The In-Between

Hello friends and family!

Here is a post just to say we are still here, and we are still kicking away at this adoption thing, along with a lot of other things:

 A quick note on adoption: we are in the end stages of our home study and then will be applying to agencies (fingers crossed) sometime in December! We still have fundraising to do, but have raised a little over $10,000 so far!! How absolutely incredible!!  We are still trying to come up with creative ideas for this process. So far, our friends Aaron and Minette put on an amazing poker tournament for us, I am still taking orders for Colorado flags, and of course we are playing our map guessing game! We SO APPRECIATE our friends and family and how they continue to step up.  They have given oh so generously to our adoption!

That being said, I'm going to take a page out of  Jesus Calling by Sarah Young - I was given this devotional by a friend, I had heard of it, but had never read it before.  I am so glad that she placed it in my hands. This is actually the passage from October 27, but it stuck with me:

"As you become increasingly aware of My presence, you find it easier to discern the way you should go. This is one of the practical benefits of living close to Me. Instead of wondering about what is on the road ahead or worrying what you should do if… Or when…., you can concentrate on staying in communication with Me. When you actually arrive at a choice-point, I will show you which direction to go, many people are so preoccupied with future plans and decisions that they fail to see choices they  need to make today. Without any conscious awareness , they make their habitual responses. People who live this way find a dullness creeping into their lives.They  sleepwalk through their days, following well-worn paths of routine. I, the Creator of the universe, am the most creative being imaginable. I will not leave you circling in deeply rutted paths.Instead, I will lead you along fresh trails of adventure, revealing to you things you did not know. Stay in communication with Me. Follow My guiding presence.

Psalm 32:8; Genesis 1:1"  - Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

With all of the excitement happening around us, I find myself being thankful for future blessings and sometimes forgetting the moment I'm standing in. This feeling has let a level of dullness and frustration with the current day creep right in. I needed this reminder we are led on fresh trails of adventure each and everyday when we stay in focus of God's purpose and promises. I hope it can be an encouragement to you, too! 

Now, can you believe it's November? Wowzers! I swear my friends just had babies last week not this spring and summer, Andy just started school, he couldn't possibly have already taken midterms, and I just started working at SF again a couple months ago so I shouldn't be coming up on a one year anniversary here!

Cheers to the last two months of one amazing year- here's to making it count! 

Andy and Mimi 

Here are a few of our favorite photos over the last month :) 

Murder Mystery Party at our house

Andy performs his first wedding ceremony and marries our neighbors!

Poker Fun with Minette & Aaron

Practice makes perfect? I think these babies are just forgetting to smile :)

My Lovely sister visiting 

A little Zombie fun...

Pity-Patter of My Heart

Sometimes   All of the time, things don't go how I plan. I'm an optimist with a realists vision. Because of this, the past couple of weeks it's been easy to tell myself that the money for adoption is coming and will come and that people will respond in their own right and on their own time. Heck I'm always the last to actually follow through on something but the optimist in me was slightly crushed. It was hard waiting for things to happen. My imaginative hope was that this money would be raised in a matter of days and we could focus on things like planning a nursery, other adoption to do's, and general baby excitement was quickly put to rest.  In fact, in my worse moments I wanted to proclaim this;

Don't get me wrong-- there were completely brilliant moments. Friends and family have given generously, people that we don't know or haven't spoken with in years have also donated to our adoption fund. I've been beyond humbled by the unselfish amounts people have given and the incredibly sweet words they have shared with us.


But those first few days after we made our initial fundraising post were somewhat brutal and God used them to have me turn towards Him once more. The book My Upmost for His Highest laid out the sin that was happening in my heart quite well;

"If we give way to self-pity and indulge in the luxury of misery, we remove God’s riches from our lives and hinder others from entering into His provision. No sin is worse than the sin of self-pity, because it removes God from the throne of our lives, replacing Him with our own self-interests. It causes us to open our mouths only to complain, and we simply become spiritual sponges— always absorbing, never giving, and never being satisfied. And there is nothing lovely or generous about our lives."

God reminded me that it will be His provision that gets us through this. Not my terrible planning. Not my ideas. Not my vision. It is His will, His plan, and His timing. Since I've been so gently reminded of this (no tantrum whatsoever or feelings of utter loss) an amazing thing has happened. More people have stepped up, God has moved people to do big, amazing things for us, and I have not just seen, but felt His provision. I'm no longer focused on the blurry path in front of me. 2 Corinthinas 9:8  is a reminder of the promise and good work that I feel right now:

"God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you’re ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist puts it,

He throws caution to the winds,

    giving to the needy in reckless abandon.

His right-living, right-giving ways

    never run out, never wear out.

This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God."

So to end this post let me just put this out in the bloggesphere;  

for your response, your prayers, your time, your commitment, your hope, your resources, your encouragement, and your love. It truly means the world.  And I promise, no more pity parties, I hope. :) 

Blinded by the Light

Dear Online Fans,

We haven't spoken in a long time-- like over a year, what happened? I thought this was going to be an ongoing relationship- why did you fail me? I need you more than you need me and I think you knew that and you took advantage of the situation-- I'm not saying I'm going to hold it against you I'm just saying I know. So let's move on....

The small stuff is the big stuff really so let me start by saying, I got new glasses.

Impressed?  I was-- by the clear crisp lines of the world. Seriously, faces have expressions, signs have words, and most importantly, roads have lines. Truly the world is a new place. And because I can't just appreciate something at face value I started thinking about the symbolism behind seeing things (very literally) clearly.

 I'm lucky enough to be able to afford an eye exam and a hot new pair frames and it still took me roughly four years to get myself to make the switch-- and because of my birth lottery ('Merica/1st world country) I knew that blurry vision could easily be corrected and that the world wasn't supposed to move in blob like shapes. So what's the flip side to that? What if where you were born wasn't privileged to Lenscrafters and no one ever checked your eyes and you always thought that things were blurry five feet from your face and that's just how the world looked. Would it change how you thought of things; of beauty? of precision? of correlation? of fear?  I don't even really have that big of an impairment -- and I have access to like three Lenscrafters-- and yet each of these things looked differently through my new lenses. You can imagine how beauty might change if you can't see the creases on your face or how I was more fearful when driving because I could never really see the road ahead.

*Run on sentence warning ahead. ----There is also that whole thought of how do we instigate peace with the world when what we think we are presenting is peace because that is what we see it as but the other side is looking through their own lens and what we show them as peace doesn't look anything like peace and so they counter offer with their vision of peace and to us that looks nothing like peace because we have our own glasses on so we argue and fight instead of trying to put on each others glasses. But that is a whole other story.

But what I have is today, so I celebrate the details in God's creation -- because today I can see them.

With laughter and joy,

Mimi


**Author note-- I've changed the name of my blog and the web address. Although the Salonen's have many adventures --setbacks in life tend to have the better story-- at least that's how my life plays out :) So update your book marks -- haha --wait I mean bookmark this page and follow me.
www.ourtemporarysetbacks.blogspot.com