10 Posts in 10 Days turned into 3 Posts in 3 Days.

The days leading up to my departure for China were full of last-minute drug store runs and moments of freaking out about what I was about to do. I didn’t know on February 20 I would be leaving for China in less than 3 months.

February 21 came and I read an email referencing this post on our adoption agency’s blog. They had an urgent need for more team members for an upcoming mission trip. Our agency has a mission-sending aim in addition to helping families adopt children from several countries including China, where we found four of our children waiting for a family!

I read the excerpt from the blog post in that email and it was like I knew. I didn’t really dismiss the prompting I felt, but I did wonder how in the world would I go to China and the logistics of all of it. I sent an email that night to the email link not really knowing for sure who would receive it. As it turns out, a lady, who had followed our journey to our first daughter in 2008 and is an adoptive parent herself, is now working for our adoption agency to coordinate all the China mission trips. She emailed me back that evening with answers to two specific questions I asked.

In her email back to me, two things she said stood out:

The purpose of this trip is simply to serve wherever we are needed in this orphanage.  Because we have not been able to work in this specific orphanage, we are not exactly sure what the needs are of this orphanage.

We will need to decide if this trip is a GO or not in the next week, or less.

OK. Breathe I told myself. A week or less? Serve where needed. I can definitely do that I thought, though the emotions and depth of that service proved to be one of the hardest and most rewarding five days of my life thus far. Continue reading →