January 3, 2011.

Angie and Clint, (MY NEW FAMILY!) are adopting a baby girl from China. We have been praying for sweet Emery Lin, and can't wait to meet her. I was holding a little baby at work, who needs a home and couldn't help but think of how powerful adoption really is. When you are adopted, you are chosen. You are grafted into your family, as if it was your own. You are prayed over, you are longed for. Your family cries over the times you are not yet theirs. They will wait for you. They will allow strangers to come and do a "home study" to see if the environment is worthy enough to raise a child in. They will spend money on fingerprints, background checks, and applications. They will spend hours on paperwork. They will sacrifice for you, and in all they give up, in all the money they spend to travel overseas just to hold you, the sacrifices will be blown away like dust, slip through their hands like sand, because everything they know, is not complete without you. I can't wait to see the joy on their faces as they bring Emery Lin home, because even in that, I will see Jesus a little clearer. God sacrificed everything, even his Son, so that you and I could be grafted into His name. We now carry his name with us, just as Emery Lin will bear the last name Weldon. What a daily reminder, a testimony of what God has done for us.
^{Ephesisan 1:3-10.3} Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. ⁴ For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love ⁵ he^[b] predestined us for adoption to sonship^[c] through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. ⁷ In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace ⁸ that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, ⁹ he^[d] made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, ¹⁰ to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.

hours and hours of sleep NOT had by angie, to make these "Emery Lin" bags, to help bring their girl home.