All of this means this exciting news came just in time! A matching grant has been offered toward the purchase of their van! Every donation, up to $5000, will be matched, dollar for dollar! So if you have $10 to give, your donation will become $10. Pretty cool, right?  The grant deadline is February 9, 2011. Please consider giving to this great cause! Four former orphans are counting on you!

How to Contribute:

You can give by sending a check made out to Tekoa 211 to:

Tracie Loux,
12312 Askew St.
Grandview, MO 64030.

If you’re sending a check, it would be a good idea to let Tracie know to make sure it gets tallied in time for the grant. Or you can let me know, and I’ll get the message to the grant holder. Together we can make this happen!

Any of you who have read my blog for any length of time, know that my sister -in- law, Renee’ and her beautiful children lost their husband and daddy in 2009 just 2 days before Christmas. Renee and Derek worked together trumpeting the cause of the orphan. They not only spoke out in defense of the fatherless, they put actions to their words by bringing children into their own home.

Renee and Derek’s first son, Josiah was born with Spina Bifida and passed away at age 2  1/2. Josiah’s incredible life opened their eyes and ours to the precious gift of children with special needs. They went on to have 2 beautiful daughters Sophia and Michaela. Over the past 10 years, Derek and Renee adopted 8 children. Their 5 daughters, adopted from the Marshall Islands, (Teyolla, Keyolla, Telma, Leeann, and Sana) had all been neglected, abused, and abandoned. Through Derek and Renee’s loving parenting, much prayer, and devotion to their daughters, these precious beauties have walked through incredible healing and restoration. Their 3 precious boys (Sasha, Ethan, and Silas) were abandoned at birth in an orphanage in Ukraine. Sasha has Spina Bifida. Ethan and Silas both have Down syndrome. The boys were severely malnourished, emotionally neglected and were suffering on so many levels. Derek and Renee literally nursed Ethan, a 5 year old weighing 11 lbs, unable to walk or  even crawl,  back to life! As a family we witness this starving, sick little boy come back to life, a true miracle of God’s kindness and his parent’s loving commitment.

After, her husband’s death, my precious sister in law, not only walked through grief and suffering with her children in  such a remarkable way, she also stood tall, determined to carry on the mission that she and Derek worked passionately for- defending orphans and standing for justice.

Renee currently serves as the director of the Orphan Justice Center in Kansas City, MO with the mission to RESCUE, ADOPT, and RESTORE! The goal of OJC is to raise awareness, equip families to adopt, and establish safe, restorative communities for orphans.

In addition on a personal level, Renee continues to walk heroically, bringing orphans into her home and calling them her own. Since Derek’s death, Renee has brought a beautiful 1 year old boy, Judah, into her home, has taken in a little blind girl, Joanna to assist her parents in getting her the care and education she needs to thrive, and has opened her home and offered to legally adopt  a 30 year old, Dawn, an orphan herself, who is working on the streets of Ecuador caring for orphans.

Renee has been given 45 acres in Grandview, MO to help her walk out the vision she and Derek had to build a home with space enough to personally take in 30+ orphans. Their dream together was to take in children with special needs and provide them with a loving home where they could be restored and healed. Their dream was to have horticultural therapy, equine therapy, along with traditional therapies. You can read more about their vision at The JOSIAH FUND website.

When I heard today that Extreme Home Makeover was looking for a deserving family in the state of Missouri, I couldn’t think of a more deserving family. This precious family: Renee, her mother Flo, and the 12 children currently in their home, share a 4 bedroom home that is bursting at the seams. They have exhausted every available space and have simply run out of room. Renee doesn’t know the word “No” when it comes to children in need. Their garage and family room have both been converted to extra sleeping space, and there is simply no room left. In addition, their current home has three floors and requires Renee to lift Sasha and his wheelchair from level to level so that he can be with the family.

When someone as rare and precious as my sister Renee desires to love and live her life in a away that to some may seem extreme, extravagant, or hard to even fathom, it seems just wrong to see something like MORE ROOM hold her back from LOVING LARGE!

If you would please help spread the word and nominate Renee Loux for this amazing opportunity to be considered for an Extreme Home Makeover. If you have been touched by this story, I would also encourage you to blog, post on FB or share in anyway possible.

DIRECTIONS

Email nominations to CastingMissouri@gmail.com

Each nomination must include the names, ages of everyone in the house, a description of the major challenges within the home and a short description of the family story. (Feel free to cut and paste from my post if it’s helpful, but I would love to have you share your own personal connection to the Loux Family)

Here’s a list of names and ages if you’d like to copy and paste, though I encourage you to write a personal description of this sweet family if you know them at all.

Renee-mother (49)

Flo- Renee’s mother (72)

Telma-Renee’s daughter, adopted from the Marshall Islands (19)

Teyolla- Renee’s daughter, adopted from the Marshall Islands (19)

Keyolla- Renee’s daughter, adopted from the Marshall Islands (19)

LeeAnn- Renee’s daughter, adopted from the Marshall Islands (16)

Sophia- Renee’s daughter (13)

Michaela- Renee’s daughter (10)

Sana- Renee’s daughter adopted from the Marshall Islands (9)

Sasha- Renee’s son with Spina Bifida adopted from Ukraine (8)

Ethan- Renee’s son with Down Syndrome adopted from Ukraine (7)

Silas- Renee’s son with Down Syndrome adopted from Ukraine (4)

Judah – Renee’ son adopted from the Marshall Islands (1)

Joanna- a blind girl under the legal guardianship of Renee (from the Marshall Islands) age 13

Deadline is March 31st. Additional Details HERE!

Miracles Happen When You Speak Up

In the old paradigm, we give to the work of a/the church. This includes money for the pastor’s salary and maintenance of the building, donating our cast-offs to the church rummage sale, and volunteering in the church nursery and Sunday school. All of that is good, and should be continued. In this new movement, though, the main ministry is not happening within the structure of the church, so the support roles must move to where the action is: in homes. This requires our giving, financial as well as time, be expanded to include not just the ministry of the established church, but to include the ministry that happens in adoptive homes, as well.

To make this happen, we have to shift from seeing just the church to seeing the Kingdom of God. I can’t say how it is for everyone, but for us, it has been a shift in priorities. Years ago I used to daydream about what we’d do if we had more money. The list included things like getting a bigger house, maybe take a nice vacation now and then, eat something besides hamburger… I still daydream about what we’d do if we had more money, but the list has changed. Now it includes paying for some adoptions, buying Tracie Loux a van, donating to The Josiah Fund to help build a house for 50 kids, donate to The Zoe Foundation to help build their database of adoption-ready families and support for birth mothers, and donate to the Orphan Justice Center.

On a practical, day-to-day level, what does this look like? Some work done on the outside of our house left the lawn kind of pitiful.  We could get it fixed, but the cost to have it done is about that of getting a h0mestudy. Hmm… Beautiful lawn vs. beautiful family able to rescue an orphan? That’s an easy choice!  What about vacations? Well, we go visit our grown children in another state, but outside of that, not so much. Bahamas or baby? I choose the baby! It also looks like having total strangers stay in our home while waiting for local paperwork to get approved for an adoption. (They became a permanent part of our family, by the way!)

Don’t get me wrong; we’re not martyrs. We don’t live in poverty, and we have fun. We have hobbies, go to movies and museums, and, living near New York City, take in an occasional Broadway show. Our lives are full and happy. We have just made the decision we don’t need everything society says we do. Our clothes are simple, our cars ordinary, and our house average. Instead of amassing a bunch of material things we can live without, we have chosen to invest in the kind of treasure that lasts: the Kingdom kind.

As I observed the conversation, I saw the real issue was one of paradigm. Confused still viewed adoption in the old paradigm. This is the school of thought that says adoption is what you do when you are unable to conceive. It says, “Our family isn’t complete because we have no children. We’ll adopt 2.5 kids, get the dog and the picket fence, and then we’ll have it all.” There’s certainly nothing wrong with this line of thinking; it makes sense for couples who can’t conceive to adopt the child another has conceived but can’t raise. However, there is a new paradigm of adoption that  brings with it a different motivation to adopt.

This new adoption paradigm (some are calling it an adoption revolution) doesn’t view adoption as primarily a way to fill a couple’s desire for children. Rather, it is a means to provide for and protect the estimated 137 million orphans in the world. Some of these orphans have lost both parents (or the only parent they’ve ever known) to disease, war, or some other tragedy. Some of them have living parents, but are orphans in the sense that the parents have turned them over to orphanages or agencies because they can no longer meet the needs of the child. In this country, most are “orphans” because their parents lost custody due to inability to care for them, or the parents relinquished their rights to the child at birth. No matter how they come to be known as orphans, they are children in need of someone to step up to the plate and say, “I will parent this child.”

This new paradigm has brought with it a new breed of adoptive parents. They are not people out to fulfill their needs, desires, or dreams. They are people who are out to fulfill the call of James 1:27, which says that pure religion (meaning your faith is unselfish,  and your life is offered as service to God) is to take care of orphans and widows. The families I personally know that are part of this adoption movement have willingly laid down the “American dream”  of having a big house with lots of extra room, fancy cars, and fancy vacations in order to bring some of these children into their homes. Their lives are busy, their houses are full, and their children are blossoming beyond belief! They have traded comfort and ease for smiling faces and full hearts.

To Confused, I would say, you are under no pressure to pay for someone else’s child. But if you stop to think about it, wouldn’t you like to help pay for Jesus’ child? For his children? Wouldn’t you like to join the behind-the-scenes army that, while not necessarily equipped to bring orphans into their own homes, have been equipped to help bring them into a permanent home, with a permanent family, where they will be raised with love and dignity, in the knowledge of the Lord? Because in reality, that’s the bottom line of what the adoption movement is all about.

For Confused, and anyone else that is now curious about what it looks like to be part of this “secret” army, I’ll write more on that in a couple days. For now, let the truth sink in that adoption isn’t always what it used to be. It’s about the children, not the parents. It’s about little beauties like this, that without parents willing to put aside their own comfort for her sake, would have begun her life in foster care, where it is unknown when or even if she would have found a permanent home. Selah…

]]> http://thecheerfulgiver.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/a-new-paradigm/feed/ 35 Dorean Beattie Mommy and Joanna http://thecheerfulgiver.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/a-worthwhile-read/ http://thecheerfulgiver.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/a-worthwhile-read/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:43:01 +0000 Dorean Beattie http://thecheerfulgiver.wordpress.com/?p=462 ]]> Here’s a great post written by a mom about happiness, kids, and Kingdom priorities:

I don’t want my children to be happy

You probably know that Tracie and her husband John, along with their three children, moved to Kansas City, Missouri a few years ago to be part of the International House of Prayer. (This means that, rather than having a full-time good paying job, complete with benefits, they have a full-time ministry job and live on missionary support, which they raise themselves.) You probably also know that three years ago they adopted a newborn baby girl domestically, and then adopted two special needs toddlers from Ukraine a year and half ago. You may even know that while she was busy adopting three little ones herself, she was helping 37 families complete their own adoptions, and has several more families in process, including three that are already matched and waiting for their babies to be born.

What you may not know about Tracie is what kind of vehicle she drives: a ’99 minivan with almost 140,000 miles on it. Yep, a minivan with seating for seven, for a family of eight. Being ever resourceful, Tracie and John ditched the middle two-seater seat and replaced it with a three seater seat, and now they are able to squeeze three teenagers and three toddlers in car seats into the back of their minivan. I can only imagine how fun it is to climb over the middle seat  to get to the back, either to sit or to buckle a toddler into a car seat, realizing that the aisle the manufacturer left to access that back seat is now occupied by seat #8! You probably don’t know the condition of this poor, overworked minivan, either. To be honest, I don’t know any specifics, but I heard how it sounded last year, and even I know a car isn’t supposed to sound like that!

So why am I telling you this? Because this family has been praying for a larger, more appropriate van ever since they became a family of eight, and I believe it’s time. They don’t just WANT a new van; they truly NEED a new van. As I wrote in my last post, so much good be done when we all get together and give even small amounts. Let’s join forces and get this family the van they so desperately need! What they really need is a 15 passenger van because, not surprisingly, they hope to rescue more orphans. When the right van becomes available it will be important to act fast, so I’m starting the money end of things right away. Our initial goal is to raise $10,000, but the more we raise the better van we will be able to get them.

There are a couple ways you can give to the Loux van fund. The first is to use the PayPal button on Tracie’s blog. The second, in case you need your gift to be tax deductible, a check made out to “Tekoa 211″ can be sent to: Tracie Loux, 12312 Askew St., Grandview, MO 64030. Attach a note to the check (don’t write ON the check) that the check is for “Loux Van”. Whichever way you choose to donate please contact me with the amount you gave so we know when we know what we have to work with. You can contact me on Facebook (Dorean Beattie) or through email (dorcb@yahoo.com).

Tracie has been such a hero to so many of us, and this time she is the one that needs some heroes. Together we can do this!

John, Tracie, the Teens and the Toddlers 2009

In the last week, I witnessed a financial “miracle” which enabled a family to do an emergency adoption. There was no wealthy benefactor that paid for the adoption; there were 182 heroes. These people gave anywhere from $5-$1200, with about half of them giving less than $30. All together, it was enough to fully ransom this little life, saving him from a life potentially spent in foster homes. Watching the Facebook updates posted by the amazing Tracie Loux over the course of a week, and seeing just how quickly we all could find money when properly motivated was amazing. (Click to visit Tracie’s personal blog here , and click here to see her adoption blog, where you can find information on newborns needing familes.)

All this got me thinking. Sure, $40,000 is a ton of money, but if we all consistently did a small part, we could make a major difference. For instance, the community at the Intertnational House of Prayer in Kansas City is made up of about 4000 people. This  includes IHOP-KC staff, IHOPU students, and FCF congregants. Sure, the missionaries don’t have piles of money, and the students don’t either. But, I’m guessing nearly everyone would find an extra $10 a month to throw in the adoption pot. Do you realize, if all 4000 of us gave $10 a month that would be $40,000, or one adoption a month fully paid for? When you add in the fact that some adoptions are closer to $20,000, just this one community could fully fund anywhere from 12-24 adoptions a year!

I realize that when you’re living on a tight budget even $10 can be a stretch, but think of it this way: The following are all about $10. Make one of these sacrifices in your monthly budget, and you could be part of a couple dozen kids having homes this year.

Things that cost about $10

a trip to Chipotle
two trips to Starbucks
a movie ticket
a sale price pizza
an everyday Tshirt
a cheap seat at a Royals (or other team) game
a car wash (with wax)
1/3 of getting highlights in your hair
1/2 a pedicure

Things $10 is less than

a  CD
 a bargain video game
a cheap haircut
a DVD
a trip to the zoo
a monthly gym membership
a shirt from American Eagle

So, what do you say? Can you spare a pizza to give a kid a home?