guess who i'm with in this picture

I had the best time on Saturday and Sunday! Angel and I drove to Lowell, Mass. to help with the Show Hope table at the Steven Curtis Chapman concert. The drive down was great, we didn't have any trouble finding our hotel. As we were leaving to head over to the auditorium we saw a mother getting off the elevator and she had a tiny little Chinese girl with her! She was sooo beautiful. We were able to talk to her for a few minutes before we headed over. After we got there she came in with her husband and turns out she was helping too and they were a fellow AWAA family and they have been home for 9 months. It was awesome to be able to talk and ask questions. The cool thing is that they traveled to the same province we'll be going to. Isn't God good that was an awesome blessing. I met another mom who was in the beginning stages of waiting and I was able to talk to her about the special needs program. That was really neat because she didn't understand at all how that all worked so she seemed excited to get home and talk to her husband about that! Also there was another AWAA family who just got a referral from Ethiopia for a 3 month old little girl!!!! They look to travel in Dec or Jan. I'll add a link to there blog. Anyway we met so many people that we were able to encourage that are praying about it but have been fearful taking that first step.

We collected change from everyone there and the money of course was going to Shohanna's Hope foundation. We raised around 2500.00 and the cool thing is we met a family that just got a referral for a little boy from Vietnam he's 7 months old and they are getting ready to travel. Anyway they brought them up on stage with SCC and he gave them all the money we raised! It was so neat. I guess they are doing that each night of the concert. They pick a family who applied for a grant and get them to the concert and surprise them with the money collected!

We didn't think we were going to be able to met him because you need a back stage pass or something. Well Nick with Show Hope gave us a couple tickets and 4 of us were able to go up and met him. I bought Grace the book Shoey and Dot and so Steven signed it for her! Angel was so mad at herself for not buying the book cause she wanted one signed for her baby. We'll just have to see if we can get to another concert! Anyway it was neat being able to share a bit of our adoption story with him and have a picture with him. He saw Grace's picture and said he thought she was beautiful....of course we do too! What asian baby isn't cute please tell me! They are all beauties : )

We didn't leave until around 12am or a little after. Had dinner at 1am and breakfast the next morning at 12 noon. talk about a messed up schedule! On the way home we went to babies r us and saw another family with an asian baby and so we approached her and got to talking and they have only been home for 4 days!!!! They said it was the best trip of their life! I'm just saying the entire trip was awesome and the Lord kept putting people in our path who we could either minister to or it was people who were able to minister to us! I can't say it enough how awesome the weekend was!!! If he ever comes close to Maine again I will definitely go help!

That's all I can think of for now...if I think of something else I'll post again. So I will post our pictures we had taken with him. I forgot my camera!!! Can you believe it!!! So I used my phone but of course that wasn't set to take a big pic. but at least we have this. It's kinda neat. The first one is me and the second one is Angel : )