Happy Easter!

The weather was great today, so we got outside for an egg hunt with the neighborhood kids. This is before it began.

The little sprout ponytail just makes me smile!

It was a wonderful day celebrating with our friends who are just as close as family.  He is risen and therefore, we have much to be hopeful about.

A Quiz

What is Bella eating?

She didn't like this

She loves this

This is her favorite!

an Emma update

Sad news:  We are not allowed to visit her.  No reason was given, just the orphanage will not allow it.  However, they sent us a video!  It's an office worker holding a camera in front of her face asking her to sing songs and smile.  She reluctantly obliges and sings VERY quietly, and she doesn't really smile.  But it's her and it's current, and she's still cute!

We sent her a package today.  It should arrive in about ten days.  We included some clothes, a teddy bear, a little backpack and a photo album introducing us, her grandparents and a few of her cousins.  We also included a single use camera and asked them to take pictures of her everyday life and her friends.  And we included some gifts for the orphanage officials and workers, yak jerky and eight treasures tea!  We also asked them to fill out a kind of questionnaire to give us some more info on her background and her current habits and likes and dislikes.  I'm not very hopeful we'll get much, but I wanted to try.

So now we wait on official approvals to go get her!  Our paperwork is being sent to the United States Citizen and Immigration Services today.  We fill out a few more forms and send them to an in-country representative from our adoption agency.  They wait for the US approval and then it gets sent back to Chinese officials for final travel approval to go get her.  Sounds simple enough, right? We'll see how long it all takes.

Here she is...

Such a gift to get a picture with a smile!

Today we received our Letter of Acceptance!  Praise the Lord!  It takes some people two months and we received ours in two weeks.  We're thrilled.  Now there's lots of paperwork to be sent to the American government and then the Chinese government.  (We'll give you more specifics on the upcoming process soon.)

For now, please pray that we get to visit Emma in early May before we actually adopt her.  Some orphanages allow this kind of visit and some do not.  Our adoption agency representative is checking on this for us.  Also pray that she receives the package and letter that we will be sending her soon.  Pray she feels loved and begins to get excited about joining our family.

News we've all been waiting for...

It is with immense pleasure, joy and thankfulness that Erika and I would like to introduce you to the next Fertig…

Emma Hope

We accepted the referral of a little girl who will turn three the beginning of April.  She has some minor physical needs, but cognitively, emotionally, and socially seems to be doing really well.

Her name comes from Erika’s great grandmother Emma Josephine Hopen.  As well, we feel her middle name reminds us of all the years we’ve waited for this to happen… in hope. 

Pray that we would be able to bring her home by July!

Pray too for our next few months of transition, waiting and other news.  There is A LOT going on for us right now…  and that leads me to…

We’re coming back to the states for an extended time!  Probably in the beginning of May.  We’ll update you more on this, but for now keep us in your prayers and THANK YOU, THANK YOU so much for your ever faithful love and support for us through these years and into the future!  

We'll post pictures as soon as the paperwork is accepted and processed from the Chinese government.  Pray our "Letter Of Acceptance" comes quickly!

She has been and will continue into eternity to…

                Grow in our hearts.

flowers we received today from friends that aren't even in town!

She's matched

Yesterday we found out that Bella is matched with her family.  I had to go to the orphanage for a meeting and when I got there they handed me a box filled with beautiful clothes and a toy from them to her.  It also included a letter.  (Which the family wrote in English, a company in China translated into Chinese and then I read it and translated it back into English in my head, haha) 

When I read the letter in the taxi on the way home is when the tears started to flow and they just came off and on throughout the afternoon and evening.  It’s all so emotional.

It was really the first time I’d heard someone else call Bella “our little girl”.  She’s no longer just mine.  But in all reality, it’s another reminder that she is and always will be His.  I know they’ve been waiting a very long time for her, likely six years or more.  My two plus year wait has been agonizing enough.  Waiting causes your heart to long and anticipate.  They now wait with joy and excitement and the days left until they come to get her cannot come fast enough.  We now wait with sadness.  Our days with her are numbered.  This goodbye will likely be the hardest thing the Lord has asked us to do, and so I would love these days to drag on and on.  So my tears are for sure, tears of sadness.

But they are also tears of joy.  She is loved and wanted, not only by us, but now by them and their friends and family.  She will be cared for and provided for all the days of her life.  In the true sense of the word, she hasn’t been an orphan since the day she entered our home.  And very soon she will legally, permanently and forever be a daughter. 

The Journey of Grief

 (by Mark)

It often starts with a simple phrase… “OH God NO!”.   It is a plea, an expression of shock, an admission that though not fully realized, life has changed.  I remember saying it on 9/11, I remember speaking it after hearing my grandmother had cancer, I remember pleading it after getting the news we wouldn’t be able to adopt Bella.  In some ways it is a last ditch effort to return to life as before, and in another way it is the beginning of grief.  It is the acknowledgement of loss and the beginning of the changing of the life you once knew.  Over the course of the months following one truth sinks deeper and deeper into your soul, making more and more profound an impact on your heart.  It is the reality that you can never go back.  To be truthful, in some cases there is happy resolution… a curing of cancer, a restoring of property lost in a fire.  However, one is still profoundly affected by these events.  Something is still lost.  In many other situations though, resolution of this reality is a hard process that can take years to truly make peace with.  We build memorials, monuments and scrapbooks to help remember.  We seek counseling, entertainment and medication to forget.  We seek to rectify our shattered world with the continued passing of the world around us.  Life goes on.  Whether we want it to or not.  And I guess that is where so much of the pain can come from.  There is the pain of loss.  There is also the pain of the coldness of the natural world… where time and seasons move on, unfeeling, uncaring and insensitive to where one might be in the process.  People too, move on.  They are not uncaring, but they have lives too.  As much as you might want to stop and linger, to bask in what is left of the person, dream or former reality, life goes on. 

I have found immense comfort in one marvelous thought in my process.  Jesus does not move on.  Profoundly, as one outside of time, he exists eternally in every moment.  He is as much in the past as in the future as he is with me here now at 5am while I type.  So too, he does not emotionally move on.  He is with me moment by moment, and he grieves the loss, my loss and the loss to the world that sin and brokenness bring.  Just as he weeps for Lazarus or Jerusalem, he also weeps for Bella and for us.  He weeps for her abandonment as an infant, he weeps for her time in an orphanage, he weeps that loving parents will not be able to keep her.  He weeps in all these things even knowing that HE is making all things new, HE is working all things for our good, HE is there in the future when resolution will take place.  He keeps a perfect balance of remembering and hoping, knowing there are greater things, better days that may never be seen this side of heaven.  I cannot imagine where comfort might come were I not to know Him.