December 9 we were given the opportunity to welcome two little guys into our family.

Our Afri-kids.

Our sons.

Since they are not legally ours yet, I can't post full pictures or give much information about them. But seeing just a little bit is better than not seeing anything at all, right?

This is our Little Guy. And I do mean little. At his last weigh-in, he was a whopping 6 pounds. Most American babies NEVER weigh that much in their life! Because he's so small, his eyes look especially big. And he's definitely sporting some interesting hair.

This is our chubby guy. We absolutely cannot wait until we get to pinch those ginormously cute cheeks. Kevin is also looking forward to getting him out of the pink cat outfit. Camouflage, trains & dump trucks, super heros, ambiguous alligator-dinosaurs driving race cars...anything but pink cats!

So now we are waiting on our paperwork to be processed through the Ethiopian court system to assign us a court date. Most likely we will fly to Africa in March/April 2011 to meet our boys for the first time and appear in court to legally become their parents. Then we will return home to China, wait 6-8 weeks for more paperwork to be processed until we can again go to them and bring them home to us for good.

We love the fact that though these boys look so incredibly different from us, we can still love them so deeply and consider them as ours. We look forward to our new bedtime routine of pulling up every picture we've received of them and studying each tiny feature. We love how much we're learning about Jesus and his pursuit and adoption of us as his children. Like he told us in John 14:18, Jesus will not leave is as orphans; He will come to us.

We will not leave you as orphans, little babies. We will come to you!