Awesome Friends

            We have been so incredibly blessed by the friends we have made here in NC.  I firmly believe that God has been working in each of them and the way they have contributed to our lives.  I can't say that I've ever experienced doing life together in this way before and it has been so good for my heart.  We have been studying the Holy Spirit at church over the past few weeks.  We talked about spiritual gifts last week and our pastor was explaining how the body has different gifts that allow other parts of the body to see a different part of God.  It's so amazing to see the detail with which God created us and this world, but hearing that made me think about our friends here and how we each are gifted with different gifts, and it truly does allow us to know God better by seeing how he works differently in each of our lives.  So I thought I would share some of the ways we have been blessed by our friends recently.
             First, we have some friends who have also adopted from ET, through our agency, so our baby will have a Hannah's Hope buddy close by :)  They have been such a huge source of encouragement throughout this entire journey.  They were the first ones we told when we officially decided to adopt because we knew we would have their support and they would be just as excited as we were, and they were!  They are in the midst of a very busy season of life, they just had baby #2 a few months ago, and they have a 2 year old Ethiopian running around :) and yet they still found the time to put this together for us:

An amazing care basket of encouragement for us as we wait! This basket is filled with cards and coordinating items/baby dates for those days when this wait seems endless and discouraging.  They get it! And they are praying and celebrating every movement with us, and we are forever grateful!  I cannot wait to find out what all is in this basket(it's very tempting to open them all now :) ) but I know it will be much better to open them on days when it feels like I can't wait another day for our baby to come home.  My Father is ministering right to my heart through them, so so awesome!  I can't really explain how good it is to have someone in my everyday life who knows the ache of having a baby on the other side of the world, other than to say it is an unbelievable blessing.
             We also have some somewhat new friends here in NC that have blessed us a great deal as well.  I say somewhat new because my hubby grew up with the husband, so that's not new, but as a couple they are new :)  Anyway, they made and gave us this awesome item to add to our nursery a few days ago:

Seriously, how awesome is this?? I cannot wait to see what it looks like in the nursery.  It's just another great reminder of faith and our journey to our baby. It means a lot to have someone think to do something like this for us.  We are so blessed to have so many people walking this journey with us, who don't think I'm crazy for having wait list numbers posted in our house, or talking about official and unofficial numbers. They are just as excited as we are for our baby to come home(maybe not just as excited, but pretty darn close!) and I can't wait to introduce our baby to this amazing group of friends that God has blessed us with!