Let the Heart of Them Rejoice...

I am sorry, I have not posted in a long time!  I know this will be a long post, but if you endure to the end I have some great news!  Or you can just skip to the end as well and read the news.  :)  I was waiting to share our news until our dear friends, the Colemans also had news to share!  They finally got their dates today!!!  Yippee!!!

Yes, I really did wear a hairnet all day!

So, let me update you on the yard sale.  This past Wednesday, I spent the day baking.  I LOVE to bake and cook.  I especially like to make things that are sweet, and I LOVE to mess with yeast dough.  This past Wednesday was a much bigger endeavour than I have ever attempted.  I started my day with the first BIG batch of dough at 4 a.m., and I ended the day at about 1 a.m. cleaning up my kitchen.  What a mess I made.  There were so many cinnamon rolls filling up every available counter/table, the girls and I had dinner sitting on the floor.  :) 

All in all, I made a little over 500 cinnamon rolls.  If you have ever made any type of bread that involves yeast, you know that the majority of the time you spend waiting.  Being that I have four little girls running around, it was the perfect project for me.  I got time in between to spend with them.  So, how many pounds of flour does one need to make 500 cinnamon rolls?  80 pounds.  You also will need 5 gallons of milk, 20 pounds of sugar, 1.5 gallons of oil, 7 pounds of butter, a whole bunch of cinnamon, 25 pounds of powdered sugar, maple flavoring, yeast, and of all things-coffee (I won't tell you how that comes into play here since some of you don't like coffee :)), and a whole lot of patience. 

Boy, did I make a mess of our kitchen!  I had to promise my girls that I would not go to bed until the kitchen was clean.  And it took me almost two hours just to clean up the mess I made.  In case you don't believe that I really made all these cinnamon rolls, I have a full chest freezer and pictures to prove it. 

There were 30x 9"x13" pans, and 20x 8" pans!

We had worked all week on preparing for the yard sale (minus the day I used for baking), and my best friend, Wanda, also spend several hours helping me organize and price things.  We got generous donations from our church family.  Thank you!!!  Abe was in charge of making signs (gotta leave that to the artist!), and I made up all kinds of signs that I printed out on the computer.  I had advertised our yard sale for several days in advance and in one last effort also made up flyers to pass out in schools, etc. 

On Saturday in the very early morning hours our friends Amy and her twins, Caleb and Abby, who are adopting Vera (Vika's surgery buddy), came over to help us set up and sell during the yard sale.  Thank you so much for coming!!!  And our best friends also came and spent their entire day helping us!  We could never thank them enough for all they have done for us!  I have no idea where we would be today had it not been for their friendship! 

In case you are wondering, NO we did NOT sell all of our cinnamon rolls, and NO we did not make a HUGE profit like my little mind had imagined we would, but it was still a day filled with more blessings than I can count. 

We had a winner on the jelly bean jar giveaway.  And the winner was right from our neighborhood.  Congratulations to Angela M.!!!  There were 647 jellybeans in the jar and she guessed 639.  That's VERY close!  Yes, I was disappointed at the end of a very long week that so much work amounted to what I counted as little.  I was also exhausted beyond words.  I questioned why the Lord didn't bring the increase like I asked Him to.  And then sometime between the evening of our Saturday and the early morning hours of our Sunday, He showed me that He is almighty, sovereign God, and He wants me to give Him all the glory for how He would provide for our adoption rather than doing something to somehow give credit to myself and my own feeble efforts. 

Our girls LOVE Mr. Derick!  Can you tell?

The girls stayed well entertained playing with their "old" toys one last time.

Fundraising has been by far the hardest part of this journey for me so far.  Why???  Because there is nothing that I can do to move the heart of people.  Only God can!!!  The Lord has blessed me with many talents and many things that I CAN do, but to let go of the control I like to have over everything in my life is VERY, VERY hard!  Little by little, He is teaching me that I cannot do all things by myself!  BUT I can do ALL things through Him who strengthens me! 

Now, every good story should have a happy ending right?  Well, on Saturday evening, I wasn't quite so sure how it could.  I was looking at that thermometer wondering if we will ever get it to come up towards the top.  If you take a look at the thermometer, guess where it went in just ONE day!  All the way up to the last quarter of what we need!  Isn't God amazing??  Someone made a very large donation to our Lifesong grant, and there were several smaller and also so very generous donations.  Of course everything that is given is doubled so even a little can amount to so much.  And then my dear friend Ashley raised over $500 for our Lifesong Grant with her diamond necklace Mother's Day gift and that amount will also be doubled in our Lifesong grant.  Then of course, we added our yard sale proceeds, too, AND Wal-Mart on Hamilton Mill Road donated $50 dollars to help us with our yard/bake sale!!!  That's awesome!!!  So, all in all we are now over $9,000!!! 

 The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad. 
Psalm 126:3

And, now to my final point of the whole long story....  This will be the most exciting part, so I hope you held on until the end.  We received our SDA appointment for May 23!!!  That means that we now also are the proud owners of airline tickets to Vika's country on a plane that departs on May 21 and arrives in the capital of Vika's country on Sunday, May 22.  Our appointment will be on May 23, so we should Lord-willing get to meet Vika on May 25!!! That's in less than three weeks!  AMAZING!!!  All throughout this process, I questioned the Lord and why things that were out of our control were taking so long to get done.  Well, it is because God ALWAYS has perfect timing even when we think it should be faster or at a different time.  It so happens that the Lord worked out our travel dates perfectly.  I will explain in detail in another post.