Overwhelmed

Overwhelmed… if you ask Courtney, she will tell you that it is a word that I rarely use. I just don’t like it. It doesn’t actually give the person you are speaking with an idea of how you are feeling. Are you sad? Happy? Angry? No, I am overwhelmed. What exactly does that mean? I like to be able to hear the words that are coming from a person and assign an emotion with them, so I can know how I can help. 

However, the word overwhelmed is the only word I can come up with that describes how we feel the past few months. We are overwhelmed with the love that has been poured out on us by our friends and families. Not a day goes by where there is not someone asking us about our adoption process. It has been amazing to me that the conversations are not just a casual, off the cuff comment, but that you really care. When you ask, you really want to know. You will stand in the hallways, stop by the office, send an e-mail, stop our parents in church or at the table in a restaurant, you will make the call or text all just to genuinely check on us and to see if our child is ready to come home. Many days where you have talked with us, you could not imagine what we had been through, yet you were there with a smile and a kind word to help us move forward. 

You have prayed for us… Oh, how you have prayed. We have literally felt the prayers of the saints as you have stopped in your daily life to lift us and our child up. We know that God’s people are interceding because there are days in the waiting process that we would never get through without your prayers on our behalf. 

You have given. There are so many of you have given sacrificially to our adoption fund. We have been blessed by those friends who we have not heard from since high school, those who live down the street, those who helped raise us, those who go to church and work with us… you all have said that you would partner with us so that we could bring our baby home. Because of your faithfulness to the Lord in giving, you have made the financial burden, one that I was more scared of than anything, so much lighter than we could have ever imagined.

Whether you know it or not, you are an instrument of God’s grace and mercy. Every time you call or stop to talk, you are showing and sharing His love. Every time you give of your time and your money, you are showing how the body of Christ comes together to sacrificially take care of one another to answer His call on our lives. Every time you respond to His urging, you are showing that God is still at work. Every time you meet a need of ours, whether you know it or not, you are the physical presence of God answering prayers.

We are overwhelmed. By God’s goodness and His grace, we are overwhelmed. By His work through you as you minister to our family, we are overwhelmed.

Our prayer is that you too will feel His presence as you continue to follow His leading and that God’s richest blessings be poured out on you and your family, as you have continued to be the living, breathing body of Christ to ours.

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21

With humble hearts,

Josh and Courtney