Well, Baby #3 could arrive any day now!  For those of you who haven’t heard, Eric and I are adopting again!  The story has been truly amazing and God-scripted from the very beginning.  A few months ago, God arranged a “divine appointment” for us with a precious eighteen-year-old girl named Bex, short for Rebekah.  (That’s her in the photo with all of us!)  Bex was visiting our church from out-of-state, and had recently found out she was pregnant.  Eric, in true Ludy-style, spoke straightforwardly about God’s amazing plan for her and for this little life, and said, “I don’t even need to talk with Leslie, I know that if you need a family for this baby, we would adopt this child.” I remember laughing when he told me about it.  “Don’t you think that might have seemed little presumptuous to her?” I asked him.  (I mean, how many people would walk up to a girl they don’t even know and offer to adopt her baby?)  But for some reason, Eric felt God had directed him to say those words. 

Just before meeting Bex, Eric and I had begun to pray about our next adoption.  God had laid it on our heart that He had ordained another child to come into our family.  We didn’t have a lot of clear direction on where we were to look for this child.  We had begun doing some research into adopting from Ethiopia and Haiti, and felt that God would hallmark a child in need for us to adopt, just like he did with Harper.  After a couple of months, though, we still didn’t have a clear direction, so we continued to wait and pray.

We didn’t see Bex for several weeks, and assumed she had returned back to her home in North Carolina.  But then over the summer, she showed up at church again, and we found out that she had decided to stay in Colorado, and that she had decided on adoption for her baby.  She showed us the ultra-sound photos of her little unborn boy.  We were excited to see her again and her touched by the photos, but even then it did not occur to us that this might be our next child.  We assumed that she had already found an adoptive family.  After chatting for a few minutes, Eric asked her what agency she had chosen to work with.  “Hope’s Promise” came the reply.  At that moment, Eric felt God speaking.  Just that past week, we had made an appointment with that very same agency, not really knowing why.  Hope’s Promise was a 2-hour drive from our home, and they didn’t even do adoptions in the countries we were looking at.  But for an inexplicable reason, we had felt directed to set up an appointment with them.  And now we learned that this was the very same agency Bex had chosen to work with.

On the drive home from church, Eric asked me if I felt anything significant about our conversation with Bex.  I was hesitant to say yes, but it truly did seem like God was orchestrating something.  After praying about it that night, we called Bex the next day and asked to meet with her.  That conversation was amazing and God-directed!  In His ever-gentle way, God made it clear to all of us that this was a story He was scripting.  Over the past few months, there have been so many fingerprints of God in working out every detail of this adoption, and the whole process has been truly supernatural.  God even wove the song How Beautiful into our first prayer time with Bex – which if you have read When Dreams Come True, you will know how significant that song is to us!  His ways are truly perfect.

As an added blessing, Bex has become a sweet part of our family!  She is a radiant set-apart young woman, and has experienced a deep, growing intimacy with Christ through all of this. Our kids absolutely love her, and they are so eager to meet their little brother!  We are so excited that this will be an open adoption in which Bex will have an ongoing relationship with her child.  We know that great things lie in store – and when God writes the story, it only gets more beautiful with time!

Be encouraged girls – God is very interested in scripting the details of our lives when we place the pen in His hands.  And His stories are far beyond any that we could script for ourselves!