We had our big yard sale fundraiser on Saturday. It went great -- we had tons of shoppers and the weather was beautiful. But by the end of the afternoon Dan and I agreed that by far, the best part of the day was just having the opportunity to share about our adoption with our neighbors -- many of whom are not Believers.

The Cupcake Kids, under the big top at the yard sale

We loved having the chance to talk about the adoption with our neighbors. Now, we did get a couple of strange looks, a few people who seemed a little disturbed by the whole thing and two different people who asked me, in complete earnest, if we were adopting from Africa because we wanted to be like Madonna. But mostly it was a lot of curious questions and many, many opportunities to share about the work the Lord is doing in our lives.

I think that in general, living the crazy life -- taking risks for the Kingdom and stepping out in faith -- will almost always provide opportunities to share the gospel at some point or another. In his book Don't Waste Your Life, John Piper says that the world is not impressed when Christians get rich, live the easy life and say thanks to God. But rather, the world is impressed when Christians forsake those things for the name of Jesus. In other words, living un-like the world gives us opportunities to share about Jesus with the world.

But anyways, enough of my rambling... I know y'all are mostly reading this post because you want to hear how much we raised at the sale this weekend. So going into the weekend, we knew we had the following immediate expenses: 1) $1,340 for filing our I600 form with the USCIS; 2) $160 for fingerprinting and 3) $300 for my remaining immunizations. If you're bad at math like me, I'll just tell you, we were looking for $1800.

The yard sale and Cupcake Kids stand raised a combined total of $1150. And at the end of the day we went to check the mail and three signed, notarized copies of our completed homestudy were sitting in our mailbox. Wow!!! we thought. That's such a big chunk of what we needed and now we have a completed homestudy, Praise God!! And then we remembered that we still had about 10 lbs worth of quarters and other coins from the sale that we'd forgotten to count. We combined all of it with our existing change jar and it all came to $150.

And at this point (and I really, really don't mean to sound ungrateful because we were VERY excited about raising $1300) I started wondering what God might be up to. I mean, we were soooo close. We don't serve the God of Almost Enough. I wonder what happened to the remaining $500? Were we supposed to take it out of savings or maybe wait a little longer for His provision?

I didn't file the I600's today because we had some confusion with the paperwork and a few details were missing. We're planning to send everything in tomorrow. I'm getting my shots on Wednesday. Around 2pm today I went to check the mail and can you guess what I found... yep. A check for $500. Exactly, exactly what we needed. The check was from a very dear and precious family (I'm not naming any names but you know who you are...) who lives out of state. They'd mailed the check days ago, before our yard sale even took place, with no idea that this is what we would need. But God knew and He had it all covered.

Wow, wow, wow! So all glory to God who always, always finishes what He starts... "being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." -- Phil 1:6.