Fundraising

So our family has been discussing some big changes as we approach one of the biggest changes of our lives. It is out hearts greatest desire to be godly parents to Mason. He deserves the best, but instead God gave us a chance. One big thing that we can do to help our family is not starting off in a huge debt. We have saved most of the money for the adoption, but needed a bit more. Then I got a facebook message from a Godly friend who God had been talking to. Our friend from small group, Jan, felt God telling her to see how we were doing with finances for the adoption. She mentioned that her family was doing some remodeling, and would be willing to donate things for a yard sale. Yard Sale, seems pretty simple and efficient. Yet the idea had escaped me until she mentioned it. So we headed over last Saturday to pick some things up...instead we got a 2 car garage filled with a blessing. Everything that you could imagine was there for us. And the best part was still to come. I didn't know how I could ever thank this family enough...but it was Jan who thought I was doing her a favor. That is when you know you have a Godly friend, when you view blessing others as the prize. She wanted nothing in return, just to help make our adoption a reality. I am constantly forced to take a step back and saw "WOW GOD, you really amazed me this time". And He keeps doing it.

So tomorrow, Saturday 19, 2011 we are hosting the world's biggest Yard Sale at grandmas house. All of our families have emptied their houses of anything extra for this event. The blessings keep coming. Mason is such a lucky child and he doesn't even realize it yet. So many people are waiting to love him in person. He is already so loved in spirit.

Of PCs and Parachutes

by Reid Hottel

I’ve learned a lot this past week, and I’d like to share a little bit of my enlightenment with you. Last week, after sitting through an amazing sermon by J.D. Greer at the Summit Church in Raleigh, NC I was convicted of what I like to call “spiritual laziness”.

What is spiritual laziness? I’m glad you asked. I define spiritual laziness as becoming an armchair Christian and refusing to answer a call on your life. The Christian life was never meant to be lived vicariously through other people or, even worse, vicariously through Biblical stories we simply read about. I have no doubt that God calls every single Christian to a great adventure. Jesus commanded us all to “go”.

“Go” implies movement, it implies action, it necessitates removing ones buttocks from ones couch and putting one foot in front of the other. Everyone’s adventure will look different, but everyone is called to a great adventure for God. Your adventure may be raising a godly family while my adventure may be backpacking through the Himalayas to find a long lost village to reach out to. Neither is greater than the other.

But do I really believe that?

Back to the story: so I was convicted of “spiritual laziness” in my life. I looked at what I prioritized in my life, and found that technology was far more important to me than God. My god had over 1000 channels, many in HD; it had shiny buttons, and controllers that let me play games with my friends. My god was technology and I worshipped it every day for hours upon end. Lauren and I would just sit and space-out in front of the TV. It was always on; even when we didn’t have anything in particular we were watching. The time we spent together as a couple, was spent in front of the TV. The time I spent with my friends was spent via an avatar shooting virtual bullets at their virtual faces.

My time with God? Relegated to 10 minutes in the morning. My time with TV? Only a measly 6 hours a day, which isn’t hardly enough to catch up on my shows.

How lazy is that? Zoning out on my couch in front of a TV instead of seeking Kingdom growth in my marriage, family, friendship, or community.

So, after being convicted during the sermon, and after receiving quite an ingenious idea from my wife, I decided to partake in a technology fast. Technology was what my life had begun to revolve around, so it was the perfect thing to eliminate to help me re-center. Only for a week, and not from the actual “phone call” portion of my cell phone, I would fast from technology and give that time back to God in some way shape or form.

It wasn’t easy.

My goal was 3 fold: Refocus on God, refocus on my wife and our adoption process, and refocus on my calling and project from God.

All three tasks went great during the week. With plenty of time on my hands we were able to reconnect together as a couple, hung out with good friends face to face and not online, work on our adoption stuff, and even get started on a God-project I’ve been neglecting. As of Saturday I would have considered my fast a success, and it was to end on Sunday. Good for Reid, right?

Wrong. J.D. Greer dropped another bombshell sermon straight onto my pile of spiritual accomplishments and decimated them to the ground. He preached out of Psalm 51 where David is pleading to God for forgiveness in the most contrite and humble fashion possible. David cries out that God’s mercy, and God’s mercy alone, is what he rests in for his forgiveness, not anything he is capable of himself. He simply has to rely on God’s promise, and that is enough.

This finalized for me exactly what it was that I was supposed to learn from my technology fast: reliance on God.

Yes, I had been spiritually lazy in my neglect for my personal and family’s spiritual growth and my neglect of doing what I’ve been called to do… but more so I’ve been spiritually lazy in my reliance on God.

Let me break it down for you:

When Lauren and I travel abroad for missions, or really do anything for missions at all, we have a total reliance on God. We call it our “God Parachute”. For some reason we crave the adventure God calls us to where we have to cast aside our personal holdups and fears and totally rely on God. We desire to take a step forward, a potentially costly leap of faith. It comes easy for us to rely fully on God when we find ourselves in a country whose language we do not speak, amongst people we do not know, trying to find a bus we don’t have tickets to, to takes us to an airport we can’t pronounce. In utter disarray, Lauren and I find ourselves excelling at our reliance on God. If you take us out of our comfort zone, we shine.

But what about when we’re in our comfort zone? When we are in our carefully built castle that we have worked with our own hands to afford and create, do we rely on God just as fully? No, we don’t. We rely on a bank account, or a budget, or a well-executed plan. We rely on stability in our jobs and future retirement benefits. We rely on everything a middle class family typically relies on and we forget to rely fully on God in the normal stuff. We become spiritually lazy, forgetting to trust in God to provide for our daily bread, because we have enough in the bank to buy a bread-maker.

So I find myself standing again on a precipice. I know I have a great adventure coming up of flying to Russia in the hopes of rescuing an orphaned child and bringing him home to a loving family. I know I will rely on God to help provide the money we don’t have, to travel to a country with recent bombings, to catch a train we can’t find, to a city we’ve never been, to convince a judge who doesn’t speak our language that we’re worthy of taking on the job of being parents that we’ve never done before. No sweat.

The precipice I stand on rests on the edge of living a comfortable middle-class life, or jumping into the unknown to follow an awesome God in the everyday. To put on my “God parachute” in my suburban home and lead a family in a radical culture-defying way, and take a leap out of a comfort zone. I’ve climbed the Himalayas, now can I raise this family? I have no idea what it looks like, but it will be a great adventure.

I love my momma

One of my motivating factors lately has been to strengthen my spiritual walk with Christ. I wonder this because I want to make sure that Reid and I are spiritually ready to raise a child up as Christ commands us to. It is easy to look at a bank account and see how you are doing financially, your spouse will let you know if they are getting what they need from you; but a child can't let you know if you have been a Godly example, if they feel love and protected in your arms, or if what you have taught them is going to carry them through tough times. The more I think about what I want to do with my child and how I want them to end up, I am humbled by my own mother's love.

Now we could argue about this all day, but you can't change my mind that I have the BEST mommy. I always joked with her that I feel like I turned out pretty good, so she can raise my children so I can be proud of them. The responsibility used to scare me that my decisions on love, discipline, and being a Godly example all rested on our shoulders to mold this little person. I guess I feel that responsibility even more now that we are adopting. I am going to get a child to raise, under the idea that we can give them a better life. That is easy as far as material things, they were sharing a crib with 3 other babies and now they have their own, they have clean new clothes, and they have all the food they could want to eat. As far as emotionally they will have Reid and I to wholly focus on them rather than waiting their turn for their babushkas. But the hard part is how do you make sure your child is getting the spiritual aspects?

I can take Mason to church everyday they are open, we can read our devotions before we go to bed at night, and Reid and I can tell them all of the right things. Unfortunately, this is when I have to remember my own conversion experience and how much my mom was a part of that. I had to hear about God and accept him on my own. My mom gave me the tools by talking about God to me so that I probably understood salvation earlier. She had me at church so that Pastor Gurley could share the gospel message with me. She showed me how a Christian was supposed to act though most importantly. My mom didn't flaunt her Christianity as though it were a show, rather I would catch her reading her bible every day. I still interrupt her every morning during her devotions when I call her "just to talk", just as I did in person when I was a kid. My mom also taught me about being fruitful. She is the kindest and most loving woman in the world and she treated everyone like that. Even in all of my fathers outbursts and hateful things he did, she never spoke down about him to us. She never treated anyone poorly, no matter how bad her day was going, and she never had an unkind word to her children.

As I write this I realize that I never told her how much that she was the reason I became a believer. Pastor Gurley led me to salvation, but my mom spent her whole life leading me to the cross. That is the kind of mom that I want to be.

And even now she still continues to amaze me. Reid and I wondered how our parents would feel when we told them that we didn't plan to have any children biologically, but rather we wanted to adopt. My mom was ECSTATIC! She had her grandma name picked out already...FYI, the shall henceforth be known to all grandkids as GIGI-the cool grandma! But once again, my mom doesn't just talk the talk, she walks the walk. When I came to her crying one day about how the Ukraine was closing, and the other programs were too expensive, she informed me that she had started saving for our adoption the day we told her about our desire to adopt. Her additional funds were the difference we needed to do the Russia program. And she did this because she was listening to God, which knowing that her generosity is an outflowing of her love and closeness with our Creator makes the gift that much better.

And did I mention that she is there for me to talk to about this whole process and encourage us along the way. My mom is the best about letting me talk forever about everything and everything, but she will call me on spiritual trust issues. She will speak scripture over me and talk with me about trusting God to provide, or just to realize how he already has. She continues to lead me back to the cross with every chance that she gets. She pretty much rocks--basically!

And now the newest pictures of the nursery. Not only is she helping fund the adoption, but she has also painted his nursery. Officially one corner is done!

So many steps towards Mason

I think that I have become a genius in regards to filling out paperwork over the last few months. Honestly our taxes seem easy after the multitude of forms, contracts, and applications we have filled out. On Tuesday I had an adventure towards finishing our paperwork. Reid and I had our diagnostic scans completed for our USCIS approval (because everyone knows what that is). For an adoption, you have to apply to the US Immigration and be approved before you can adopt and this was our last step in completing that. It is a fingerprinting process for a federal background check. Luckily for us, Reid walked in a few minutes late, right as they were opening the room we needed to go to. My husband is the luckiest man in the world, so they just sent him to the front of the line ahead of those sitting in the waiting room. I guess they liked him because they let me go to the front of the line as well. We were in and out in 13 minutes.

Next I headed to Hillsborough to get copies of our marriage certificate. I am always baffled at how much that town changes each time I go back. All of the offices had been moved to the Weaver Street Market. But having a regular entrance is reserved for the Whole Foods. If you want to do government business, then you have to enter through the back of the building...it felt as shady as it seems. In the back entrance is a single elevator that goes up to the government building offices. Felt kind of like MIB.

Then I was back to Raleigh to mail off our first payment to About-A-Child and our signed contract.

The ladies at the post office were so sweet to take this photo for me. Someone clocked and and came to the side so that they didn't break any rules. It is amazing how many people light up when you talk to them about adoption. I do wish that I had more courage in sharing about why we are adopting and about how God adopted us into His family when we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

Well our last update deals with our financials. I am very happy to say that Reid and I have saved over $20,000 towards Mason's adoption. This will cover all of our agency expenses as well as some travel. We have finally come to the realization that we need to let our friends and family know how they can help. We borrowed this great idea from a family that is adopting from The Summit as well. We have found a beautiful puzzle with a scene of Russia at night.

The concept is that people buy pieces of this puzzle for $10 each piece. We will write each persons name on the back of each piece that they buy. Then Mason will be able to see all of the people who helped to bring him home. We will display this print in our house for everyone to see and to remind us of everyone who helped us make our dream of bringing this little boy home a reality. We tried to make the process as simple as possible. We have set up a PayPal account so that people can feel safe about their finances. You can get as many or as few of the puzzle pieces as you like to help us reach our goal. We will also try and update everyone about the progress of the fundraiser.

Thank you in advance for your love and support. It has meant the world to us to receive the encouragement that you all have poured out to us. You never realize how many people love you until the outpouring of love comes your way. We are truly grateful for each of you!

My Little Gorky

We heard from our agency about where our son would be coming from. In Russia, there are a few regions that allow independent adoptions. Mason will be from Nizhni Novgorod, a very historic Russian city. A few weeks ago we went from not knowing what country Mason would be from to knowing the exact city. This is also good news because since he will be in such a modern area, the chances of him receiving better care may increase.

The other amazing news is that we got our home study back today. Now we can send it off to the USCIS and get our official approval from the US government. Once we get this last piece we are done with our dossier preparation and headed over to Russia.

Mason Arthur Hottel

I was shocked to see that I had actually started a blog quite a while back and the topic was about our desire to adopt. Well a lot of progress has been made towards making that dream into a reality. On Father's Day 2010, Reid and I attended The Summit Church in Brier Creek. The topic was adoption from Pastor Trevor. Reid and I went back to our vehicle after the sermon and looked at each other and started to pour our hearts out to each other about what God had been revealing to us through the sermon. We knew we were ready to start our adoption. We researched countries and fell in love with the Ukraine. They would allow us to adopt without an agency, which means raising half as much money. Little did we know that God was leading us through a process, but had a country still to reveal to us. We started the paperwork for the USCIS, found a social worker to conduct our homestudy, and started researching facilitators. God was growing us through the whole experience.

Once we finally found our facilitator, this week we were faced with some bad news. The Ukraine's goverment is trying to close the country to adoptions. The facilitator did have some hope for us though. Russia has a few cities that allow independant adoptions still. We would be eligable to get a younger child and maybe sooner than 6 months. The way independent adoptions work in Russia is that the couple has to submit their request in person, then wait for a week to see if there are any matching referrals. If there are we meet Mason and then go home as the paperwork is processes. If not, we go on the waiting list for an appointment a few months later. Clearly my desire would be that after we submit our application we would be able to find Mason and start the process. We would go home for a month and then come back to Russia to pick up our son. I originally didn't think that I would be able to last a month for the inbetween, but after having the fear of the adoption fallen through, I think I can handle the month.

When we first found out that Ukraine was closing I felt like I had lost my baby. But the more I talked with Reid and mommy I realized that God had broughten us to a certain point, and was now revealing the rest of His plan to us. I tend to fill in the blanks for God so that I have a complete plan to look at. But He doesn't need my help. He can actually handle this on His own. We were looking for Mason in the wrong place, my son is waiting for me still. I wonder if this kid will rock at hide and seek, because this adoption so far has felt like a giant game of it thus far.

On a side note, my mom is gonna be the best grandma ever. When I shared with her that the adoption has now going to be much more expensive and that we may have to postpone for a few years she revealed to me that she had actually been saving for our adoption as well. I was blown away by her love not only for me, but for my son Mason as well. She is gonna be a great Gigi. I cried so much last night just thinking about how she teaches me so much about God's love and provision through her love and through the way she listens to Christ's leadings.

So right now we are in limbo. We are waiting to see if the Ukraine is closed for sure first, but are starting making plans for Russia. We are preparing our dossier for both countries in the inbetween time and across the holidays. After January and we do our taxes, we will hopefully have enough money to go to Russia. Mason we are coming for you my little man. I don't know you yet, but I love you so much already!

Adoption

So last week Reid and I looked at our finances (or Reid looked at and updated me) and realized that with Reid's promotion, that we will be debt free in like 2 months. That is a major blessing because our finances are the biggest worry for Reid since he sees all of the good and bad cases at the bank. Well, with this great news came the talk about kids, but this time Reid brought it up. He told me that with our financial situation the way it is, we would be financially prepared to have kids earlier than projected (as financially prepared as you can be).
Reid said that if I was ready, that we could go ahead and put our names on a list to adopt. I was overjoyed. This has been something that we are both very passionate about. After going to China and seeing the kids there, especially Angela, we have wanted to adopt a Chinese daughter. We plan on having a child naturally as well, but wanted to take care of a child born into this world without a family. Reid had a customer who gave us the name of a Christian adoption agency that they had gotten their daughter through. The only downside is that Chinese law does not allow adoption to anyone under the age of 30. This puts a kink in our plans. We have contacted CCIA to see if this rule has an exception, but no word yet.
Sometimes I get frustrated that people who make the right decisions at a young age are penalized by the ones who make stupid decisions. Since there aren't many adults at 25 who have settled down and started a family, we have our hands tied due to the majority. Same reason I am old enough to lead the Children's programs at church, but not old enough to drive church vehicles due to insurance.