when comfort meets love

If I'm being honest here (and why wouldn't I be?), we are very happy and very COMFORTABLE in our family. We have the most amazing kids ever (totally not biased!) and enjoy being with them. We aren't rich, by any means, but thanks to skills we learned from Dave Ramsey, we don't live paycheck to paycheck. We save and give and are very, very blessed. Life is good.

So...why are we throwing a huge wrench into our normal, COMFORTABLE lives this new year? Because God says:

In Essentials class at CC, I'm teaching kids the 4 sentence purposes: Declarative, Exclamatory, Interrogative, and Imperative. An Imperative is basically a command and always has an implied you. Such as "Love one another." - it is an implied or understood YOU that is supposed to be doing the action of loving. There are tons of imperative sentences in the Bible, that we choose to read as suggestions instead of commands most of the time. Follow me. Repent. Go and tell. Fear not. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind...oh and love your neighbor as yourself.

God didn't command us to be comfortable. He commanded us to love Him and love others. 

So, in 2013, we will be stepping way out of our comfort zone, and going to love others that don't have their own families to love on them right now. The foster care process is long and kind of a pain, but we are on our way. We have already met some wonderful people who are helping us on this journey and were assigned our social worker yesterday, who seems sweet as can be. Friends are getting calls about us and I hope they are being nice - lol. The ball is definitely rolling here.

We don't have any delusions that this will be easy and fun all the time. We are very aware that at times it will be frustrating and heartbreaking and miserable and just plain hard. I can't imagine taking a kid away from their parents (even if they were actually rescuing them from their parents - not sure kids see the difference), putting them in a shelter for a few days or months, then sticking them in a new family and expecting them to just blend right in. Add in abuse, neglect, anger, changing schools, multiple foster homes already, etc, etc, etc, etc....and well, we will all be needing your prayers and God's grace to help us in this new journey. We can't wait to get starting showing God's love to these kiddos!

If you think of us, please pray for wisdom for us. Pray for the kids who are scared, alone, angry, and confused. Please pray for our own kids. They are all on board...as of right now...but we are rocking their comfortable little worlds too. They will be giving up a lot for us to do this, but we believe they will also grow closer to God and closer to each other through it all.

Thanks, guys. I am not sure how much of this journey will be on this blog, but just giving you a heads up of where we are heading and the exciting things going on in the E household in 2013 :)