Julie and I continue to marvel at the support of our friends and even strangers when it comes to the adoption of our “Andrew” from Uganda. Dozens of you wore your Hope T-shirt last month as a show support. As result 50 more people bought a T-shirt and others gave financially to help us reach our funding goal.
Currently we are around $5000 away from our total funding goal. The finances of our adoption honestly seemed insurmountable to me a year ago. God has truly been faithful.
This weekend we had a conference call with our adoption agency and got some updates in regards to our referral process. One of the challenges in adopting in an African country like Uganda is the fight against human trafficking and child exploitation. The rise in families being willing to adopt orphans has also created a rise in criminal exploitation and abuse of adoption. Evil is real. As a result our adoption agency has had to spend extra time and resources in the orphan investigations and reviews. It’s hard to imagine, but traffickers will steal children and pass them off as orphans for money. That is not adoption. It’s kidnapping and child-abuse. To combat this our agency is stepped up its efforts to provide even more thorough investigations to ensure ethical adoptions are taking place.
This along with some other factors has made a spring adoption referral unlikely for us. We are still hoping and praying for summer or fall of 2014. We’re disappointed, but are also learning to wait patiently on the Lord and his timing.
As some of you know I’ve been growing my beard out until our referral came. Frankly, it turned into a wild and woolly sort of thing. With the delay in our adoption timeframe likely I went ahead and showed my wife some love on Valentine’s Day and trimmed it down. She says she wouldn’t mind a “Duck Dynasty” look if it came with Duck Dynasty money! 😉
Thanks for all of your love, support and prayers. We’ll keep you posted!
Hope for Andrew,
Brad, Julie and Rylee
bradraby.com 