Garage Sale Finale

"For you, O LORD, have made me glad by what You have done, I will sing for joy at the works of Your hand." Psalm 92:4


The garage sale is finally over and we are completely overwhelmed by God's grace. We made a grand total of :$2261!!!

It's amazing that only a few weeks ago, we had absolutely nothing and by the grace of God we got enough donations to cover our home study and a big chunk of our first agency fee. It is so clear that God had His hand in every single step in this process.

Jordan's parents graciously decided to come in town to help with the sale, because we knew we were going to need extra hands. My mother-in-law said that when they were packing up some extra stuff for our garage sale in the back of their truck, that she looked over at their neighbor's yard and saw a few pieces of furniture that they had thrown to the curb. She said they were calling to her, so with permission she packed those up as well. God was just building this puzzle piece by piece.

We started the garage sale Friday morning and we were flooded by so many people, we didn't even have time to put up signs for directions to our house. Throughout that first day, all of us had such amazing opportunities to share our story to complete strangers. There were some that told us their story of their adoptions of their children, and some were even telling their story of when they were adopted. Not once, did we get a question like, "Why not adopt from the US?" or "You already have kids, why are you adopting?" Nothing but positive energy was present throughout the entire day. We even had customers who were complete strangers come back to our sale with bags of donations that they had in their car or at their house. Again, God just building his masterpiece, piece by piece. My husband had a younger boy around 17 buy a skateboard and he came back to hand my husband a brand new pair of shoes, tags on and all, that he said he had just bought that he wanted to donate. Unbelievable!! The first day we made $1300 and at the end of the day we were completely exhausted, but we were so energized by what God had done in just a few hours with just a bunch of "stuff".



Today, our amazing volunteers all came back to help us with the sale, and because of all the generous donations of complete strangers, we had almost as much stuff as we had when we first started. Yet again, we kept hearing stories of people's adoptions and complete strangers just donating extra money to help our cause.

My favorite thing about the process was how God used our sale to help more than one ministry. There was a gentleman who came up to me and said he wanted to buy ALL of our children's books. He said that he worked for a program that helped local Austin kids who weren't always in school. They teach the kids how to read and that they start them off by reading children's books. He bought every single children's book for his ministry. This brings tears to my eyes how HE moves, and boy, does He move!!!

At the end of the day we were starting to pack up all the clothes that we had leftover. The very last customer of the day came up to me and my mom, and asked what we were doing with the clothes. She said that her church had a ministry in Mexico that gave out clothes to the people in poverty and asked if we would be willing to donate the clothing to her ministry. Of course, we said yes, and within 5 minutes, her son was there with a truck, and we filled the back of the truck with bags of clothes for those people. His timing is always perfect!!

A BIG THANK YOU to everyone who donated their stuff to our garage sale. Without you we wouldn't have been able to have the sale and every little thing completely added up! Thank you so much to our amazing friends and families who came and helped with the garage sale in the crazy Texas heat. We are so incredibly blessed to have you guys in our lives, and can't wait to tell our son how everyone had such a huge role in bringing him home. We love you very much! For all of these people, we are eternally gratefully and know that you will receive many blessings for your generosity.

After everything, we had three boxes of stuff left and that will be donated to charity. I still have a few things to sell on craigslist, and I plan on taking the rest of the books to Half-Price books. We still need about $1000 to complete the first step, so please pray that God provides us with the rest of the money. Also, if you could please pray for a situation that I am dealing with that is affecting us financially. Hopefully, one day soon I can talk more openly about it, but right now we just need A TON of prayer over the issue. It has completely tied us up financially, and I know it's satan trying to get in the way of God's plan.

TO GOD BE THE GLORY!!!