.And We Worshiped.

We ended up there in Korah the day after we landed - still shell shocked and giddy to be back in Ethiopia. I honestly did not sleep much the night before, but I never do in Ethiopia. I am not sure if it is the time change or just excitement - I don't want to miss a moment in-country.

The church was in the middle of Korah. Korah is a community with 75 plus thousand people who live in the garbage dump of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It is where people who are sick with HIV, AIDS, Tuberculosis, Hepatitis, and Leprosy come because they have been made outcasts. There is a large percentage of sick widows in Korah. More often than not, the only way the people survive, is by picking through the garbage dump for their main source of nourishment. Jim was being given the privilege of preaching there. The "church" was a small tin shack with plastic chairs that had been rented for the day for us, and an old sound system turned up as loud as it could go, and little keyboard- also rented for us. Right from the beginning I was humbled and even slightly embarrassed over the fuss being made over us. We had come to serve them, and here they were doing everything possible to serve us.



The worship began almost immediately after we were seated. Worship mingled with prayers of thanksgiving. I understand very little amharic, but one word that I do understand, I heard over and over and over. Ameseginalehu - thank you. The worship and prayer time had hardly begun before I was looking around the tiny, dirt-floored room, at the ragged and dirty men, women, and children who worshiped the One true Creator, arms outstretched, eyes closed, faces relaxed, focused on only One, and radiating joy - in the midst of their bleak circumstances and surroundings -  they were worshiping the God Who had not forgotten them. They were not seated on plush pews or chairs - the room was so packed many were not seated at all. There was no pulpit, no cross, no decorations or grand piano, or electric guitar. No glitz, no glamor. No foyer or coffee or donuts or book store. It was just God's people - black and white - Americans and Abyssinians - together - worshipping the God Who had never let go of a single one of us- all created in His image - and in that moment we knew it and recognized it, and we worshiped. 

I have probably attended thousand after thousands of worship services in my life time - thousands of Sunday morning services. But this one was different. This time the worship was different. It felt different. It wasn't just the surroundings, or the cultural difference, the language, or the worship-style. This worship was unadulterated - pure, simple - something I am not sure I had ever really experienced before in my kind of church, where there are expectations and unspoken rules - even about worship. There is a sense of duty - obligation - ritual - and emptiness in what I am used to, and I didn't even know it until I walked into worship in Korah - which was none of those things. The Holy Spirit was evident in the people of Korah, and to my kind of church, sometimes the Spirit is over-looked, feared, and made light-of. But I saw what Spirit-filled worship could be. I felt so much gratitude and joy, in that little shack of a church that Sunday morning. It was a feeling I never wanted to lose again in worship. I sat in my plastic chair for the 3 hour plus long service with hot, ugly tears streaming down my checks, a trembling bottom lip that bled from biting it to keep the sobs down (Thanks Roger for pretending to ignore my ugly cry. You are a good man.), and I begged God to let us bring this back home with us. But I have to be honest, two weeks later I returned to my home church, which I dearly love, and walked back into our sanctuary, and back into my comfortable and the unspoken rules of worship, and it's gone. The first Sunday home I also cried during worship, but not the same joyful, humbled cry that rocked my soul in Korah.



We are missing it. Here in America in so many of our churches - we are missing the passionate, unadulterated worship that our Savior, our God longs for from us.

I am missing it.

I am missing it because I am proud, I am fearful of what the person next to me might think, I am calloused, I am comfortable, I am hurried and hardened, and I am selfish.



We are missing out on true worship, and I don't think we even know it. It took a church in Korah to show me what I am missing.

This is the poverty of America - our comfortableness, our ease, and our fear-of-man is destroying us - it's destroying even our intimacy with God and our worship.



I saw Jesus in Korah - in the faces of his children - dirty and scarred - in the the eyes of the Pastor as he rolled up his tattered sleeves and stirred the coffee beans - in the widowed mother who bent to kiss her child's forehead and wipe his little runny nose with her dress. He was there in all of them. He was there in their worship.

He's here too. I know He is. Perhaps I just need to look a little harder.                                 

.Day 17 of 7.

I think God perfectly orchestrated this fast for this month - well, of course He did. He knew we would need that intentional focus and prayer that comes with fasting. I am hesitating to share this - any of it....

This is about our precious boy that we met on the streets of Ethiopia in January of 2011. This is about Habtamu. My heart knew the moment that our eyes locked, on that dusty street, that he was mine, and I was his. I think my heart knew as soon as he shoved his bracelet into my hand through the van window, that he was my son. Looking back I can now see how God was preparing me for the moment that I met him. Even the day before, as I witnessed families meeting their older children for their meetcha day. Something bruised in my heart, as I watched these older children, run into the arms of their new parents with tears streaking their brown faces and sobs catching in their throats. These were children who knew what they had been missing out on, children who longed for a family. I knew that Jamesy was God-ordained for our family, but I knew even then, that we would not be bringing home an infant for our next adoption.

 I've chronicled much of our story with Habi here, but what I have not come out and said clearly is that we have been pursuing an adoption of him for a long time. It started last June, and then God slammed the door, only to reopen it this January/February. Someday I may write more on how that came to be and perhaps some of what transpired, but not now. The past four months have been a roller coaster ride of emotion. One day we would find out that an adoption was nearly impossible and the next that it looked probable, and it bounced back and forth this way for months. We kept in almost daily contact with Habi, thanks to internet cafes, facebook, and skpe. On some days he would use the last little bit of money he had from working all day to skype with us, rather than eat - because seeing the faces of people who loved him was more important to him. We've prayed for him, cried over him, and longed to bring him into our family. We have feared his safety and heard his cries for food, shelter, but above all for a family. I cannot even count how many nights I have cried myself to sleep, selfishly asking God why He put such a love for Habi in my heart if he would never be my son, and if we could not do more to help him. I have awoken from nightmares about Habi sleeping on the street - only I awake from these nightmares while they are Habi's reality a lot of times.

This week our Habi was only  one clearance away from becoming paper ready to be adopted, and God slammed the door. Permanently.

My heart is crushed.

But even despite the sadness, we have a glimmer of hope. To some it may seem strange why we would fight so hard for a street boy - a teenage boy nonetheless, who we have only spent little time with, know very little of his story, or what kind of horrors he has experienced. I am sure only a few years ago this would have seemed strange to me. I know this makes us weird. I am getting used to that. But every time we pray over this situation, because to do nothing is not an option when God so clearly placed him in our life, we feel as if Jesus would fight for this fatherless boy. So in turn we fight. We pursue. We move forward, and we do not give up hope. I think every child should be in a loving family, and every child should have someone who is fighting for them - who is for them. Habtamu is that child for us. We are for Habi.

So now we pursue something that is very difficult in Ethiopia with a boy like Habi. We pursue an F-1 student visa. Many times thse visas are denied - especially for poor people like Habtamu who have nothing to make them want to come back to Ethiopia. But this is our final attempt to bring him into our family. We have found a SEVIS approved school (a school that has the legal certification to accept students with F-1 visas) that has told us they will accept him. It is over an hour drive both ways, but we are so thankful to have found a school. We will fill out paperwork for them and wait for the I-20 approval. Paperwork will be done on Habtamu's end, and then a visa interview at the embassy will be requested. Typically this all takes several months, but we are praying to a big God. We are asking God to bring the paperwork together quickly and to give Habi a quick interview date, and then we will ask every believer we know to get on their knees and pray that Habi gets granted that visa. We are also praying that this can all happen by the time we go over for our mission trip in July, and that God would orchestrate the details for Habi to have his visa and be able to fly home with us.

According to man's thinking this is impossible.

But with God it's possible, so I am clinging to that and looking forward to the moment that Habi is in our home.

 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. Ephesians 3:20