Wait on the Lord or Take a Leap of Faith?

Our ice cream social was not nearly what we hoped it would be. We did have a couple friends and a few neighborhood kids come, but that was all. Unfortunately it seemed everyone had other plans, but the good news is that we still made a small profit and didn't loose money on it. We are still hoping to put on another much bigger fundraiser, but we have not gotten permission to do so at the church yet. Please pray that they would allow us to do something there. A wonderful friend-of-a-friend is going to make a quilt or two for us to raffle off and has offered her time and materials for free, what a blessing! As far as letters go, we have only received three back, but are very grateful for those who responded, thank you. Jared has been offered some drafting "side jobs", we are looking into getting a paper rout for a few months, and all of the money I make from personal training is going to go strait to the adoption fund. So, hopefully with all of that we will earn what we need. That is the update on fundraising, but we do have some other interesting news. After talking with the couple in our church who is adopting from Ethiopia as well, we found out that the agency they used will let us apply now. This came as a surprise to us. Now we have some praying to do about which agency to use and whether to wait on the Lord for more funds or take a leap of faith and apply now. Prayers for that would be appreciated as well. That's all the news for now.

Garage Sales, Ice Cream and New Friends

Well, our second garage sale was less than productive so we are going to pack everything back up and try again next spring. Tomorrow we are having our ice-cream social, please pray for good weather and good sales. We do have some good news...we just learned that another couple in our church is also adopting a child from Ethiopia. One of our pasters got our support letter and emailed us with the couple's info, so we are hoping to get in touch with them this weekend or next. It will be really nice to have a couple so close to talk with about the adoption. They are adopting a little girl who is older I think 6-8 years old or so, but they are going over this fall to get her so that will be very exciting to see. It is also nice that they have already been through the process and will be able to give us pointers along the way. Thats about it for now. Check out the new links we have and if you have time watch the great video on Ethiopia by clicking this link http://www.allgodschildren.org/about/videos/ and then click on"Hanna's Hope Ethiopia" Thanks for all your prayers!

Fundrasing Update

We have a few new updates on fundraising. Community Home Dairy here in Missoula graciously donated six gallons of ice cream for our ice cream social; what a great blessing. Also, our first garage sale did okay. Saturday we made a decent amount, but the fun thing was, one of the couples who stopped by was a Christian couple needing someone to draft/design a new entry for their house....how convinet uh? Sunday, however, we only had one person show up so Jared decided to calculate our dollar per hour pay for Sunday and we only made $1.36 an hour. I told him that next time we should maybe skip that statistic. haha This weekend we have another garage sale, but this one we actually have an ad for. The ad is in a smaller local paper since the Missoulian costs $26 for an ad, but hopefully it will bring in a few more people. Several friends have been donating things for us to sell in the sale and that is greatly appreciated. Also, Jared just got an email from a friend of ours who has been interested in buying some left-over tile we had from building our house, and it seems they are ready for it. Good timing uh? These have all been nice small but very helpful contributions, but I've saved the best for last. The other day I went to the mail box and found a piece of mail from our Medical Center. I figured it was just a bill for Aspen's latest check up, but instead it turned out to be a refund check for $657.00! I had no idea that it was coming so I called just to make sure it wasn't too good to be true and apparently our insurance came back and paid a huge claim that they had denied at first so they owed us money. Unfortunately we can't use all of this for the adoption, but a large portion of it will cover our application fee; yeah! God is so cool in His timing. I knew He would provide for us, but it is so fun to see how creatively it happens. That's about all for now, but please keep praying for our next two weekend fundraisers. Thanks for all your support.