2012 at 1:21 pm | by Nicole Whitacre
Filed under
Motherhood Adoption
Things have been quiet here on the adoption front because we’ve been in waiting mode. But I’m excited to announce that yesterday we were finally submitted to the US Embassy! In a week or so we hope to receive an embassy appointment, and then travel a few weeks later to bring our kids home.
Here in America we have moved from Fairfax, VA to Louisville, KY, unpacked our new house, celebrated Christmas, and bought bunk beds. Our Ethiopian children’s clothes are in their closets, their booster seats are in the car, their chairs are empty at the dinner table, and our backyard seems deserted with only two children.
There’s still a lot of paperwork to get processed between now and when we bring Kassa and Mulunesh home, including the Embassy clearance and our home study update. We would love your prayers that it would speedily pass through the proper channels.
Meanwhile, we receive regular updates that our kids are doing well and they know that we are coming for them soon. Here’s a recent picture our adoption agency sent us a few days ago. Aren’t they the cutest, smiliest kids you ever saw? Our hearts just ache to bring them home soon.
And although this is not related to our adoption I must add a personal note of thanks to all of you who have welcomed us to Louisville. So many of you sent me your contact information, invited us over to your house, offered to bring meals or watch our kids, and helped us move in. I haven’t had a chance to reply and thank all of you personally but please know you have made us feel so welcome to the seminary and the lovely town of Louisville. I hope I can meet all of you soon!
Thanks again for all your prayers and encouragement for our adoption. Our family is so blessed by your care. Can’t wait to share pictures of our family, complete at last.
2012 at 6:42 pm | by Nicole Whitacre
Filed under
Biblical Womanhood Suffering Homemaking
What burdens are you carrying around your home this January day? Whether nagging or crushing, may this gospel truth compel you to cast them on the Lord, who daily bears us up (Ps. 68:19):
Perhaps, your home-duties, trials, and needs, form your burden. Every home is an embryo kingdom, an epitomized world, of which the parent constitutes the sovereign. There are laws to be obeyed, rules to be observed, subjects to be governed, cares to be sustained, demands to be met, and “who is sufficient for all this?” is often your anxious inquiry. Who can tell what crushing burdens, what bitter sorrows, what corroding cares, what pressing demands, may exist within a single family circle, deeply veiled from every eye but God’s? You are perhaps a widower—bereaved and desolate. Or you are a widow—lonely and helpless. Your children are an anxiety. Your domestic duties a trial. Your necessities are pressing. Your whole position one of embarrassment and depression.
What shall you do? Do even as the Lord who loves you enjoins—“Cast your burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain you.” Your Heavenly Father knows all your home-trials, for He has sent them! Jesus, though he had no home on earth, yet sympathized with the home-cares and sorrows of others, and is not a stranger, nor indifferent to yours. Bring all to Him, tell Him all, confide to Him all, trust Him in all. You have no family trial too great, and no domestic need too little, and no home-sorrow too delicate, to take to Christ. Obey the precept, “Cast your burden upon the Lord;” and He will make good the promise, “and He shall sustain you.” O costly and blessed home-burden that brings Jesus beneath our roof! . . .
Jesus is the great Burden-Bearer of His people. No other arm, and no other heart, in heaven or upon earth, were strong enough, or loving enough, to bear these burdens but His! He who bore the weight of our sin and curse and shame in His obedience and death—bore it along all the avenues of His weary pilgrimage, from Bethlehem to Calvary—is He who now stretches forth His Divine arm, and makes bare a Brother’s heart to take your burden of care and of grief, dear saint of God, upon Himself.
Octavius Winslow, The Ministry of Home (London: 1847), page 351–352 (emphasis mine)
HT: Tony Reinke
2012 at 8:49 pm | by Nicole Whitacre
Filed under
Biblical Womanhood Spiritual Growth
Each year we make New Year’s resolutions for things we want to change, but we also have New Year’s hopes for things we can’t change, but wish we could. We long to receive certain desires of our heart that seem elusively out of reach. And maybe, just maybe, we will see those hopes fulfilled this year.
When I was single, I hoped for a husband. Maybe this year, he will come. I imagined myself married by the following New Year, or at least engaged. Maybe the New Year was holding my future husband in the wings. God eventually gave me an amazing husband, but new hopes still sprang up with each New Year’s Day. When we lived in a teeny apartment, I wanted to move to a bigger place. When I experienced secondary infertility, I wanted to have another child. Maybe this year.
I’m sure you have hopes for this year. They are probably whatever you are thinking about right now.
But in her book, Keep A Quiet Heart, Elisabeth Elliot encourages us to focus on the most important of New Year’s hopes:
“Will the young woman find a mate? Will the couple have a child? Maybe this year will be the year of desire fulfilled. Perhaps, on the other hand, it will be the year of desire radically transformed, the year of finding, as we have perhaps not yet truly found, Christ to be the All-Sufficient One, Christ the ‘deep sweet well of Love’” (page 49, emphasis mine).
This year, let us ask God to dissolve all our hopes (however good they may be!) into a single hope: to know Christ and to be found in Him. May this be a year of desire radically transformed, a deeper, truer, knowing of Christ as our All-Sufficient One.
“But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:7-8a).
2012 at 9:03 pm | by Nicole Whitacre
Filed under
Biblical Womanhood Spiritual Growth
A few January’s ago we asked the question: Is it possible to make a New Year’s resolution and truly keep it?
The answer is Yes! And we did a little three part series to explain how.
Keeping Right Resolutions
Keeping One Resolution
Help Keeping Resolutions
