Almost to Africa

Thus life began with the 3 “New McMorrises”.

(I should also mention that we have a total of 7 children, for those doing the math. Mara, 20, is my step-daughter, who is every single bit a member of our family and a child of mine. She is one of the most beautiful young women I have ever met both inside and out. She is brilliant, has a heart of gold, and has more sense than half of the people her age. I am honored to parent her in partnership with Dave and Wendy and Gary. That is a whole other blog, but I wanted to include “Sissy”, who God has also used to grow me in amazing ways.)

Adoption, I have come to find out is a funny thing. The anticipation, the process, the waiting for it to be final, it consumed all of my thoughts and energy. Again, it was a goal that I was waiting to attain. Although we did life together and adjusted in the very practical ways to our new, larger family, it was not the heart changing experience that I had hoped it would be. The adoption phase of life is so busy that God can easily get hidden by the doubt, the paperwork, the frustrations…

We spent the first year with Brice, Halie and Jasmine simply adjusting…bonding, loving, teaching, learning, counseling, trying to figure out how all 6 kids could get a shower before we ran out of hot water, and how much of our favorite dinners Dave needed to make so that we all could get seconds…and Halie could get thirds.

The second year, as all of those systems began to work themselves out and we could say that all 6 of the kids had adjusted successfully to this new life, we began to see areas where more help was needed. We began to explore areas that needed intervention and that would NOT just work themselves out with extra hugs and kisses. We identified delays, health issues, and behavior disorders.

The third year, the rubber hit the road. Once we began to understand who these kids were and what needs they had, we could begin advocating for them and making changes to our lives that would allow us to be the best parents that we could be for them. This includes lots of doctor’s appointments, second opinions and meetings at school. It included a lot of time and energy.

Closing my daycare was one of those changes that I knew needed to be made. I knew that while pouring myself into all of my daycare children and running a business, I didn’t have the resources that I needed at the end of the day to be a great mom. I knew that God had called me to be a wife and a mother before He called me to be a daycare provider, and I have always wanted to bring glory to God in my ministry of motherhood. I had to truly put my family first.

Knowing that I would be closing my daycare brought Dave Ramsey into our lives. J We began to “live like no one else, so that later, we could live like no one else.” We committed to spending money only on “needs” and not on “wants” for a period of time. We also started tithing to our church…what a crazy concept. we went from giving 1% of our income to giving 10% and God blessed every single cent of it. We paid off all of our debt, and we refinanced our house so that we would own our home before our kids started college. We shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet, we always seem to be when God works miracles in our lives. Within a year we had turned around our lives financially, had a savings account, and began feeling called to serve in Africa. It still seemed like a crazy calling, but at least the thought had entered our minds.

We were very confident in our American lives as we laughed and said, “Sure God. Africa would be cool. If YOU ever give us the money to go there, we will do whatever you want us to.” We went on living life with that attitude towards Africa. We had some boys from Uganda live with us for a week as their choir was touring the USA, we helped friends fund raise for their Ethiopian adoptions, we thought about Africa, but never in our wildest dreams did we think we could or would ever set foot there.

August of 2012, through a situation that could have only been orchestrated by God, we came to know and love a community of homeless people in Bloomington. 

We began serving them meals, loving them, and hanging out with them.  We learned so much about our homeless friends and about the life of extreme poverty. Again, God was stretching us, growing our kids, giving us ample opportunities to lean solely on Him when what He asked us to do didn’t make sense to on-lookers. We learned to ignore criticism. We learned that we had to live a life of Christian action if we wanted to teach our children that is what God called us to. No Sunday School class was ever going to teach them what we could by sharing our Christmas morning with our friends.

Living our lives with this group of people and reading a little book by Jen Hatmaker, called “7”, helped us to identify the excess in our lives and begin to refocus on what God had called our lives to look like. Believe it or not, God wasn’t calling us to live with cable and electronics and new clothes and vacations. Jesus taught others that the secret to happiness was serving others. He told us that loving others was the most important thing that we would ever do next to loving God. We decided to take Him at His word. We wondered if we could possibly be happy if our goal in life was to love others unconditionally and to make more of God through all of our actions and all that we put into our minds. We didn’t jump off the deep end, we just refocused on our family. And it was wonderful. We played board games and went for bike rides. We cut down on so many bills, and we started going to the library. Not crazy stuff, just stuff that had seemed to get lost in the hustle and bustle of life.

Here I was again, not comfortable just being on this journey, but always looking for the conclusion, always trying to get one step ahead of God…or at least I thought that I could catch up with Him. Again, I thought I had figured “it” out. I thought that we were called to serve the homeless in our town. Awesome. I must have just been wrong about that Africa-thing. We will just serve the homeless forever.

But when my friend came over and told me that someone in her small group was thinking about going to Africa, I couldn’t jump on board fast enough. “Let’s plan it! Let’s all go serve together! You all are smart, faithful people, if God is calling you to Africa, then it must not be as crazy as I thought!” One of those couples had introduced us to a book called “Kisses from Katie”, and that gave more focus to our big idea. The book is about a young, American mission worker named Katie Davis, who fell in love with Uganda when she was there on a mission trip and then moved back and adopted 14 girls and opened a school…all before she was 25. Sounds like my kid of girl! Dave and I were dead set on going. We assumed it would be with that group of people, but God had other plans in their immediate futures, so it was up to us, on our own we thought, but God had a plan all along.

I had spent all of those month saying to God that I would go to Africa if He provided, and He was about to see if I meant what I said. As we had identified excess in our lives and began living with less, we were finding that we had more money to save. As our savings account grew and we continued to give money away, we realized that we would have enough money to go to Africa. I got on the computer, and I booked our trip with Visiting Orphans, the organization that Katie Davis worked with.

Little did we know, at the time I was booking the trip for Dave, Chloe and I,  God was writing a story in the lives of 19 other people across the United States who would join us in this journey and become like family.