Hello! We are so excited to be walking the path of adoption again! Bringing a child into a home in any way is a journey filled with all kinds of emotions and this fourth child for us is no different than the past three. We are so happy, and nervous, and filled with awe that God would bless us this way.
We have been talking about another child for a while, but in February we started considering it more seriously. About a month and a half ago, we took our kids out to eat and told them our plan to bring home a brother. Their response was beautiful and it is a lunch date I do not ever want to forget! Hailey and Caleb have a heartbeat for children without families and they were all in. So, we have begun the paperwork again!
We learned many things the last time we grew our family through adoption, but we will mention this one main truth. WE DID NOT ADOPT ADELINE ALONE. It was a community of family and friends who helped us arrive in the beautiful country of Rwanda and bring home our precious little girl. We know it will take this community again. We want to share this journey with any of you who want to walk it with us. We have been accepted by an agency that our social worker told us about that works in Uganda. We are asking for a little boy younger than Adeline. Uganda requires a stay in country for approximately 6 weeks. This was too long to leave our other children, so we have applied for passports for all! This is very exciting for us as there are people we know who live in Uganda that we can hardly wait to connect with during our stay.
When we were waiting for Adeline to come home there were countless days (and nights) we wet the floor with our tears, crying out to God for His Hand to move and bring her to us. We did not see how we could ever raise the money needed. This is the place we are in again, and this time we are talking about travel for 5 to Uganda and 6 back home! We have already been amazed at God's provision for our application fee. We owed $250 to send in with our application last week, so we had a garage sale. We made $265! Amazing!!! Our next step is $4000 to the placing agency and some dear friends just came together and gave us a little over $3000! WOW! We fully trust the money will come in God's timing, it is just hard because there are many moments when we would rather just see the money in our bank account instead of living by faith. There are things we can do though. Dillon is starting a second job this week and we are cutting back from our already tight (or so it feels) budget... but there is NO way we can do this alone. Will you join in and be part of our community this way? Our goal is $35,000. (Placing agency, home study, travel costs, post placement fees and paper work) Unreachable, unattainable, too much - if we were doing it alone, but we are not! Praise God, we will NOT bring home our next son alone!
With love, Dillon, Adrienne, Hailey, Caleb, Adeline Stengel
Our dear friends are hosting a Coffee Fundraiser for us! This coffee is delicious and even better comes straight from Africa! The bag is 1/2 kilo or 1.1 lbs. For a suggested donation of $18 they will mail you a bag so you can try it yourself (and help bring our little guy home in the process!) You can use the PayPal link below or mail us a check. If you use the Paypal link, when you get to the page that says "review your donation" there is a section with special instructions for the recipient. Please let us know how many bags you are ordering and give us your address so your coffee can be sent off as soon as possible. Thank you for being part of our community!
I can't wait to meet my future cousin. Praying for you along the way!
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