Thursday, February 11, 2010

Great news!

Jared has been accepted into the Missionary Assistant program, and as soon as he raises adequate monthly support, he will be leaving for an extended mission trip to Nepal to work with missionaries Jason & Kristi Loper. He is tentatively planning to leave this fall and stay until the Lopers return to the US in May 2012.  

Jared spent two months ministering with the Lopers in Nepal during the summer of '09, and in his words, experienced the "worst month of my life followed by the best month of my life". When you follow the Lord's call on your life, you should be prepared for and expect the enemy to try to discourage you in an attempt to derail God's message of salvation from being proclaimed. 

My prayer for Jared as he follows God's leading to Nepal is found in Jesus' words in John 16:33...."In Me you may have [perfect] peace and confidence. In the world you have tribulation and trials and distress and frustration; but be of good cheer [take courage; be confident, certain, undaunted]! For I have overcome the world. [I have deprived it of power to harm you and have conquered it for you.]" (The Amplified Version)

Jared produced a short video about his Nepal internship last summer, and as soon as I figure out how, I'll post it here.   

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Minn. bridge collapse widow adopts Haitian twins

By JEFF BAENEN, Associated Press Writer Jeff Baenen, Associated Press Writer 


Betsy Sathers wears the glow of a new mother as she perches on the couch in her living room, smiling and chatting with visitors while still managing to keep an eye on the two-year-old twins burbling and cavorting at her feet. 
BLAINE, Minn. – Betsy Sathers wears the glow of a new mother as she perches on the couch in her family room, smiling and chatting with visitors while still managing to keep an eye on the 2-year-old twins burbling and cavorting at her feet.



Sathers — whose husband was killed when a Minneapolis freeway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007 — is realizing her dreams of being a mother with the adoption of Ross and Alyse from Haiti.

The twins, brought to Sathers' home just days after the earthquake in Haiti, suck from baby bottles and drag toys across the floor. On the wall hangs a framed wedding day photo of Sathers and her late husband, Scott.

"I wasn't sure if I would ever be a wife again, and I was really all right with that. But I knew that I wanted to be a mom and I thought about it and I prayed about it a long, long time," Sathers said.

Betsy and Scott Sathers had been married just 10 months when the Interstate 35W bridge fell apart in August 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145.

The young couple had talked about starting a family. At the time of the collapse, Betsy Sathers had thought she might even be pregnant. She later found she was not, adding to her pain: "I was grieving the loss of my husband and the family we had hoped to have together."

Now the children she hoped to have are finally here.

"I don't think I rescued them," Sathers, 33, said of the twins. "I feel like if anything, they've rescued me."

Sathers started the paperwork to adopt from Haiti last January. On Aug. 17, she received the referral — boy-girl twins.


She made three trips to Haiti to visit her children, the last one over New Year's Day. The quake hit Jan. 12, killing at least 150,000 people. Sathers, back home in her northern Minneapolis suburb, didn't know if her children were alive or dead.

The answer came in a phone call from a stranger — Rob Kramer, chairman and co-founder of Global Water Trust, which works to bring clean water to developing nations, and CEO of PopRule, an Internet technology company. Kramer had flown to Haiti after the quake and was helping legally process children who already had been adopted when he got an e-mail from a friend of Sathers' who told him about the twins.

Kramer was in a car leaving an orphanage when he received the e-mail. He asked the driver to stop in the middle of traffic and went to the van behind him to talk to Lucy Armistead, the founder and head of Kentucky Adoption Services. Armistead had just been at the same orphanage, picking up children eligible to be adopted out of the country.

Kramer said he asked Armistead if she knew "the boy and girl twins, Schneider and Schneidine" — Ross and Alyse's Haitian names — and explained the story. Armistead figured the twins were back at the orphanage. Still, she and her co-worker looked around the van, which was carrying about nine children, and found the twins in the back seat.

"I said, `You've got to be kidding me,'" Kramer recalls. "I said, `Let's just dash to the (U.S.) Embassy.'"

Ross and Alyse had survived the quake along with the 45 or so other children at the orphanage. The building in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour, at the epicenter of the quake, was destroyed, and the children were sleeping in tents and under tarps on a concrete slab across the street.

 By Jan. 22, Kramer was on a private jet to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with the twins. Sathers and her mother rushed to get on a flight to pick up her children.

The twins arrived a little dehydrated and, at 22 pounds each, a bit underweight, Sathers said. But she said the children are gaining weight and taking to American food.

Sathers, a consultant who plans to take a year's leave to be home with the twins, said she hopes people will continue to support Haitians through prayer and donations or volunteer work for relief organizations. 

"It's a happy ending for my family, but there's still so much devastation there. There's so many other kids that it's not a happy ending there." 


Monday, February 8, 2010

Comparing Apples to Oranges

Saturday evening we took our four youngest kids to a pancake supper fundraiser for a local church, and we sat with a German Baptist family who we've known through our homeschool support group for many years.  But because neither of our families are members of the support group anymore, we don't see each other very often.  We had a very nice time catching up on what our older children are doing now that they've finished high school.  

Another German Baptist family came by our table to say hello, and as we talked we realized their newest little one was born the exact same day as our little Jaeci.  But sharing a birthday is where the similarity stops....their daughter is quite a bit bigger than Jaeci and is walking and talking already.  She is even more developmentally advanced than Jaxon, who will be three in two months, yet still isn't walking or talking.  

I try not to compare our little ones to "typical" kids, but being a "typical" mom, sometimes I can't help myself, even though it's like comparing apples to oranges.  But thankfully, after six years of parenting special needs children, it doesn't take long for me to remember the blessing of their altered developmental timetable, which helps teach me how to slow down, to savor each moment and celebrate each milestone as precious gifts from God, not to be endured, but to be lovingly embraced.  

The Creed For Babies with Down Syndrome
Anonymous

My face may be different
But my feelings the same.
I laugh and I cry
And I take pride in my gains.
I was sent here among you
To teach you to love.
As God in the Heavens
Looks down from above.
To Him I’m no different
His love knows no bounds.
It’s those here among you
In cities and towns
That judge me by standards
That man has imparted
But this family I’ve chosen
Will help me get started.
For I’m one of the children
So special and few
That came here to learn
The same lesson as you
That love is acceptance
It must come from the heart
We all have the same purpose
Though not the same start
The Lord gave me life
To live and embrace
And I’ll do it as you
But at my own pace.


Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Adopted for Life....and in Death

(This is a reprint of a blog post from AlbertMohler.com)

Arno was inseparable from Mr. Penguin. The little Haitian boy was almost three years old, and the plush penguin with the word "love" inscribed upon it was his most treasured object. The orphan and his penguin were always seen together.

The boy had been given the penguin just after his birth. A Dutch couple was in the process of adopting him almost from the start of his life -- they had been matched to him when he was only two months old. The penguin represented a promise.

The process of adoption took two years -- the length of time considered adequate to determine that no living relatives might claim him. According to official estimates, there were over 50,000 parentless orphans in Haiti before the earthquake came and orphaned many thousands more.

Richard and Rowena Pet were the young Dutch couple who wanted so badly to be Arno's mother and father. They had struggled with infertility for years before deciding to adopt. As they awaited the adoption of Arno, Rowena became pregnant. Last August she gave birth to Jim, who was left in the care of relatives as Richard and Rowena flew to Haiti in January to claim Arno and complete the adoption process.

The story of Arno's adoption is movingly told by reporter David Charter of The Times [London]. As he reported, "Arno was shy at first but within 30 minutes of meeting his adoptive parents he reached for Rowena’s hand and took the Dutch couple on a tour of the orphanage in Port-au-Prince where he had spent most of his short life. He began to call them Mummy and Daddy."

Richard had shared their joy with a friend in an e-mail:

“We got to the orphanage feeling a bit strange. We went around a corner and immediately saw Arno walking towards us. He was OK until he was about half a meter away, but then he panicked. The woman from the orphanage helped out and half an hour later he took Rowena’s hand for the first time. I’m sorry but I can’t help crying at the moment as I type this. Arno has been showing us everything in the orphanage. He showed us an old car they have for the children to play on. He was holding a birthday card we sent for his second birthday.”

According to Charter, adoptive parents often stay at the Hotel Villa Therese in the PĂ©tionville district of Port-au-Prince. That is where Richard and Rowena took Arno. That is where they were when the earthquake came. And that is where they died together.

David Charter tells the story, with comments by Chris Spaansen, the friend to whom Richard had sent the e-mail:

Dutch TV cameras were on hand during the frantic search by an international rescue team with members from the Netherlands, Britain and Canada. . . . Lying there amid the rubble was the unmistakable blue and yellow toy bird, Mr Penguin, marked with the word “Love”, that went everywhere with Arno. “That toy helped them to make their first contact with the little boy. It had a really special place in the family. It was a very emotional moment for all of us,” Spaansen says.

Then this:

What the cameras did not show were the three bodies, found intertwined together, as if Rowena and Richard had tried to put protective arms around Arno as the masonry began to fall. The disaster cruelly destroyed the new family, creating its own orphan back in the Netherlands. Jim, just five months old, will be brought up by Rowena’s sister, who already has her own three-year-old boy.

The bodies of Richard and Rowena and Arno Pet were taken to the Netherlands together, just as they had been found together in the rubble of the Hotel Villa Therese. They had been a family for a few hours, but a family all the same. Arno had a tragically short life, but he ended that life in the arms of a mother and a father.

Who can read this account without heartbreak . . . and a heart warmed? Is there a heart so cold that it does not feel the pathos of this report, and sense the sentiment of this family's tragedy? At the same time, this is not a tragedy in the classic sense. The love of Richard and Rowena and Arno Pet transcends tragedy. That is why The Times published this report, and why it stays with you so long after you read it.

Of course, for the Christian there is far more to this story. In the story of Arno Pet we find a picture of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul wrote to the Galatians:

But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a virgin, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying "Abba! Father!" Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. [Galatians 4:4-7]

Adoption is perhaps the most powerful depiction of the Gospel found in the Bible. We are all orphans, born under the curse of sin. By the sheer grace and mercy of God, those who come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ are adopted as sons. Redeemed sinners are adopted as sons "through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise and glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved." [Ephesians 1:5-6]

Arno Pet began life as an orphan, but he ended life as a son. He was abandoned at his birth, but he died in the arms of his parents. He did not die as Arno, he died as Arno Pet.

In the rubble of the Hotel Villa Therese the film crew found the bodies of Richard and Rowena and Arno Pet. In that same rubble, we find a picture of the Gospel of Christ. He who has eyes to see, let him see.

http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/02/03/adopted-for-life-and-death/