A change!

I actually had a few minutes to write this morning. We were at church late last night, so Alex is sleeping in.
We went back to horse therapy yesterday! What a blessing! While we were there the riding instructor came out and talked to me. He said that they have raised enough money for Alex to ride for at least a year!!! That's over $4000! As I was talking to him I could just clearly see God's hand in the situation. There's no other explanation. John wants me to write up a story about Alex that he can pass on to the people who donated, so that maybe they will see how it is helping and will be willing to contribute more on an ongoing basis. Of course I will write the story! It gives me a chance to brag about Alex and what the Lord has done! Praise the Lord!
Also the last few days we have been talking about the Russian adoption again. For awhile we felt that the Lord said to wait. Boy that was hard. The longer we waited the more our enthusiasm went down. Well, I think we are beginning to see why the Lord had us wait. I mentioned in the last post that the agency we were going with changed the "rules" on us, so that caused us to look elsewhere. We were looking for an "easy" way out, a way that didn't require much faith. Local adoption was nearly free. The Russian adoption through the other agency (before the rules changed) would have been only traveling fees which would have been doable for us. It seems the Lord is wanting to take us the more expensive route because it causes us to rely on Him 100% for the money. It stretches our faith. There is NO way possible we could come up with the money. On Monday Steve found an agency that we had never seen before. We have not seen any bad reports about them anywhere. It is a small agency, and seems to be more like a family than just a business. Steve has emailed the director twice and both times she has gotten back to us within hours! It took a few days at least with the other agency. We feel more at peace with this place, and you pay as you go so if we back out or something happens we will not owe them tens of thousands of dollars. It appears that we will either be adopting from Moscow or from Magadan which is close to Japan. If we adopt from Magadan, on the second trip we will literally be flying all the way around the world (most likely) to bring our child(ren) home!
So now that we are talking about it again and things are happening, we are getting excited again. We both have fears which can become paralyzing, so I ask for your prayers that the Lord will help us overcome. We had a chat with our pastor last night that encouraged us and reminded us that the Lord called us to do this. The Lord is good and I know that He will guide us every step through this process. I will keep you all updated!