"I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly."
~Jesus (John 10:10b)

Thursday, January 3, 2013

The Lord be magnified!


"Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You; Let those who love Your salvation say continually, "The Lord be magnified!"  ~Psalm 40:16

As the year 2012 comes to a close and a new year begins, this verse is our cry to the Lord. We want our very lives to cause His people to say, "The Lord be magnified!". We don't know what this year may bring our way, maybe another little Lawson to join the family! But in all that this year holds, it joys, changes, and tears, we pray He is magnified.

These past couple of months have been a roller coaster ride of significant changes in the Lawson home. The Lord has been gracious in guiding us. We wanted to fill all of you in!

One exciting change that is taking place in 18 days is a move back to Georgia! We are so thrilled to be settling into the home that we will grow in as a family. Daniel's grandmother passed away last year and left her home to the Lawson family. We are able to move in, rent it out, and make it our own! This is definitely a HUGE blessing to us. We now live in student housing, and were attempting to make changes to a 880 sq. foot apartment to allow for TWO more little ones! Though I LOVE Ikea (LOTS of help there for small spaces) and could have totally made it work, more space is definitely a plus. We will be moving into a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home with a garage and fenced in back yard. Oh, and I should not forget to mention, a DISHWASHER! My first since I have been married! We are really grateful for the blessing of this home and Daniel's grandmother who took impeccable care of it, paid for it in full, and left her family a financial blessing to make this possible. We are so thankful!

This amazing artwork is by Fred Mutebi,
a Ugandan artist that Daniel has come to love
Also, there have been some major changes in our adoption. As you may have gathered in recent posts or facebook updates, Congo is a very unstable country as of late. We have grown to greatly LOVE this country and have grown in love and respect for its natural beauty with strong people who have lived through some difficult times and hardships. We have prayed for DRC and continue to pray for peace and protection from the M23 invasion. We are praying for our agency, Lifeline, to wisely sift through so much of the corruption and child trafficking that is taking place. This is harming many children that have families and leaving destitute those children in desperate need of families. We LOVE our agency and fully trust them. They have been so wise and sought to be ethical in all their dealings with the Congo and its officials. With that said, due to such a lack of stability, Lifeline has been unable to give us a timeline that we could possibly bring our little ones home. All we know, that it is going to be a LONG road in finishing an adoption. With our young family, we knew we could not wait a significant amount of time longer. We prayerfully then considered working through the DRC program or switching to another program. With tears, Daniel and I took a date night, and prayerfully talked through our options. After much research, advice from others and our agency, we have prayerfully decided to make a switch to adopting from Uganda, a neighboring country. We are sobered about the loss of adopting little ones through the D.R. Congo, a country we have come to dearly love, and yet trusting the Lord's sovereign hand in leading us to adopt from Uganda. We are looking forward to learning more about this country and growing in love for the people as well.

We also wanted to share a PRAISE! Our homestudy has been completed! We are so thrilled! And through your generous giving,prayer, fundraising, and working overtime, we have exceeded the next payment! One great thing about reaching this milestone, is that we are now eligible to apply for grants. We are thanking the Lord for that! Lord willing, grants will play a huge part in funding our adoption.

 Pray for us in all of these changes! May He be magnified through these!

In Christ by His Grace,
The Lawsons