It's Been One Year!

Well, it's been a year already. For those of you who haven't followed our blogs in the past you can view them at dunnadoptions.blogspot.com to see where we've come from. To put it all in a nutshell (whatever that means... that actually sounds ridiculous if you think about it, anyway...) one year ago we traveled to Curitiba Brazil with 2 of our 3 biological children (our 19 year old stayed behind because of school) and we adopted 5 children. They were a sibling group that had spent most of their lives in an orphanage. Their mother was a prostitute, their father was taken away by the police, in handcuffs, for murdering a woman... it wasn't a good start to their lives. Their ages at the time that we adopted them were 2,4,6,8 and 11. Now they are a year older and so much has changed. They not only live with us and have our last name... but they are acting like us, dressing like us, singing in the car like us, joking and teasing like us (that's a must if you are going to survive in our home) and most of all they are "us". What I mean by that is that they are a part of the family. Not just in name only...but really a part 'of ' the family. I'm sitting here right now as I'm blogging and watching them all in the back yard. Man, we've really come a long way in one year. There have been many 'near' nervous breakdowns, a lot of tears, a lot of yelling and screaming but also a lot of good times. A lot of hugs and kisses. A lot of love. We're definitely not the perfect parents because we're still trying to figure this whole parenting thing out but God has been good to us. It's been a learning process, that's for sure. We really never saw what we've done lived out in front of us and it's not like there's a ton of books written on adopting large siblings groups. So, we're definitely giving all the glory to God for making it this far.

We're starting this new blog because we felt like we needed to change the format a little. It's still going to have stuff in it about us and our family life... there's way too much stuff happening not to blog about...but we wanted it to have more. We feel like we need to be an encouragement to those of you out there who really feel like there has to be more to our lives as Christians than what we're presently seeing and doing. Man, when I read the Bible and see what Jesus and the early church was doing... they were really rockin the world! In John 14:12, Jesus said, "that those who believed in him would not only do what he was doing... but even greater things! I don't know about you, but I think we've kind of missed it a little on that one. And I want more. I want more of Christ in my life. I want his presence to be so powerful in me that not only does it burn all of the 'me' out of 'me' but it also causes those around me to see him and only him. I've got a long way to go, but I've got to start somewhere, right? So, if you want more of God in your life and you know that there's more out there than what you've experienced in life so far, then I encourage you to subscribe to this blog and let's do this thing together, OK? You see, in my position I'm able to talk to a lot of people and a majority of them feel like there's more. People who feel like we've really lost focus on what our REAL mission is on this earth, this blog is for them and this blog is for you. You may not agree with everything I say but hopefully it will get you thinking and looking at your Bible for yourself, so that you can reach your own conclusions rather than what someone else said. Now, I'm not going to bash any particular person, church or denomination because it's not about that. But I do feel like we need to bash some of what I like to call our 'Americanized' gospel and what it has become. So hopefully you'll be challenged to be all that God has called you to be and experience what we're calling the "Real Deal Religion."