How Great Is Our God

So for me, the greatness of God continues to blow my mind. For Him to grant us the privilege of being parents not only to Anna and Madelyn, but now to little Isabelle who was born half a world away, under circumstances we will never know, is humbling. Add to that the assurances and reassurances He has given us through this entire process and we are in awe. There are far too many to ever be catalogued in this blog. BUT, I will share just a couple from the past week or so. The first is that, amidst all the craziness of this adoption, I decided to do a Beth Moore Bible study. You know, add a weekly commitment and homework to my plate. I don't know why, but I felt very strongly that I needed to do this study on the book of Esther. The first week of the study was on the providence of God--how He knows every detail of everything in my life. How there are no coincidences. How nothing catches God by surprise and how, while many times God chooses to reach down and accomplish something in a miraculous way, the book of Esther is an example of Him using the sweat-it-out through humans approach. Hmmmm.

The second week was all about how Esther was an orphan and how God used her and had a very special destiny for her to save His people. I choked back the tears as I listened to Beth Moore expound on this. I had been struggling for days over the fact that our sweet Isabelle had lived for a year with no mom or dad in her life. I had been grieving on her behalf. I couldn't shake this underlying sadness until I was reassured that night that God has been with Isabelle the whole time and has a special destiny for her life, and that God can use anything in her life for His glory and her good. How kind and merciful of God to give me that assurance when I needed it most.

Another little thing God chose to do for us in this whole adventure was to place my sister and her husband in China for the past year with the Peace Corps. I, of course, thought how great that was because I could fly Holly to meet us and she could help us with language, culture, etc. when we got the baby. Time marched on and Holly and Marc are now scheduled to come home in July and have limited travel options between now and then. Well, with our plans to leave on July 1, we will overlap with them in Beijing for 2 days! God is so cool. Having them in China for this year has helped me to feel connected to our daughter in a unique way. Even though we didn't know her or where she was, our regular Skype sessions with Holly and Marc have helped us to learn about the people and culture of China, and somehow we felt closer to her as a result.

God is faithful. He does know every detail about our journey and is intimately involved in them. He is not too busy with the "big stuff" to care about my day. Thinking otherwise puts him in a box and makes him small and limited--not a god I would want to serve. Instead, we serve the God who spoke the world into being, who knows every star by name, and who has the hairs on our heads numbered. Why I fret over the small stuff is beyond me.