God did exactly what we asked Him to do, for His glory!

I am yet again completely blown away at how amazing God truly is, as many of you reading this know, Melanie and I are adopting! What you may not know, is that when we realized that God laid it on our hearts to adopt, we had absolutely nothing financially to draw from in order to make that happen. In fact many might say that it was irresponsible to try and adopt a child with no money. I can't fully explain it but we knew God wanted us to do this. I could never have imagined what that would look like practically speaking. However we felt led to start the process and follow a philosophy that Pastor Brett used to plant the church body that we are a part of. It is a pretty basic philosophy, Keep moving forward until God stops you! He will either open the doors or slam them! Trust Him no matter what! So we started this journey.

We started to pray and seek Him. We decided to adopt on faith. I am not talking about blind faith or a leap of faith, I am talking about Biblical faith. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. We know that God does what He says and is who He says he is! The interesting this is, that in this process, sometimes we lost that solid grasp on faith and wavered at times. That is where I now know that God is faithful to the faithless. As I wrote the last time I posted on this blog, God came through in a big way and through a number of generous people with contributions of all sizes God answered prayer and showed us His enormous power and capability by putting it on someones heart to donate a sizable amount of money, and that changed not only our adoption process but also our lives completely!

What happened is that we realized even more that God is the God of the Bible and He is all that He says he is in His word. I can say that with great conviction because I know that our friend gave us that money out of love, but not just any old love. He would tell you right now that he gave that money because of the love Jesus showed him and the generosity that Christ shows all of us by becoming poor and dying on our behalf. It is the love and generosity that Jesus shows us in giving His life for us that we would be able to stand before the Father righteous, forgiven of all of our sin. That love and generosity motivated our friend and many others to give! With that we were changed, not by the dollar amount as much as we were changed by why he would give so generously. I am excited to say, that was not the end of what God was accomplishing!

There have been more hurdles and obstacles, there have been a number of other checks that have come in and some doors to fund raising closed and we have been putting in for grants and even came to the conclusion that we would borrow against our house if we have to in order to bring a child into our home that needs our love, and compassion and mostly a desire to raise them to know Jesus! We were selected by a mother much faster than we expected and found out that she is due April 12th. IT'S A BOY! With much uncertainty and questions like, Where is the rest of the money going to come from, here we are! We continue to pray for the mother and for our little one should God decide to place him with us. The story has takin another unsuspected turn!

This AM God moved again, I was handed another check, this one for $13,000. Our adoption is officially paid for! God did exactly what we asked Him to do, for His glory! Today I sit here in awe of the story that He has given us. I have to be honest, as good as this is I have to wonder, would I see Him in the same light if something really bad happened? After all He gives and He takes away. Right now I am overwhelmed by His majesty, His grace, His mercy, and all that He truly is! This story is not done, there is much to still be written in this adoption and in this life that He has givin my family and me, to glorify Him! I will say this, I am looking forward to the next thing God puts on our heart. Good or bad I know He is right here with us!

As I said the adoption is not final and many things could happen, yet I trust that whatever happens, God always does what is good, right, and perfect! Lastly, when asked why they gave, they said they wanted us to not have to worry about anything except bringing our little guy home! It was in these words that I was reminded of Philippians 4:6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And before that it says Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be made known to everyone. THE LORD IS AT HAND! That is obvious! Stay tuned to see what He does next! I would also like to say on behalf of my family, THANK YOU to all of you who have given to this amazing story, whether it was money, support, or prayer, we would not have come this far without you! Paise God! He is worth it!

To Him alone be the glory!
James Iverson