End of Summer Mind Dump

Wow, except for yesterday, I haven't posted since June 11.


It's been a full summer.


One of the New Year's Resolutions I've made was to blog for me, not for anyone else. (Not always the right answer, but got me over the hump of feeling like I needed to say something spiritual in every post, which made me approach blogging like preparing a message, which made me hesitant to post.)

Here I'll catch up with what's been going on:

1. I love motorcycle riding! Since I got my motorcycle in June, I now ride it to work almost every day. Yesterday, Katie rode 30 miles with me.

2. Adoption paperwork! It takes a LONG time. But we finished all our paperwork yesterday!!! (We celebrated with a motorcycle ride.)

3. Preaching through Romans - this has been awesome for me. I love getting a handle on the message of a whole book, and I understand Romans so much better than I have before, and it has really clarified lots about our walk with Christ. Romans 6:13 and Romans 12:1-2 were the best for me.

4. Getting ahead on Message Prep and Service Planning -- Peachtree is officially four weeks out on service planning (sermon AND music and creative elements). This is a first! Clinton, Sheila, and I have worked really hard all summer to get ourselves ahead. We've also got series mapped out through the end of the year.

5. Writing a book - I'll save this one for a post by itself.

Adoption Progress and How it All Began

Today Katie and I turned in the very last of the paperwork for our adoption from China. Praise God! It is now in China's hands (and the Lord's). We should get our LID (log-in date) sometime next week.


This process began May 2007. We were bike riding at the Silver Comet trail and actually were talking about dream travel plans we had (it you don't make a regular habit of dreaming with your spouse, you're missing out; it's so fun to share your biggest, boldest thoughts with someone, and it's amazing how many dreams we share with each other that God ends us bringing about) I changed subjects and mentioned that I had thought about adopting from overseas as a dream, and Katie promptly told me she'd been thinking the same thing recently.


We both confessed that we'd thought the other one wouldn't be interested and that it would be a hard sell to the other. (I thought she'd prefer biological children, she thought the cost of adoption would turn me off to it).


We agreed to pray about it and look into it further.


The next month we had the privilege of going with our youth to SuperWow and David Platt preached a message on theological adoption (God adopted us into His family) and ended it with a slideshow about the the number of orphans around the world (145 million!) and challenged Christians to consider adoption.

God was speaking right to us. We skipped the next session and walked around for an hour on the beach processing what we'd heard. We decided that the only reasons we could come up with not to adopt were selfish, that it felt like every call from God (to seminary, to church planting) we've had, and that as we've always decided with God's calls: we'd be crazy not to do it.

We spent the next weekend praying and researching on the internet. Two documentaries really go to us: The Dying Rooms and China's Lost Girls (National Geographic).

I'll write the rest of the story in another post.