Change part 3

I promise all these posts are leading up to something :)  However sometimes I think people need to know the whole story to really understand things.  I see it a lot when we are in community or church or any other human gathering spot.  We hear things and learn about things and our own experiences, bias or lack of experience tends to skew our view of the situation, but once people open up and share their life and heart with others suddenly we see them and their situations in totally new ways.  So with that said.....

Randy and I got married in 1999.  We moved into our first apartment.  During the next 5 years we celebrated the birth of our son, a little preemie due to more pregnancy complications. We bought our first house, a scary old haunted house :)  We lost Randy's mother to alcohol related disease, we lost my mother to cancer, we moved another 2 times and thanks to my brother I found my faith.  By this point we were fumbling through growing up.  However we had a great support system of family and friends. When we lost our mothers, we never felt alone as those we loved surrounded us, and we always had each other.  For the first time in Randy's life when things got hard people stuck it out and our family stayed together.  We learned how life isn't meant to be done alone.  I needed him as much as he needed me.  Sure we could have done OK on our own, but we accomplished and enjoyed so much more because we combined our life, skills and experience and worked together.  

In the early 2000s we moved to Midland, TX....such a huge culture shock!! During this time Randy found his faith too.  For many years I knew I could have no more children, but I still had a burning desire to be a mother to many.  I had talked adoption and Randy had not thought it was a good idea. We had 2 awesome kids, life was just starting to get a little easier.  We still had financial struggles and he did not want think it was a good time to consider it.  In 2005 he came to me and said I have been being selfish, I think we should adopt.  I pretty much had him sign the papers the next morning :)  We began the process to adopt with a small amount of savings and huge amount of faith.  We decided to adopt 1 newborn.  In January of 2006 we got a call from our agency and learned about our 2 girls.  They said this never happens as we only place newborns, but we have 2 toddler sisters that are already in our foster care home, would you be interested. One moment to stick to our "plan" of a newborn.  One moment to decide if 2 girls should remain another week or longer in foster care.  One decision to the change the entire future for them and for us.  So we became a family of 6.  It was not a hard decision, once we looked at the 2 sweet girls in the referrel picture and saw 2 babies (they were 2 and 1) we knew that they were ours.  I think a big issue for people is we don't take time to look at faces.  Randy saw in my face the desperate desire to be a mother, it was what I felt like I was created to do.  We both looked at the sweet faces of our little girls and our "newborn plan" was instantly replaced with this new journey.  It is easy to pretend things are not our responsibility as other humans for things we do not cause, as long as we don't see the faces or meet the people involved.  Those who look into the faces of people who are desperately in need  feel compelled to respond.