Orphan Sunday.....New Clanton video!

(thank you Kandi Bailey!!!!!!!)


Tomorrow is Orphan Sunday....Wish we were home so our church could celebrate it with us.  Last year was very emotional for us as we had just seen Sarah...and couldn't forget her.

I'll tell you the background...
Last October a friend posted a lady's blog on FB.  http://theblessingofverity.com/
The family was finishing adopting her 9 year old  TWELVE  pound, daughter from an Eastern European country.  Katie has Downs Syndrome and had been mistreated.  In the blog she mentioned a ministry called Reese's Rainbow  http://reecesrainbow.org/.  I decided to go and look at it....so I got on the site and typed in Blind kids....Guess whose picture came up?  Ms Sarah...but she was bald and looked so much like Sam I actually thought she was a boy.  I read over it quickly and noticed that the child was in a mental institution.  Here you can see the picture of her that we first saw. http://reecesrainbow.org/28647/sponsorclanton  Her picture upset me so much that I literally turned off the computer and tried to go to bed.   I tried to forget but I couldn't sleep.  I tossed and turned and prayed for the "little boy"   I kept thinking "what if that were Sam???"   A few days went by and, Orphan Sunday was coming up.  It usually the first Sunday in November, it was November 7th.   So I thought it would be a "nice thing" to take up an offering for Sarah (who was called Genesis)  so our church did do that.....I got up and spoke about orphans and how sad things were for Shad and how bad things were for this child. 

So by the end of that day I had decided that our church should raise the money for her to get a family.  All $20,000!  LOL  So we committed to raising money and that lasted for a full 3 days...then Jon & I talked about it and decided we did not want to anyone else to adopt her!!!  We wanted her!!!!!!! 

So we were off....RUNNING....God working miracles....God providing every penny we needed....and a new van....and surprise another sweet daughter Selah.....and 7 months from tomorrow (Sunday-Orphan Sunday) we met our girls for the first time!!!!!! Monday will be 6 months since we walked out the doors of the orphanage with our precious girls......

 

Jon holding Sarah and me following with Selah.  The first time Selah had been outside in almost 4 years.....

 

 

And this picture of me and Shad meeting for the first time on 1/9/06.... minutes before he left the Chengdu orphanage forever......with me!  What an honor it has been to be with my kids as we left of the orphanages together~ what a privilege to be given these precious children to have as our own!  None of my children were "true orphans" meaning their parents didn't die...their parents didn't want to raise them.  Shad was left on a street,wrapped up in a blanket...WHY? Because somehow as a 6 month old child he had had some type of accident that damaged one eye.  So his parents who probably rejoiced that they had had a boy just months before, decided now that he was "damaged" and they left him...alone....

 

Sarah was rejected by her parents at birth.  Her parents saw her and refused to touch her.  They were older, late 30's, already had a child and decided they didn't want to even look at this sweet little girl who was born with just one eye.....they left her.... alone...

 

Selah was taken home by her parents, who then proceeded to malnourish and mistreat her.  She, along with her siblings were taken away from them.  She had 4 other sibling, 3 adopted by Ukrainians and one sister who is still in a "boarding school"  another name for an orphanage.  Selah went to a hospital of some type for 6 months!  Then she was transferred to several different shelters before briefly going to a baby house and then to the adult mental institution...she was all... alone....

 

So my three had 6 adults fail them....the system failed them....the world failed them but God never forgot them! And now they are NOT alone!!!!

 

Since we humans are not robots, God couldn't just MAKE us each one go and get an orphan or abandoned child....but if you stay with your heart open to God......you might just end up doing something "crazy" like that!!!

 

With all three, it just took a picture to fall in love.....and it was no different than if somehow Steve or Sam had ended up alone in another country.  I felt such an urgency, to get these kids home!!! 

 

With Shad if you don't know his story,  we got a newsletter from a great adoption agency All God's Children http://www.allgodschildren.org/ and I saw his picture. We had given to them in the past and every now and then we got a newsletter.   It was like a light shone on it.  But we were in NO place to adopt back in "05, Sam was little and sickly, I wasn't working....a million reasons why we should NOT adopt....but not to God!  So I called AGC and told them that I had a son who was blind and gave my number to whoever might start the process to adopt him.  We had just did all kinds of research on eye hospitals all over the country and i wanted to help that family.  Well 6 weeks later I got a call from the social worker who I had spoke to.  She told me no one but me had inquired about him and his file was schedule to go back to China if someone didn't commit.....couldn't we commit to him????  I said "NO"  I told her ALL the reasons why we could not and then she said "I really think this is God"  I thought she had lost her ever living mind......but I told her I'd talk to my husband.  So we did and we decided to do the little bit of paperwork to "commit and hold his file"  so the file wouldn't go back to China with the understanding that others could still look at his file...  We barely had the money to put the $195 down for him!    Well after we did that, then the SW kept sending me paperwork and we kept doing it...and all of a sudden we were in the middle of adopting him!  LOLOLOL   9 months and 6 days later I was picking him up in Chengdu China!!!!!!!  What a story!!!!!!

 

So that is our story of how we became the Clanton7.....

 

I encourage you to do something for orphans!

http://gracehavenhome.com/?page_id=308&fb_action_ids=10152155528130038&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=246965925417366

This family is adopting 2 children with very Special Needs from my girls' orphanage.  Also is you see the "Waiting children"  there, Patricia and Peter...those are two of the other children we'd like to adopt...especially Patricia, we even asked about her when we were there in Ukraine, hoping that we could add her but couldn't get the paperwork straight, there were questions and then by the time we knew where she was at as far as availability, we had already gone to court....  GIVE to this family's adoption or help place a donation on one of these waiting children......GIVE and PRAY!!!  The little boy lying on his tummy is one of the children they are adopting....see that room?  That is how our girls'  room looked like, they were down the hall from him.....


Or you could give to this family that just committed to Victoria, Victoria was in Sarah's room and spent alot of time with us.  As I was dressing Sarah to leave the orphanage, Victoria sat on her bed, she was across from Sarah and she just cried and cried.  She is crippled in her legs, that's it...and she totally got the fact that Sarah was leaving with her new mom and dad and she wanted a family too!  I could hardly look at her, I felt so awful!!!!    Now someone is coming for her!  And guess what?  They have an older daughter who has the same physical problem!!  Could you give to them so Victoria will be the one leaving the mental instituion soon?
http://reecesrainbow.org/1725/victoria110  

  So if you want to do something for us, do this!!!  And just let me know you did it in honor of our family!  I'd love to hear that the children get fully funded by folks who read my blog!  We'd be honored!!!!!!!!


SELAH update: she is doing good.  We took the kids over today and they got to spend a few hours with Selah.  She was alert and it made the kids happy to see her so alert:)  We are just waiting for Monday, looking forward to the fish oil and all her therapies....can't wait to see what all will happen in the next few days!