An update after over TWO  YEARS….

Have you ever felt the Lord’s leading, direction, blessing and guidance in a certain area of life and you go towards that dream with full hope and peace only to find that it isn’t going to happen the way you “thought” it would?  That is the spot that Ben and I landed early last fall with our hopes of adopting from Ethiopia.

In 2013 we started the process of adopting a little girl from Ethiopia with the time frame of 1.5-2 years being clearly formulated in our hearts and minds. We finished a large amount of paperwork and had our home study completed with two small boys running around at our feet and began to pay the first ½ of our adoption fees, which was around $25,000.   Valentines day: February 14th, 2014 our dossier made it to Ethiopia and we officially began waiting! We were hopeful and excited.

Even when our agency contacted us and told us our wait would be extended by another year, making it a total of 3 years, we still held on to the hope that the adoption of our little girl was going to happen. In the meantime, while we waited for our daughter from Ethiopia, the Lord blessed us with a daughter and we continued to move forward hoping that Ellie would have a little sister.

Fast forward to 2016, we were still waiting and hopeful but the climate of international adoption really started to change and for the first time in many years, Ethiopia was less open to international adoption. Some of their reasons are rooted correctly: they want their children to be well cared for and loved and they know that it is best to empower their own people socially and economically to be able to have an infrastructure in the family that is strong enough to raise children and thus decreasing the need for international adoption. Nonetheless, right reasons and wrong, it became clear to Ben and I that an Ethiopian adoption of a baby girl was not going to take place for our family. Our hearts were sad and we prayed that the Lord would show us yet again what He wanted.

We were quickly reminded that time obeying God is not wasted, that if He leads and scripture supports then our job as His children, is to obey, even if that doesn’t always make sense to us. We continued to talk to our social worker and ask for guidance and ask the Lord if maybe our family of five was complete.

Time and time again, both Ben and I and even our boys affirmed that the Lord still had adoption firmly placed on our hearts. So from this still burning flame, we began looking at different agencies. DHS and Indian Welfare Services were options we checked into thoroughly.  However with the unpredictability of those agencies and the likelihood that we may have numerous children in and out of our home before one became a permanent part of our family made both Ben and I uneasy. With our oldest having his own adoption story, we wanted to make sure and guard his heart and mind while he formulates his understanding and identity of who he is in Christ, and our family, and we felt that multiple children in and out of our home may complicate that.

Also, another prayer we had was for the birth mother of our child. We wanted an agency that would be a loving source of hope and care for our birth mother. As we prayed, we had a few acquaintances that had used an agency in Oklahoma City called Lilyfied and had noted some great experiences. We touched base with them last October and continued to pray.

Fast forward again to this year, September of 2017, Ben and I had our first face-to-face meeting with the agency and we loved many things about this group. They, first and foremost, love Jesus and secondly they love the family and all children and mothers. Their goal is to support and love birth moms before, during and after the adoption of their child and to offer children Christian homes, where they will be raised to love God and others. We were excited!

We filled out the paperwork and sent in our application and on October 4th we received the call and were officially accepted into their program! We told the boys that night and captured their expressions when we said that God was going to give us a little sister or brother and they were and are so excited! Ellie, well ,her world will be rocked. J

As we move forward, we have a stack of paperwork and fingerprints and references and home studies to complete and it is overwhelming and exciting. We are excited that the Lord is yet again, leading us to add to our family. Some days this parenting gig and raising small humans to love God and others is overwhelming and character building, but we know there is nothing sweeter or better than this and we are blessed to love these children.

Would you please continue to pray for us. Pray for international adoption and the families that are stuck in the wait.  Pray for our birth mom and our future child and our family as we prepare for the months ahead.

Lilyfield informed us that once our profile goes live, some families have waited 18 months, while others have waited 2 weeks. We know God has a heart for adoption and we want to join Him there.

Would you please also pray for us as we begin to put the pieces together to finance another adoption. We know the Lord will write this detail of our story as well and look forward to His authorship.

We are excited and hopeful, yet again, as we look towards the future and to what God has in store for our family.

God is good.

Celebrating One Year of waiting on our Girl!

~ A few days late,  but in celebration of our dossier being in Ethiopia for one year, we are starting a fund raiser as we begin saving and paying for the 2^nd half of our adoption (around $20,000) of our little girl Zoey.

February 14^th, 2015

It’s the national day of Love: Valentines Day! How fitting because today marks one year: 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes since we officially started waiting on our girl.

This time last year; February 14, 2014 after much prayer & counsel, we took a step of faith & sent our dossier across the ocean to Ethiopia in the hopes and anticipation that one day we too would be joining in the journey across the ocean to get our little girl.

At that point we were unclear as to what the future would hold.

Our agency, America world informed us that due to multiple cases & circumstances many agencies were pulling out of Ethiopia & thus those agencies were encouraging their families to adopt from other countries. They told us that they did not foresee themselves doing that but it was still unclear.

At that point we had a choice to make. We could choose like many families to switch countries or we could continue to walk forward & see what the Lord had in store. We prayed and fasted and we felt a peace from the Lord to trust and move forward. At that point, we sent our dossier: another word for a document that contains all the nooks and crannies of ones life and family, along with around $10,000 to our agency and then to Eithiopia. To say it was an act relying on the Lord and trusting Him with our journey is an understatement, but when God calls you to something, Ben and I have seen time and again that He will also see you through it.

Adoption is hard! It is character building! But it is HIS heart, and more than anything else, we want our family to be after HIS heart!

So in celebration of our dossier being in Ethiopia for one year & most likely having at least 2-3 more years of waiting, we want to commemorate this BIG day as we wait for our girl.

We want her to know that she was wanted and longed for and anticipated and prayed over and joyfully celebrated long before she became a part of her forever family!

More than that, we want to do what the Lord tells us to in scripture, which is:

Joshua 4:20-24

And those twelve stones, which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up in Gilgal. Then he spoke to the children of Israel, saying: “When your children ask their fathers in time to come saying: What are these stones?” Then you shall let your children know saying, “Israel crossed over as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up before us until we had crossed over that all the people of the earth may know the hand of the Lord that it is mighty that you may fear the Lord your God forever!”

This year we want to commemorate this BIG day with a T-shirt that expresses our celebration and anticipation as we wait for Zoey and secondly, as always, we want to share the Gospel and the Hope that we have in Christ which sustains us and molds us and keeps us as we wait! (which is so not an easy thing to do and we are not very good at) 

T-Shirts will be available in adult sizes all the way down to youth size small: which will fit a 3-4 year old child. The shirts are super soft and they are a fun spring color!

They are available for $20 each. If you need the shirt shipped, we will add on another $4 for shipping.

All funds raised go to our adoption of Miss Zoey.

Ways you can order:

We are doing a PRE-ORDER: This means that I will be taking orders for the next 2-3 weeks and then requesting our first shipment. You can place your order by:

1.        ~ if we do a lot of life together: text or call me and let me know you would like a shirt and what size and pay for the shirt and I will add you to the list J

I will also have a sign up sheet available for those who would like to sign up and pay in person.  

2.        ~ comment below here on the blog or on Facebook or instagram with your email and shirt size and I will send you a PayPal invoice that you can pay online.

3.       ~ email me at els_erin@hotmail.com with your name and size and I can again send an invoice to your email.

4.      ~ Lastly, our mailing address is

Ben & Erin Allred

2 Jarrot Dr.

Shawnee, Ok

74801

Please send us a note with your size(s) and money.

As always, thank you for celebrating with us and supporting us! We look forward to the day when we will have the opportunity to introduce Zoey to all of you! God is good!

A Year and A Day In: God is good ALL the time!

Have you ever wanted something so bad that it hurts at times while waiting to obtain it? Have you ever stopped to ask God if He really thinks you are strong enough to handle all of the “character building”  and “stretching” you feel is going on in your life at a certain time, just to quickly hear Him say “you can take it" because He is holding it ALL right  there with you?

  It can be a very challenging, sometimes hard, dark season of life, when you are in the thick of things but you know what….. He is Faithful!

2 Peter1:3(NIV)

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness.

Today marks a year and a day since we started our adoption process for our baby girl; Zoey.

When we took that picture last August of 2013, after church we were in a very different place than we are this August of 2014. 

We had a “plan” as to how we would finance a $40,000 dollar adoption and we had an “idea” as to a time frame that we could be working within, in which we would be holding our baby girl.

Needless to say, things are not  going  the way we “imagined” they would go, but you know what else…. He is still Faithful!

Isaiah 43:1 (MSG)

But now God’s Message, the God who  made you in the 1^st place, Jacob, the One who got you started Israel: “Don’t be afraid, I’ve redeemed you. I’ve called your Name. You’re mine. When you’re in over your head, Ill be there with you. When you’re between a rock and a hard place, it wont be a dead end- Because I am God, your personal God. The Holy of Israel, the Savior.

We have had many friends and family ask us where we are at in our adoption process and to tell you the truth, I have been hesitant to update the blog because it has been a hard season, but even as we are in the season still, I see His hand and rest in His faithfulness that He is writing this story and not us. And in the end, no mater how it ends, it is His story and we want Him to have all the Glory.

Last August we started our international adoption process with AWAA (hyperlink) & Ethiopia in hopes of it being a 18month to 2 year  process in which the ending would be us holding a precious baby girl.  We moved quite quickly through the paper chase and were able to get finger prints and our home study completed in about 6 – 8 weeks instead of the usual 3-6months. Our agency and social worker are amazing!

It was goosebumpy good to see how fast things were falling into place. 

Also, for the first part of the adoption an initial $5,000 was needed to start and Ben and I were able to  finance that quite quickly.  All in all, August and September were easy months and exciting months as we officially got started.

October came and the “easy” disappeared J

We found out mid October that I was no longer going to hold the position of Family Nurse Practitioner at the primary care clinic that I had grown to love.

Due to budget cuts and other events, my position was being eliminated. We were disappointed, to say the least. When we received the news, we quickly started praying and giving it to God, not knowing what His plan was but knowing He holds it all. My position allowed Ben and I to “finance” the adoption with little to no stress to our budget. We saw it as God’s provision.

I worked two days a week and was able to be home with the boys the rest of the time. It was easy. I loved the ladies and gentleman that I got to work with. The doctors are some of the best men that I have ever met and they love their patients and the ladies at the office that kept the place moving and a grooving were like none other. They were not only co-workers, but  also friends. When I had to be away from my babies, I was doing something that I loved, serving and loving on others.  

My heart was sad and both Ben and I were unclear as to whether AWAA and our social worker would allow us to continue our adoption of Zoey, due to all of the major life changes. We gave it to God and made a few calls and were informed that we could proceed with the adoption.

Once again, God was holding it All.

1 Colossians 1:17

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

Two days after the news of my job termination, we held our first fund raiser. We had about 10 families donate their “unused treasures” from their homes for us to sell. We had everything from coffee makers to changing tables, to wedding flowers and office chairs. It was amazing! We sold baked goods and headbands and had friends who gave of their time and energy to help us out.

The Lord blew us away…. Not sure about you, but in the past, garage sales have not been the most profitable of fund raising events, this one begged to differ: We were blessed with $3500  from our two day sale and were able to get a large portion of the 1^st half: $20,000 paid off. God is good!

Numerous other gifts from friends and family came in as well as Ben started doing more work with The Center for Christian Counseling and Care, and I got to dibble dabble with my love of photography and watch as it grew too. It was a very bitter sweet fall and winter.

November and December came and it was time to finally send off our dossier (the book of the paperwork that we had gathered from different government and state organizations that stated that we were approved to have a sweet baby girl in our home and told EVERYTHING about us as a family)

 All together the papers totaled to be over 50 + pages. As we went to the post office to deliver our prized possession, you would have thought we were mailing a large sum of cash or prized jewels (I guess in a sense we were) ;)

Right after the New year, we found out that our Dossier had made it to Virginia, which was the first stop before going to Ethiopia. We were elated to find this out! However, our elation was soon overshadowed.

We were driving home from a holiday celebration in the panhandle when I began to get tricklining in emails that something was not right in Ethiopia and that more character building was on the way……

Now this is a segway for a whole other post, but adoption is hard and complicated and there are many people and lives that are intertwined within just one adoption process. Thus, we are aware that at times some very unethical events and circumstances can overshadow an adoption.

Because of this knowledge, we were very careful in our selection process of our agency. AWAA has quite a clean record thus far of being ethical and supporting adoptions both within the countries they are working and outside. Needless to say, some of the few unethical adoptions that have occurred were starting to overshadow the many good and the PR from those few had hit main stream media in Ethiopia and the repercussions were hard and fast.

Shortly into January Ethiopia stopped writing referalls for children to be adopted out of the country. They said that they were reevaluating their system and would decide what needed to be done.

For us, we were again…. Stopped in our tracks….. Our paperwork had been all approved on the USA side and was just waiting to be sent to Africa…..  We were saddened and heartbroken for the orphan children who were longing for forever families but may not find them because of this new ruling.

And of course we were saddened for our own little family as we were unclear on how to  proceed. I remember countless nights of tears and prayers as we gave it God and knew that if our hearts were aching for these little ones, how much more was His for all of the little ones? 

John 14:18

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

Soon into the month of February after our paperwork had sat in Virginia for close to 6 weeks, we got the news that Ethiopia was beginning to set up a new infrastructure in which they would still allow international adoptions but would be taking more time to oversee the system much closer. When I say more time, I mean 3-4 years per adoption instead of the 18 months to 2 years…… 

We talked to many friends and family and prayed about it and sought the Lord and felt his peace that we should proceed.

Valentines Day 2014 was the day! Our official Dossier to Ethiopia (DTE). Our paper pregnancy had officially begun for our child! So many emotions filled that day…… but we were and are hopeful.

Since Febuarary, we continue to work hand in hand with our agency as the day seems so far in the future as to when we will hold our baby girl. We are only two months away from having the 1^st $20,000 paid for and then we will start the 2^nd $20,000.

Even in that large sum of money, we see the Lord, He has been oh so faithful. Each month He has provided exactly what we need through gifts, and Ben’s job and photo sessions and headband sales and other garage sales…. The Lord is good and we feel His hand on our lives.

Ben and I both joke that we “thought” the Lord was holding the pen and writing this adoption story of our Zoey, but we see even more each day that not only is He holding the pen, but He also has the paper, the printer, the beginning and the ending and we are so glad that HE does.

Our hearts have been on a roller coaster for sure but He has taught us so much and even though we don’t understand it all, we Trust Him.

James 1:17

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does NOT CHANGE like shifting shadows.

We continue to wait and trust and hope and even though…. Multiple things have changed since last August: jobs, addresses, time frames, finances, plans,

We know who holds All of this and though the last year our faith has grown, and our hope has grown. There is a peace that Ben and I cannot shake. It comes from within, from a God who Loves us, who has called us and who promises to never let us go. He is our hope that anchors our soul.

Our plan is to be better at updating our blog and I am going to start posting more of my photo sessions here, as well as links to different fund raisers and other blogs about adoption too. We cannot express to each of you reading this how grateful we are to do Life with you. God is such an amazing Creator to allow us to Love one another. Thank you for your continual prayers and encouragement.

This story of our Zoey has many more chapters to come.

God is good ALL the time.