Hey, maybe!

What if this is our last year of not being parents? What if this was our last Christmas without a little one? What if this is our last New Year's Eve as just a couple?

We're praying for a lot going into 2014; for better health, for a new and permanent home (not leaving Gainesville, ever, just looking into a permanent place), for deeper connections with friends, for new adventures through River Cross. These are all prayers that are meaningful to us, yet pale in comparison to the prayer that 2014 could see Baby Patterson come home. 

Thanks to each of you who graciously gave this year; you are part of God's provision! You have shown us support in ways that we could not possibly repay, so know that we can't wait to bring home our son or daughter and tell them about the community of people who made this possible. Thank you thank you thank you.

And...would you commit to praying? Would you pray with us - daily? Even just 5 seconds of God's people petitioning the throne of grace with confidence would mean so much. Pray for our child's birth mother; for her health and safety and for her to know she is valued. Pray for Angel Adoption, Inc, for wisdom and guidance and blessings on them. Pray for our hearts to continue to be prepared to welcome home Baby Patterson.

Thank you so much! We love each of you dearly

By His grace, for His glory,

Bethany and Wayne

Christmas is about adoption

But don’t take any of this for granted. It was only yesterday that you outsiders to God’s ways had no idea of any of this, didn’t know the first thing about the way God works, hadn’t the faintest idea of Christ. You knew nothing of that rich history of God’s covenants and promises in Israel, hadn’t a clue about what God was doing in the world at large. Now because of Christ—dying that death, shedding that blood—you who were once out of it altogether are in on everything. (Ephesians 2:11-13 MSG)

We were all far away from God, hopeless and Fatherless in the world. Then Christmas! We were that part of the song that goes 'long lay the world, in sin and error pining' even if we don't remember that part of our lives. 

But Christmas! Our God and King stepped out of his rightful throne, setting aside his Crown, coming into our world and mess and sin and despair and laid aside those rightful Royal elements that we may partake in his perfect inheritance as doted-on sons and daughters.

Christmas! When Perfection took on humanity so that humanity could know Perfection - so that you and me and our future son or daughter could know the One true Father forevermore.

Merry Christmas!

Bethany and Wayne

SO WE'RE SENDING IN OUR CONTRACT

People, we are sending in our contract to Angel Adoptions tomorrow. You can't send in your contract unless you have the $7200.* That means you wonderful people have helped us get over the biggest, most important hurdle. SO YEA, we'll start working on our profile with Angel in the next couple of weeks. They'll take that profile and use it to introduce us to potential birth mothers. WHOA.

We're blown away.

Will you rejoice with us? We'd be honored if you would take a minute to pray a prayer of gratitude; use Psalm 100 or Psalm 126 or Psalm 147  as a guide. We know, deep in our guts and spirit, that the Lord is doing an incredible work. We also know that, because of the Lord's good work and provision, we must rejoice! And, sadly, we know that in our weakness we will forget this.

Will you help us remember? Will you join us in worshiping and rejoicing and remembering that the Lord has done great things?

Thank you, dear friends!

By His grace, for His glory,
Bethany and Wayne




*We told you all the wrong number...we thought $7800 was our next big goal, but it's actually $7200. We still have approximately $17,000 to go after the $7200 so our total taken amount of $8300 (WOW!!) means we're on our way to our next goal. IF, however, you gave money based on getting us to that $7800 and would like your money back, that is VERY fair! Email Wayne (wayne.rivercross@gmail.com) and we'll get that worked out.

Rejoicing in each step

We had a moment recently where we were excited about all the financial support that was coming in and simultaneously subdued because of the amount that was still left to raise. We looked at the generosity of all of you wonderful people and were encouraged, yet also hesitant to be too joyful as we knew there was so far to go. 

Fortunately, God in His patience, quickly and gently reminded us to JUST REJOICE in what He was up to and in what our friends and family are doing by so faithfully assisting us in this journey. So we apologize for our momentary lapse of perspective and have redoubled our rejoicing in what is happening - because the love and support we are receiving is overwhelming! 

As of 9a on December 17th we are barely $700 away from our big goal of $7800 that will go to our adoption agency. We are only a few hundred dollars from being introduced to birth moms via our agency. We are so much further along than we could have ever hoped at this point.

So we rejoice, with thankful hearts.

Are there things in your life that you need to just stop and rejoice in? Are you letting worries cloud what is worthy of praise? We encourage you to stop and rejoice, for surely there is much to rejoice in!

By His grace, for His glory,

Wayne 

That one time we prayed for $300

Last night we held a concert at Patticakes with THE best local artist Gainesville has to offer, Ricky Kendall. Seriously, take a minute and go to YouTube and look him up and you're welcome (no, for real; go do it. We'll take a quick break).

The catalyst for having this show was to have a day/evening fund raiser through Patticakes for our Baby Patterson homecoming push and Ricky was gracious enough to come and play as a draw for folks to come out and support.

We prayed for $300 to come in (through a portion of ticket sales and donation boxes). Truly, we thought $300 was a pretty lofty prayer for a small benefit concert.

Yea, we took in over $1500 in donations.

I did not type that wrong. $1500! We only sold 25/26 tickets, but between the generosity of the folks who came and others who donated during the time of the benefit from afar (via PayPal, venmo, etc) we had $1500+ come in. 

Guys, that's crazy. That means we are less than $1400 from really getting this process going. Less than $1400 away from our agency beginning to introduce us to potential birth moms. That means in barely 7 weeks you wonderful peiple have contributed $6400. That means we are that much closer to bringing home our child.

We are humbled and overwhelmed and beyond grateful. 

There's still a long way to go but shame on us if we don't stop and really rejoice in the faithfulness of our God and His provision.

We love you all. Thank you.

By His Grace, to His glory,

Bethany and Wayne

Wonderful testimony and idea!

We had a recent donation of $300+ that came because of a generous friend's idea to count up their loose change. I heard there were household guesses as to how much it would amount to and no one was even close! This friend emailed in and we wanted to share that great encouragement and challenge:

'When I looked at our jar of coins I always wondered what would be worth spending it on. My challenge to everyone is to think about all the loose coins you have collecting dust and waiting for that wonderful way you are finally going to use that money. What better way to use it to place a baby in the arms of Wayne and Bethany Patterson.'

This note and encouragement has been such a blessing to us and I hope you will be blessed by it as well; if you have wrestled with wanting to help but don't feel like you can do much, know that ANY AMOUNT does help, and that your prayers are being answered as you intercede on our behalf, specifically prayers that the Lord would continue to provide for us financially. Those prayers are being heard!

By His grace, for His glory,

Bethany and Wayne

Overwhelmed

We are half way there! You wonderful and exceedingly generous people have donated nearly $4000. $4000!!

We can't put into words the gratitude we feel because of your lavish participation in this. To be able to tell our son or daughter that they have such wonderful people in their lives that they would help bring them home will be a story we will tell many, many times.

We will keep you posted as we head toward that $7800 mark to start the process of Angel Adoption showing our profile to potential birth moms. Thank you for your support, it is evidence that our great God is supplying our every need as He fulfills his calling in and through us.

Love you all,

Bethany and Wayne

Thankful for adoption

It has been a fairly common question/assumption that we are adopting because we can't have kids of our own, and while it is certainly a possibility that we won't be able to have children biologically, we are adopting out of a desire to adopt, to start our family through this amazing way.

We are THANKFUL that we get to adopt. We are not bitter because we must adopt, we are grateful because the Lord has called us to adopt. But...this was not always so. AND, it is not always so. There are times (as we've mentioned in previous posts) that we wish we had a more traditional path to starting a family. Yet, through prayer and remembering God's call and on-going faithfulness, we know that adoption is a GET TO. And we are grateful.

This is an important distinction that I think many of us should try and look for: what's something in your life that you look at as a 'have to' that you should, instead, look at a 'get to'? Is there something that is a burden that you could look at as a blessing? Is there a way that you could take some situation in your life that others say 'aw, poor thing' and, instead of feeding on the pity, rejoice that the Lord was gracious enough to let you - YOU! - have that situation?

It is not easy, but easy is boring. Let's rejoice together, Happy Thanksgiving

By His grace, for His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

An update on the process

A little update so you know where things are in the process:

- Scroll down to see a specific update on our Home Study

- We have had another group of you wonderful people donate money toward our next goal of $7800 - THANK YOU!

- We are currently at $2400 toward the $7800 that is due to our adoption agency; the $7800 is our next necessary step in bringing home our child so we can't express how grateful we are for all of you who have joined us in our journey with financial support

- For anyone who is interested, we are asking that for Bethany's birthday (November 30th) and Christmas that we not receive gifts and instead receive donations toward the adoption. Even presents like cute outfits for our little one and diapers and other necessities for new parents we are asking that you hold off on for a little while

- We are hearing from many of you about stories of how adoption has directly affected your life - please keep those coming! They are so encouraging and gives us another glimpse of how we are doing this with the aid of our community

- We have a FAQ section of the blog (click here to head over there) and would love to know how to help answer any questions you may have! We are still very new at all of this but would love to help with anything we can and that means there's no question that is off limits - ask away!

Thanks so much,

Bethany and Wayne

Home study update

Home studies are weird.

What do you have your home studied for? Pass an inspection before selling your house? To make sure you have load-bearing walls where you want to put in new cabinets? To see if that leak is something much worse?

How about to see if you are fit to be parents?

Home studies are weird. But, as we've learned, home studies are necessary. Not the necessary like you need to get a college degree to get a job necessary; necessary like you have to be a woman to have a baby necessary; necessary like you have to wear a helmet to play football; necessary like you have to have to use eggs if you want to make an omelette (don't talk to us about the fake stuff). Necessary like you can't adopt your child unless someone comes to your home and says 'yes, these people are not terrible' and then takes your 13 items (financial documents, background checks, doctors' notes) and says 'yes, these people are still not terrible'.

But, good news, we should get the official results next Monday, December 2nd, that we are NOT terrible people! We got an email today from Debra from Sunshine State Adoption and Home Study Services that said all our paperwork is in, and as long as none of our financial documents come back showing fraud (if we've committed fraud I don't know where the money is...) then we will get our gold seal of approval, which is necessary to continue on with our adoption agency.

We hope you know that in this post we are being silly and sarcastic; we are grateful for the thorough process that parents have to go through so that these darling children are placed in warm and welcoming homes. It can be (and has been) a taxing process but we are grateful for the steps as they have given us new ways to see progress as we pursue our child. We'll keep you posted when we get the official word.

By His grace, for His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

Not biology, theology - Tony Merida

This is one of my favorite teachers, Tony Merida, and it was partly through hearing his testimony about adoption that compelled us to consider more and more our already-given call from God and to DO something about that call. This video is a great snap shot of our heartbeat to why are adopting and why we want you to consider adoption and supporting adoption.

By His grace, for His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

Generosity

You people are amazing - we've already received just under $2000 toward bringing Baby Patterson home! We will continue to tell you that this blog is not primarily for raising money, and we know that we can't do this without the assistance of our dear friends and family; so: THANK YOU.

We'll try and regularly keep you posted on where we are funds-wise and what that means in terms of using those funds to bring our child home. Here's where we are as of now:

With the donations taken in, we are about $5700 away from our next payment to our Adoption Agency, or, more directly, we are about $5700 from our agency starting the process of connecting us to potential birth mothers. Obviously that's a huge step in this journey, a point on our radar that is consistently a part of our prayers.

If you have helped us get this far, thank you so much for that blessing and encouragement. If you are interested in helping out, feel free to use the PayPal button on the front page, but please read the 'support raising' page so you know what we're doing with the fund raising portion of this journey. As always, we covet your prayers above your money; our God has called us to this and we are therefore supremely confident in His ability to provide. His mode of provision might well be through your generosity, so we thank you in advance

By His grace, For His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

What great lengths

The Gospel is a startling thing. God - the One True and Infinite God of the Universe! - loves us so much that He would go to extreme lengths to show us that love, that we may have a life-changing and everlasting relationship with Himself. So extreme are the lengths that He would pursue us, He pursues through any circumstance, pursues through any work it would take, pursues through paying any cost necessary. We have experienced this pursuing love in very real ways; we desire to show this pursuing love in a very real way.

We have stated that our primary reason for adoption is to show the love God has for His creation - we want our child to know that he or she was pursued long before their birth day, that we desired them to pursue a relationship with him or her through any circumstance, pursuing our child through any work that it takes, pursuing our son or daughter through paying any cost necessary.

By His grace, For His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

Spotlight on our adoption agency

We've been asked about our adoption agency a few times so we thought we'd write up a post on them - who they are, what they do and why we went with them over other agencies.

We went with an agency called Angel Adoption based out of Illinois. We would love for you to take a few minutes and look around their site (just click on the name in the previous sentence), including the stories of adoptive parents that have had their families grow through adoption. We hope to be one those families someday soon! (Related: if you want to see how you can help us along in that part of our journey, click here to head over to our support page).

We chose to go with Angel for several reasons, but the primary reason was their size and therefore their ability to give us the personal care that we know we need. This is a long process and there are a ton of questions and worries that we have and will have; we needed an agency that we knew would take intentional care to make sure we had those questions answered and those worries addressed. Angel Adoption will do just that.

Additionally, since we are starting our family through adoption, we wanted to experience our child's entire life. We hope that we will get to experience growing our family through a foster-to-adopt program in the future, but we sensed that we just aren't ready for starting our family when we hadn't experienced any parenting at any level. Since Angel specializes in pairing birth mothers with adopting families well before the baby's birth, that made it a natural fit.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we were blown away with the high placement rate for adoptive parents - 95% of parents are paired with a birth mother and go home with a full family. Angel does this by being intentional about which states and agencies they work with: if they've had a bad experience with a birth mother backing out they are unlikely to work with the agency that they found the birth mother through; if a state has a relinquishment law more than 72 hours, Angel doesn't work with them at all; they assign a coordinator to birth parents who will walk through the process with us AND walk through the process with the birth mom once she's picked us - this advocate keeps encouraging the birth mother along, reminding her of what a great choice she is making by having her child and giving him or her the very best life through adoption; choosing Angel had as much to do with knowing that the birth mom would have an advocate as we would.

You'll hear much more about Angel as we navigate this journey with them holding our hands, but hopefully this gives you a good snapshot of a our adoption agency, our primary hand-holders in this process.

By His grace, For His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

Like buying a house..

Adoption is way more like buying a house than having a child. No, it's like buying 3 houses in 3 different cities that all require lots of background checks and fingerprints and one is a foreclosure and one is out of our price range. Yea, it's more like that.

Don't get me wrong, we are far more excited in this than any other emotion! We know that we know that we are bringing home our child - goodness, that gives us chills every time we say or read it! Adoption is the mode we are using to grow our family and we are excited about that. And...

Sometimes is hard. Sometimes it's annoying filling out another form. Sometimes we don't want to go to the UPS store (again) to get something else notarized. Sometimes we want to eat unhealthy things and talk about baby names instead of scheduling a class on 'what to do while waiting on your placement'.

Sometimes we want to see Bethany's belly bump get a little bigger so we can see our child growing.

But just sometimes.

Way more we are just over-the-moon-excited that the Lord has given us the privilege of growing our family this way - we are not adopting as a last ditch effort to have a child, we are adopting because we GET TO! We get to. We get to adopt. And we are filled with joy.

Many of you have asked how you can pray for us and we have been consistently asking for prayer for our hearts to remember, more and more, that we are in the process of bringing home our child, not just walking through some arduous refinancing process. We ask (again and again) that you would keep praying that prayer.

We're not buying a house,
Bethany and Wayne

Adoption profile

One reason for posting this blog will be for our adoption agency to use as a means to communicate who we are as a couple to prospective birth mothers. You may see sections pop up like 'Who we are' or photo galleries show up of us looking super cute. Just roll with it. Feel free to rib Wayne for his perfectly quaffed hair, just don't do that on here. Cool? Cool!

By His grace, for His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

Prayer: one thing to stop praying about

Have you ever continued to pray for what you've already received an answer for?

Should you ask her to marry you? 

Can I afford to take this new job?

What if my daughter hates me for not letting her go?

How can I trust a God I can't even see?

We will be using this blog to talk a lot about prayer and the wonderful reality that we are not babbling at the dark expanse like fools but instead speaking with a good and loving Father. One (of many!) aspects of prayer we want to navigate with you: there are some things you can stop praying about. 

One thing you can stop praying about: caring about adoption. If you claim Christ as King, you cannot avoid the heartbeat He and the Father have for adoption - it is the very essence of the Gospel! We, who were far away and separate from God because of our sin and without a hope in the world were adopted into full family rights. That's crazy! My buddy James says that the only true religion must include caring for widows and orphans. Jesus' best friends repeatedly document how radically pro-kid Jesus was, even in the midst of a culture that looked at them as mostly a burdensome annoyance. If you are a Christ follower, you don't have to pray about whether or not you are called to be a supporter of adoption. YOU ARE.

We know that a portion of our calling is to be a catalyst for some of you to actually adopt - to take the big, scary plunge into the murky and messy waters of adopting a child of your own. Perhaps it's you? We also know that contained in this calling is to be advocates for adoption, for the millions of orphans that we won't be able to help on our own, the precious lives who need Hope and need you to do whatever you can to help them. I don't think you need to pray about IF you should help out but I do hope you'll pray about HOW you can help. If you want, help us - but we truly hope you'll consider helping out with one of the many compassionate organizations that help out the least of these. We'll be highlighting some of those great organizations in the coming weeks AND if you are brokenhearted for a particular place (organization or country or method, etc.) please email that to us (wayne.rivercross@gmail.com) as we'd love to help highlight wherever we can.

There is much to pray about but you can stop praying about whether or not you should care for and support adoption.

By His grace, for His glory,
Bethany and Wayne

Here we go

Hello there, friend, how are you? We are doing quite well, thanks!

This is the first post of many as we chronicle our journey to expand our family through adoption. You'll find on this blog:
- Ways to pray with and for us
- Information about adoption
- What's happening in our journey (it's a loooooong process so warning: there will be some redundancy)
- God's generous grace to us
- Yes...how you can support us financially

We are adopting through a really wonderful organization, Angel Adoptions, and will be adopting domestically through their African-American program and we will be partnered with a birth mother, so we will be bringing home an infant. There are lots still to be unpacked with many more details to come but that's usually a big, first 'where are you adopting from' question that a lot of you will have.

We will post a specific entry on why we are burdened to adopt but know this: we CANNOT do this without you. To steal from a tired but misunderstood saying: it takes a village to raise a child. You are our village. We need you - this is our journey, we'd love you to join us.

- Bethany and Wayne

Why we are adopting

This is probably the second most asked question we've been asked so far (#1: international or domestic? We'll answer that question in this post, but only briefly, so more on that soon), so we wanted to address it early as a reference point.

Why we are adopting:

1. We believe that the One True God is a lavishly grace-filled Father and that nothing exemplifies that love like adoption. Paul teaches in Galatians 4 (and elsewhere) that because of Christ's work we, who were not children of God have been adopted into His family. This is mind-bending, heart-exploding stuff! Unnaturally born children given every right as God's very own. This is easily our number one reason for adopting; we want our child to know God's adoptive love for him or her, clearly.
2. We want to be a catalyst for change. It's not breaking news to say that adoption is tricky and that the vast majority of Americans don't see it as a viable option. We understand this and we believe, passionately, that this should NOT stop people from adopting - especially Christians. We lovingly challenge you to ask God to work on your heart as you follow along on our journey, asking if He would give you the push to trust Him with this important yet challenging undertaking. 
3. This is could be 2a but we feel called to adopt so that young women would see it as a more and more viable option over abortion. This is not a political stance (we are usually pretty vocal about our a-political views) but rather a hope for a change in options; if we can help one young, scared, overwhelmed mother know that her child is a wanted blessing, then we have vastly altered the social landscape, much more significantly than a vote or a boycott. This is also why for our first child we will be adopting domestically; we have a global burden for orphans, but we are starting with a domestic adoption so that we can say we've been a part of the solution here at home. 
4. We're not sure if we'll be able to have children biologically. This is not the main reason we are adopting, but we are not sure, given Bethany's kidney rejection medicines, that we will ever be able to biologically bring children into our home. We are not mad or frustrated as we know that God could very well give us biological children and we are confident that adoption is not the second best option to biological children. AND we know for sure that God has called us to trust Him in growing our family through adoption first.

You will see these reasons referenced many times going forward, and you will see that we will let you in on further reasons why as they become relevant - and we hope that you know that these are OUR reasons! If you disagree or have a different stance or viewpoint, we love and appreciate you no matter what. So yea, join us on the journey

- Bethany and Wayne

So, yea, about that...

This may come as a shock to you (so take a seat): adoption costs money. I know, I know, we were caught off guard as well.

We will be using this blog as a means to allow anyone who feels so led to contribute to the costs of our adoption. Before we talk about how much and how it all breaks down (not a very simple answer there...at all) I wanted to share our heart on why this is our least favorite post and how it took some serious convincing to even mention this to you all.

First...we can be prideful and arrogant. We don't mind asking for help moving a few boxes or delivering some cupcakes or letting you buy one of us dinner when it's one of our birthdays or after Wayne beats you in fantasy football, but asking for help with something this big, something this financially large, something this life-altering is, well, hard. So, here's our response (and we have unashamedly stolen it from dear friends and family): we're not asking for help, we're letting others join us in our journey. This will be a long process, complete with lots of unknown twists and turns and so we will need every one of you to join us, and the more we let the Lord soften our hearts the more our pride and arrogance melts away (with a loooooong way to go).

Second...we feel weird asking for money/letting folks help us out financially because, who doesn't have a tough time financially navigating starting a family? We're having a baby, babies are expensive, why should we ask for help? This one has played on our brains quite a bit but, again with the help of dear friends who have traveled the journey ahead of us, we are letting this one go more and more all the time. A baby IS expensive and will be once we have him or her; what we're talking about here is welcoming assistance until we get to the point of having our child home with us.

Third...this will be a long process and some of our costs are not a defined number - we know some definite amounts but many are based on where our child will be born, travel to that location, legal fees that vary state to state, etc. We've struggled asking for assistance/letting others in on the financial side of things because we fear the perception that we would ask for too much, not knowing exact amounts until that step came to pass. This one is still difficult but this is also one that's been a bit easier to wrestle through because, frankly, if you don't think we'd be honest with any donation given, please o please: 1) don't give! and 2) let us know for we need to live in freedom and grace and that means accepting godly counsel.

Still with us? Between what we've already spent (a little north of $1200) and what we will spend before bringing our child home is $25,000. NOW, you still with us? How this breaks down:

• $1000 for the home study that is currently processing
• $200 for various things linked to the home study (almost $100 for fingerprinting, $12 for background checks, that sort of thing)
• $7800 for our adoption agency
• $3000 to help our birth mother with expenses
• $3-9000 for lawyer and legal fees (WIDE range there, we know)
• $1-3000 for travel to meet the birth mother and travel for the birth of our child (air fare + hotel + food); how much $ depends on where the birth mother lives
• $500-1000 (hospital fees; shared with the birth mothers insurance so this one could head north of $1k)

What we will do is let you know as things are due AND, as they come closer, we'll let you know as specific a number as we can (ex: when our birth mother picks us, we can start working on lawyer fees and other legal costs based on that state). So, our next big number is $7,800 due to our adoption agency; once we've arranged for that payment our clock will start - our adoption coordinator will start introducing us to birth moms.

So, there you go. IF you would like to assist in any financial way, you can:
1) write a check (email Wayne - wayne.rivercross@gmail.com) for our address
2) if you have the iPhone/Android app 'Venmo', you can use that (if you don't have Venmo but are interested, it's very simple: download the Venmo app, put your banking information into their very secure system, add Wayne Patterson - the one with a picture of Bethany and I as the profile picture - and add friend; if you have any questions, fire away!)
3) we will have a PayPal payment button on the blog very soon

We will keep you updated with a running count of where we are at with fundraising and what is coming up next financially in our journey. 

Any questions? Surely you have questions, right? Ask away! We love you all dearly.

By His grace, for His glory,

Wayne and Bethany