Songs, Stories, Sweets, and Shopping

Last night we hosted a benefit for our church's adoption ministry. And when I say "we" here I mean our brilliant, hardworking, dedicated planning team and me and David. We had a silent and live auction, along with a program that celebrated adoption with songs and family stories. After weeks of organizing, soliciting donations, and promoting the event, we were truly blessed with a major haul of fruit for our labors. We had great attendance and raised over $20,000 between last night and advance ticket sales and donations. The money we raised will be used to provide services, programs, and grants for Christian adoptive families in our area. We also felt this event was effective in putting our ministry on the map in our church and our community. Our church is large and very active in outreach and missions of many kinds, and we were advised that the cause of adoption might "get lost in all the good." Fortunately, many people at our church and in our city (we had over 160 donors/sponsors of this event) seem to have made a place in their hearts for this cause that is so near to the heart of God as revealed in scripture.

I knew we had a great group of family stories to share through videos, and I'm so glad that so many showed up to see these. We had the story of a mom and dad who adopted their eleven-year-old son through the foster care system when he was ten years old. They talked about how they had prayed for a child and he talked about how he had prayed for a family. Another friend of ours who is a single mom has adopted 11 kids both domestically and internationally. She challenged potential adoptive parents not to wait until they had the perfect life situation to adopt. A third family shared their story of adoptive five siblings from Guatamala. They endured a three-year-process to get their kids here with them. We had a lady there who is associated with our local foster care system who signed up several potential foster families, and we had associates there from our adoption agency, America World, who were able to distribute information to several families interested in that process. Our pastor, who is also an adoptive father, gave a great message on how adoption is a picture of our adoption as children of God, and really encouraged others to think about and support it.

David and I have already seen this ministry blessed in so many ways, and we have only been working on it for a few months. God gave us so much grace to cover for our inexperience, and our team really helped us to make much better choices about things than we would have made. David and I were laughing last night about some things we had planned that our team wisely steered us away from (thanks, guys.) We prayed that He would show up strong in this, and He definitely did. We are praising Him today for His everlasting goodness, the gifts He has given us in our friends and our family who supported this so much, and are excited to see what He has planned for this ministry in the future.

We could not have hoped for a better celebration of the miracle of adoption. It was simply a beautiful night.