A Journey of Faith: Part 3

Over the summer we all shared many memories together and were learning to be a family.  The courting process was going very smoothly.  We did realize that we weren't going to be able to complete the guardianship process in time for us all to travel together so our plans for furlough were put on hold indefinitely.  That was a hard reality to face, as we were all eager to get back to TX and see our family and friends that we had been away from for almost two years.  But growing the family we had here in Uganda and taking care of the guardianship process was what needed to come first.

The anniversary gift of all the kids!

It was exciting to be able to share with some friends when a mission group from our home church was able to come and visit and serve with Healing Faith.  A great friend of ours was even able to take family pictures for us (at the bottom of page, thank you Rachel!).  When Pierce was born in 2010 we had a photo taken of the kids lying head to head.  It is actually the photo that I desperately need to update to the right of the page, as my avatar for this blog.  I recreated that pose with all the kids to give to Jason for our anniversary in October.

In September Everett was given the best birthday present he could imagine.  Foster care orders were finally signed which meant that Eva Faith and Joseph could come home with us permanently.  No more taking them back at the end of the day.  But things didn't go exactly as we expected.  For reasons we didn't quite understand, they were only releasing Joseph to us and not Eva Faith.  We were confused, disappointed and sad, but prayerfully moving forward and trusting in the home and what they were saying, which at that time was that we would have her in a few days.  We were all still able to celebrate both Everett's and Eva Faith's birthdays together before we had to take Eva Faith back.

In asking more about the care orders and why Eva Faith wasn't home with us, we were told that there had been some glitch in the process.  There was some paper of abandonment that needed to be signed by the person that brought Eva Faith to the home originally and they were having issues tracking this person down.  They said that they weren't following the care orders because they wanted to spare our feelings if something were to go a different way than we expected.  This was the first time that worry began to creep into our minds.  And it was quite impossible to think that any feelings would be spared by this point.  We were a family.  It might not be on paper yet, but it was already solid in all of our hearts.

We started asking many questions again, but unfortunately getting very few answers.  Then, out of the blue, we were told that in the process of tracking the one lady down they had actually uncovered Eva Faith's birth mother.  She had been living this entire time in a city less than 2hrs away.  She was easily discovered just by a visit to the police station in which Eva Faith was abandoned.  We were speechless.  We felt naive that we trusted too much.  We felt foolish that we hadn't hired our own private investigator before agreeing to move forward in the process and most of all we felt completely scared to death about what this meant for our daughter that had been part of our family for the past six months.

Note: I have edited this part of the story, and deleted some of this post, in order to make the story public for everyone.  It was a hard decision to make because I want the whole truth of our story to be there.  For learning for others, and because truth needs to be told.  But I also realize that the pain is still too fresh to determine if I am bringing too much of that hurt into the truth and leading the story only on our pain and on our feelings.  Please bare with us.

Again there were more questions than there were answers.  We kept being told to wait it out, we should have her home with us by the end of October.  We had no idea how or what that meant.  We didn't know if her birth mother was going to jail, we didn't know if her birth mother wanted her daughter back, we didn't know anything other than our hearts were breaking and it felt like our family was slowly falling apart.

Sweet Sisters!

Love this boy!

Love her so much!

Full of blessings!

The girls.

The whole family!

The boys.

The kids new very little at this point and we wanted to keep it that way until we actually had answers for the questions we knew they would have.