Jack meets his brother and sister for the first time on Skype. It was the first the time he waived! It truly felt like he knew who they were.

Norbert, whose story is below, was our attorney and advocate Happy new parents! I love this photo! Joe has loved reading to Jack!

Besides the army of angels God dispatched since the day Jack was born, our attorney, Norbert Munana, was also a tireless advocate for our son this past year. When Norbert was 16, he lost both his parents and 2 siblings when they were macheted to death in the Rwandan genocide. I asked if I could share his story with you:
 

“I lived in a village a couple of hours from here. We had dinner with our neighbors one night and the next day they came along with many others to kill us. We all ran away, but my mother was very sick at the time and she couldn’t get away. They let her lay outside, while they looted everything in our house and then burned it. We snuck back to the house, found our mother alive, and took her to the local hospital. The government announced that all hospitals and churches were safe [it was later learned that this was propaganda as the government were the genociders and used churches and hospitals as gathering spots to kill people].  My brothers, mother, and father were all at the hospital when a huge mass of people stormed the hospital with machetes. I was outside hiding in a tree when I heard my family screaming as they were being killed. After that, I hid in trees, in the forest, and finally went to a stadium where many people came because we heard it was safe. Instead, it was where people were being selected to be killed. Everyone over 18 was killed. I was younger, and some how God spared my life. Once the killing stopped, I walked for days, hiding under roads and trees to Kigali. A family took me in. The mommy was so good to me but the father was very abusive. I wanted to die.

One night, I had a vision. Jesus came to my house and showed me a screen. On one side of the screen was everything I had done wrong my entire life. On the other side was everything that Christ offered- blessing, protection, mercy, compassion, and love. That was when I met Jesus. I went to a random church by myself the next day and have remained in that community. After that, I was no longer an orphan. God is my Father and my mother.

After joining that church, I met my wife. We were engaged for a very long time. In Rwanda, weddings are very large celebrations with hundreds of people. It is important that all the elders from your family are there. Well you see, I didn’t have any elders in my family because I had no family at all. Only some brothers who had also survived. This was a very sad time to for me. How can I have a wedding when there is no one to invite? This is what I want to tell you: Please, orphans do not need money or clothes. They need people to care for them and comfort them and be there for them.

After becoming a lawyer, God told me to use my gifts to help orphans. I didn’t know what to do as I didn’t have any money. How can I work for free? But now one day a week, I provide legal help to orphans and widows through an organization and I also care and love on the children.”

Tears were streaming down my face as I realized that this man used his own devastating experience to bring our son home, so there would be one less orphan in his country. This summer when our adoption process slowed significantly, he wrote  “Don't worry, I understand you well and thank you for your love, soon you will have your child and he is waiting for you too.”  Words fail me at the way God uses all things to restore the world back to how he intended it to be.  He used a man’s parents being slaughtered in the genocide to turn his heart towards orphans. That man then won the son God had always intended to be in our family (not in an orphanage) for us.

“God made the world for the delight of human beings– if we could see His goodness everywhere, His concern for us, His awareness of our needs: the phone call we’ve waited for, the ride we are offered, the letter in the mail, just the little things He does for us throughout the day. As we remember and notice His love for us, we just begin to fall in love with Him because He is so busy with us — you just can’t resist Him. I believe there’s no such thing as luck in life, it’s God’s love, it’s His.”
Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa

 {I wrote this blog the day our computers were stolen at the beginning of last week. This week deserves about 5 blogs! For now, I ask you to pray that Jack's medical records make it to the US Embassy on Friday morning so we can make our Friday night flight}

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