Rattins living Coram Deo

From Doug Nichol's prayer letter this week (founder of ACTION): When someone learns that I'm going to speak at their church about adoption, typically the first question is, "So will you be talking about the doctrine of adoption or, you know, real adoption?" That's a hard question, because I cannot address one without addressing the other. We cannot master one aspect and then move to the other, from the vertical aspect of adoption to the horizontal aspect, or vice versa. Families, the Bible tells us, reflect something eternally true about God. It is God's fatherhood after which every family in heaven and on earth is named (Eph. 3:14-15). We know what human parenting should look like based on our Father's behavior toward us. The reverse is also true. We see something of God's fatherhood in our relationship with our human fathers. Jesus tells us that our fathers' provision and discipline show us God's active love toward us (Matt. 7:9-11; Heb. 1

Christian Alliance for Orphans from New Vision Productions on Vimeo .

It looks like we're solidly at 60% of our monthly support for our budget for moving to East Africa - exciting to see progress, but the progress feels so slow at times! Pray for more churches and individuals to join us as partners in our ministry so that we can hopefully be on the mission field soon!

Our mission board has a new website focusing JUST on the ministries to Children in Crisis worldwide - check it out !

Our church is a multi-purpose room so once the chairs are put away after the service, Gracie has lots of room to "walk around" in her KidWalk - she's doing so great in it! She is actually moving herself around purposefully and the other kids love it! She's doing a lot of bunny hopping instead of reciprocal leg movements, but we're okay with that for now because she's learning that she can make herself go where she wants to go. Yesterday she walked into the kitchen to get some dinner from Mimi - how wonderful! (yes, that's one of our good friends caught mid-air doing a flying leap toward Gracie who loved the attention!)

As you know, my ministry overseas will revolve around children with disabilities. This is a great little video on disabilities .

(Noah is HUGE! and has gotten a little more demanding in his old age - he's ready to be crawling but can't yet so he's a little impatient with life right now. He still adores his sisters and his Daddy - in fact he'll giggle at Daddy from across the room! He's sitting up on his own and working on crawling at five months!) I get to have Gracie home with me on Mondays now. We arranged for a four day school week for her so that she would miss less school with our support raising trips. So I'm practicing homeschooling with three 100% dependent children! Today we made truffles... I'm not sure why, but I decided that I wanted to make truffles for Valentine's Day (taking advantage of having ANY ingredient that strikes my fancy immediately available while we're still living in the USA?) . Ana and I bake together a lot and she's very good at helping with ingredients, stirring, and today we worked on measuring - looking for the numbers on the measuring

Josh found this great video of Gulu which he says is very representative of the terrain and culture.