He Is Still El Roi - The God Who Sees

I have struggled for literally a month now to write this next blog entry. I have started and stopped several times...deleted sentences, words, and then sat staring at the screen, trying to find the right words that would even come close to expressing what I've been thinking and feeling. But I think, after all these weeks, I've come to the conclusion that sometimes words are just inadequate.


So often, my writings consist of things God has been teaching me about  Himself through the pages of Scripture. In fact my last post I wrote about how God had engraved on my heart anew about His character through the story of Hagar. This time, He has taken what He taught me through the story of Hagar and reiterated in a very personal way that He is still El Roi the God who sees...and etched it further in my heart through a story within my own family.

Nyah - at the orphanage
Nyah - "Purpose"

The story began last fall when my brother and his wife answered God's call for them to add through adoption to their already active family. As a family, we all began to pray for this faceless little one, not even knowing whether she had been born yet but believing that God knew exactly who she was and was watching over her.

Fast forward to March 2011 halfway around the world to the Congo where a  newborn infant girl lay crying at the bottom of a ditch where she was left to die. Her brother, not yet two years old, stood a few yards away, scared, confused and alone. Both abandoned and unprotected in a country known for its violence.

Jayce - at the orphanage
Jayce -"healer" "the Lord is Salvation"

Abandoned because of desperation, yes, but not abandoned by God. Just like He did thousands of years ago when He heard Hagar's desperate cries in the wilderness, God heard the cries of these precious children and saw their plight. Those two little ones were found, brought to an orphanage, and within 6 months from the time they were found, God brought them home into the waiting arms of my brother and sister-in-law.

Jayce in his new home playing football
with his brothers.

To finally look into their faces after nearly a year of waiting, praying, and wondering...to touch them and hold them and reflect on all that had happened to them in their short lives...to put together in my mind the miracle that God had orchestrated to bring these two particular children, to this particular family...to realize that not only have their lives been altered and impacted through adoption but ours as well...to witness God at work...still seeing...still hearing...still answering prayer...to be able to literally see with my own eyes the work of the very same God that I had read about in the pages of Scripture...all these thoughts have swirled around and around in mind and in my heart leaving me with a desire to express them but an inability to come up with the right words than adequately describes the awe and wonder I feel at being privileged to know and belong to this God! I am reminded of the words of Job  when he said, "My ears had heard of You but now my eyes have seen You." 

Todd & Kristin and their 5 children!

And finally, throughout this whole journey, I can't help but realize that what God has done for these children is also a picture of what He has done for me. He found me when I was abandoned and dead in my sin and He picked me up out of the bottom of the ditch and gave me a new life, a new home, and a new name and made me one of His heirs!

Aunt Cherie with Nyah

"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ...In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding...Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen." (Taken from Eph. 1:3-8; 3:20-21)