Today’s Friday Favorite is a fun bonus for readers!
Anyone who pre-orders Wishing on Willows will receive seven devotionals.
Each one touches on an important theme in the novel.
Each one includes a small snippet from the book.
I hope they leave you blessed and encouraged!
To download your copy, click on this link and fill in the requested information. My publisher will send you the download via email.
Let’s Talk: What’s one of your favorites from the week?
Adoption can be a wonderful beautiful amazing thing.
But it’s also messy and complicated and risky and not quite so black-and-white as I originally supposed.
World has orphans. Orphans need families. Families adopt orphans.
Sounds nice and tidy, but oh is it ever-lovin’ not.
Before I jump into an explanation, let me share a non-update update.
I haven’t blogged about our adoption lately.
Mainly because for a long while there, nothing was happening.
Well, that has changed.
I can absolutely say that things are happening. A big decision was made and we’re moving forward with a strange mixture of caution and eagerness.
I promise that as soon as I can be less cryptic and more specific (hey, that kinda rhymes), I will. As soon as I have something I can share, I will gladly shout it from the rooftops.
Until then, I’ll say this:
We’ve learned so much. Our brains are water-logged with all the learning.
We’ve seen the sticky, rarely-talked-about underbelly of adoption, especially from impoverished countries like Congo. We’ve learned that the greater the need in a country, the greater the risk for corruption. Which should give you a hint at what we’re up against. DRC is one of the poorest nations in the world. It is a war-torn country ravaged by AIDS and poverty that has resulted in an orphan crisis that is most grievous.
Yet I wouldn’t encourage anyone to adopt from there until they’ve done much praying and are willing to do much research.
How does that work?
If there’s an excess of orphans, let’s hurry up and adopt them, right?
Well, not quite.
There are orphans who will never have a family unless they are adopted. In which case, go adoption!
But then there are orphans who already have a family. A family who wants to raise them, but can’t feed them, so they end up in orphanages that can feed them. Orphans like the ones mentioned in this post.
Many orphans in Congo fall into that second category. They don’t need a new family. They need assistance reuniting with the one they already have.
Yet there are agencies and lawyers in country who have turned a blind eye to the corruption, to the fraudulent papers, to the lack of investigations done to ensure that the children being adopted should actually be adopted. Which is exactly why the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasha is now requiring an additional 3-6 month investigation before they will issue any Visas. They are trying to clean up the mess these agencies and lawyers left behind.
So what do we do with this information?
For us, it meant reconsidering everything. We tossed around domestic infant adoption, foster care, trying to conceive on our own, changing countries, stopping altogether.
But the more we prayed and fasted and sought guidance, the more our hearts kept landing where we originally began.
The DRC.
Only this time we come armed with knowledge we didn’t have in the beginning. And knowledge is power, right?
Right.
So we’re going to wield that power. We’re going to use it to help us do all we can to make sure we’re not somehow adding to the corruption in the country. To make sure we’re doing everything possible to navigate an ethical adoption.
This means asking the tough, uncomfortable questions. This means taking extra precautions – like a third party investigation. This means checking my emotions at the door, because my mama heart yearns to race headlong with eyes and ears shut tight. This means being on our knees, praying for God’s best and God’s truth.
This means TRUST. Oh, heaven, trust.
It means surrendering all my fears to a God who knows everything–not just my past, present, and future, but our child’s past, present, and future too.
Come what may, He’s got a plan and a purpose for having the Gansherts on such a crazy, nutty, eye-opening journey. To Him be the glory.
Now, If you’d like to help we crazy, nutty, open-eyed Gansherts travel such a journey, then please hop on over to our Adoption Fundraising Blog.
Because it’s big-time time for another fundraiser. One that I am totally, completely psyched about. It involves a puzzle, a sharpie, and 500 willing hearts. I get teary just thinking about what a testament the end-product will be to our little one someday. We’re also selling t-shirts and hosting an online Tastefully Simple event! So come on over, read the details, and know that we covet your support and your prayer.
All donations are tax-deductible, thanks to Lifesong for Orphans!
Let’s Talk: Have your eyes ever been opened to something you had no clue about before?
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
~Micah 6:8
“I’ve learned two things. First, authors who write books as an avocation just to have fun or tell people they’re published rarely succeed. Secondly, authors who write books as a vocation and take their work seriously usually achieve their goals.”
~Rob Eager, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire
I had a rather obvious, albeit profound epiphany recently.
I am not a stay-at-home mother.
I am a work-at-home mother.
Now, in defense of stay-at-home mother’s everywhere, I am not at all trying to imply that stay-at-home mothers are not working their tails off. Raising children and taking care of a home is incredibly hard work.
What I am saying is that I have a job outside of raising my child and taking care of my house.
I’m a writer.
Right about now, some of you might be thinking, “Um….yeah. You’re just realizing this?”
Not so much realizing as having an attitude shift.
Let me explain.
Two years ago, I was a writer still riding the high of signing my first contract. I was a wife, a mother of a two and a half year old boy, and a full-time 5th grade teacher. The idea of staying home full time to be with my son and write? Heav. En.
So when that idea became a reality, I had all these grand dreams. Of play dates and Bible studies and an immaculate house and my husband NEVER having to do another load of laundry again and writing two books a year. I mean, seriously. I was writing almost two books a year when I was teaching full time. So there was no reason I shouldn’t be able to now that I didn’t have a day job.
Um….
First, staying at home with a child or multiple children while running a household is a full time job in and of itself.
Second, something happens when you make that transition from uncontracted author to contracted author.
There are SO many things that creep their way onto your plate that were not there before.
Not just marketing and publicity stuff (although that in and of itself could be a full time job if you let it, for real), but edits and proposals and deadlines and….oh yeah…writing.
It’s taken me a year and a half to finally realize that the time I need to write and reach my goals and build a career will not just naturally work itself out.
I need to treat this like a bona fide job with bona fide hours and I need to protect those hours.
This is how the epiphany came about:
Over the summer, I kept thinking, “Man, once I get these content edits done, I will finally have a break.”
But then immediately following content edits I got line edits and I started thinking, “Once I get line edits done, I will finally have a break.”
But then line edits finished and I had some additional bigger edits and then I needed to write seven devotionals for a promotional thing and then I needed to get two proposals finished and then I had copy edits for Willows in my inbox and that’s when I realized….
That break isn’t coming.
This is a job.
Granted, an amazingly awesome job. But a job.
And for the sake of my sanity and my husband’s sanity and my son’s well being, I need to treat it as such.
So Ryan and I sat down and we wrote up my work schedule. Those working hours are blocks of protected time. I won’t schedule play dates or time with girlfriends during these block. I won’t answer my cell phone (as if I do anyway). I won’t dink around on Pinterest or Facebook (unless it’s for marketing). Ryan will take care of Brogan.
I will either be in my office or at the library, doing writing-related things.
The schedule is posted on our refrigerator.
Now, if a friend calls and wants to get together during one of these times, I simply say, “I’m working then. But how about….(insert a non-working time here).”
Let me tell you, I’m wondering why in the world I didn’t do this a year and a half ago.
Let’s Talk: Are you a fan of scheduling things into your day, or do you prefer to wing it?