A Call to...Prayer

"Man plans. God laughs." says the old Yiddish proverb.


We heard from our agency a few weeks back that we were very close to getting our travel approval. There was one official who needed to get back in the country from a business trip and sign off on our documents. So we started making plans. Packing bags. Getting our Christmas shopping done ahead of time and our decorations out and up before Thanksgiving (the sacrilege!) so the girls could have Christmas even if we didn't make it home quickly. Making lists of all the last-minute things that needed to be done. We wanted to be ready to hop a plane within only a few days after getting that call. I've been so busy at the church that it's been hard for me to not feel overwhelmed at the prospect of jumping up and leaving the country for three weeks. But new staff arrived in the past month to lighten my load. I finished some major projects. My excitement was building at the prospects of how it all was going to play out: travel to Nepal, meet and bring home our son, celebrate the first Christmas with our "new" family, and then...the new church campus that I will pastor launching in the New Year.

Man plans. God laughs.

Last Friday we got a call. There's been yet another delay. We are going to have to wait some more. 

The good news in all this is that the Nepali government seems to be working hard to protect the integrity of its adoption process. The bad news is that recent issues have slowed down the process for everyone.  And we don't know when things will get moving again.

In the middle of all this, a verse of Scripture immediately came to mind for me and T: "Be still and know I am God." The literal translation of Psalm 46:10: "Cease your striving and know I am God." In some versions, "Stop your fighting..."

So we want to issue a simple call to prayer. As difficult as this is for us to continue to wait, every day another day without our son (today he turns 17 months old), we trust in the sovereign timing of our God. We don't always understand, but we trust. And we ask you, our friends and family, to join us in a movement of prayer. The Spirit of God knows no international boundaries, is not limited by government bureaucracy, and can accomplish more than human effort and striving could ever hope to do.

Will you join us as we pray?

Specifically for the orphans of Nepal, as there are at least 450 loving families waiting to bring them home.

And let us not forget the 140+ million orphans in the world, that the people of God would rise up to give them all a family. I read today that if 7% of all Christian families in the world would hear the call to adopt, all of these orphans would have a home. That's a staggering statistic to us. We need to not just pray for the orphans, but for the church, that God's people would be stirred to action and out of our complacency.

Father, teach us to pray...