The Real Journey Begins

The "Shanghai Mystery" has been nothing short of amazing!  We have been able to get our days and nights flipped around, taken in so many amazing sights and spent a couple days soaking up the Chinese culture.  Through our journey to Max and now to Ellie we have come to love and respect the culture and herritage of two of our precious children.  But today is where the real journey begins, the journey we traveled across the ocean to make, the journey to our daughter.  In a few short hours we will board a plane and travel to Nanchang, the capital city of our daughter's province.  This is the city that we will meet and hold our daughter for the first time.  This is the city where she will officially become ours and we will become a family.  We can hardly wait.

In less than two days our little Ellie will be taken from everything she has ever known.  The orphanage, her nannies, her metal bed and straw mat, the faces of the little girls she wakes up to everyday, the bottles, the food, the sights, sounds and smells of what she knows as home.  She will be handed to two people that look, smell, talk and act different. We will feed, bathe, change and hold her differently than what she has known.  The busy streets, hotels, restaruants, cars ... and the list goes on will be nothing like she has ever experienced.  She will experience loss, we have no idea to what extent or how she will grieve all that she has lost but we trust that God is holding her little heart through all of it.

Our prayer is that God will open Ellie's little heart and that she will be able to feel the love we have for her and receive it instinctively.  We pray that God would give us the grace to meet her emotionally and physically in the very way her precious little heart and spirit needs.  We are trusting the gaps and places deep within her soul that are sad and scared will be filled by the One that created her.  Pray with us for those gaps, pray with us for all that is to come.

"The Lord God is with you, 

He is might to save. 

He will take great delight in you, 

He will quiet you with His love,

He will rejoice over you with singing!"

Zephaniah 3:17

Little Ellie will be placed in our arms around 4:30 pm on Sunday in China, which is 3:30 am in the states.  We will update our blog with pictures of Ellie in our arms as soon as we can.