We are home!!

We arrived home late last night!!! It was truly an amazing trip!!!! I will be adding more pictures and updates in the weeks ahead. I just wanted to thank you all for the prayers and financial help!!! I loved every single second of the trip and its a little hard to be home without tearying up about the things that happened. The team we went with was AWESOME!!!! There were a lot of tears at the airport last night and it was hard to part after such a powerful week!!! Pray that we are able to discern what God wants us to do with what we learned on the trip.

On of our team members shared this video with us today. (Thanks Amy) It again brought tears to my eyes as it shows our earthy stuggle so well and shows us that all we need is to give it up and turn to the Lord!!!!!!!!!

It’s a skit that was done at Winterfest this year set to “Everything” by the band Lifehouse. It brought me to tears and reminded me how careful I need to be every single day to cling to Jesus. We have so many “distractions” that can come against us, tempt us, and tear us away from God. And they will tear our life apart. But, if we spend our days right next to God, including Him in our daily activities, letting Him lead us, we will be protected.

I pray that it moves you as it moved me.






If you need Jesus to come to your rescue and help you fight off the distractions, temptations, and harmful influences in your life all you have to do is ask for His help. Get down on your knees and pray to God. Ask Him to forgive you for your sins, tell Him that you believe that He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to die for you, so you could spend eternity in relationship with Him.
If you just made a decision to follow Jesus for the first time, or rededicated your life to Him, please let us know.

We would love to hear from you!!!

Haiti updates

Due to time constraints here!! Its been busy, busy, busy but very good. If you are checking this blog for updates from me for our week please go to either one of these sites.

http://lighthousetrips.blogspot.com or

http://www.livesayhaiti.blogspot.com


There are lots of pictures on both sites!!!!

Hello from Haiti

This is for all those that are not following us on the church blog.

After a 2 hour sit on the plane in Miami (a passenger not showing up and they had to get one piece of luggage off the plane due to security reasons. Imagine human hands having to find one bag out of hundreds of pieces of luggage or more) we arrived in Haiti at 6:30 pm our time instread of 4:00pm. We were all very tired and we had a 2 hour ride back to the mission in the pitch black but we made it very safely and only little sore from the ride. We had a wonderful Authentic Kreyold meal and then pretty much went to bed.This morning we were all a litt more awake and we went to the church in Luly this morning. It was an amazing day. You can always fell God at this little church near the Ocean. It turned out that the convention that we raised money for was actually today and we were all there to take part in this!!! Wow! It was also the church's 14th birthday. There was a wedding, a baby dediction, 2 baptisms (in the early morning before we arrived). Nate was asked to pray for the wedding and the baby dediction and it was so neat to just be a part of all this. There was ton of singing and it was incredible!!! It gives me goosebumps everytime we take part in these services and it is also very humbling to know that God called each one of us to Haiti and this time and to take part. They knew were coming so they deciced to have the convetion when we were there. Church was packed and after 3 hours it was Nate's time to preach! It went so well and the truth was spoken and please pray that hearts were opened and that some of those that were there would come to call Christ, their Lord and savior. Its has been raining and thunderstorming but the storms here are awesome!!!! We are getting ready for our first day of bible school tomorrow. Lots of preperation but we are all in high spirits and feeling great!! Thanks for the prayers. They are being felt!!!!! Hopefully we will be able to get some pictures on soon. We had some really fun times today with the Haitians!!!!

Just under 48 hours until we leave!!! woo hoo!!! I cannot believe the time is almost here!

The kids are all packed and arrangements all set in place. We have an awesome team going and I could not be more excited!!!! Thank you all for the prayers that you have already given us and for all the donations that we have been given!! We cannot wait to share Christ's love with the people in Haiti!!! I will be trying to post here but most of the posts will probably be here:

http://lighthousetrips.blogspot.com You can post comments to the whole team there as well.

We have to be at the airport by 4:45am on Saturday morning and we will not get into Haiti until Late Saturday night so not sure if I will be able to post anything until Sunday afternoon or evening.

Just some misceleanous pictures for you today!! We had an awesome church service and they also comissioned our Haiti team!! It was awesome to have most of our team together today!!

These pictures are just ones that I had been hoping to post for awhile now but I kind of lost where i hat put them and just found them

The first one is of one of our campfire skillet dinners!! Yum!!! They are so good!

This one had Onions, whole mushrooms, green peppers, Brauts, Zuchinni, summer squash and some other items in it!! So good





This picture is of a little girl named Lauren!
She is a part of our homegroup and she got stuck on the bottom of our chair a few weeks back. It was just too cute NOT to take a photo!!! :)










This is a picture of our whole group that is going to Haiti. There was only one person missing and that is because she lives out of state. Its going to be a really fun group!!

I have been reprimanded by Tori for not updating today! LOL

I really do not have much to say. I had my dryer fixed this morning. I took 5 children grocery shopping and getting last minutes Haiti supplies.

Diane and Tori came over last night and really helped us finish packing. They helped so much and we cannot thank them enough. We have only 1 more suitcase to pack and that is a very good! Things have been a little stressful wondering if we would get everything packed.

Hard to believe that we leave in 7 days.

Tonight we have to go to Nate's sister for dinner. We are having a cook out so please pray the rain is done! My niece is out here this week from New Mexico so it will be fun to see her again!!

Just a few picture of the Nikolas (thanks Tori for noticing that I spelled Nik's name wrong LOL!!) and Caleb at a petty zoo in June!

Lincoln Brewster's everlasting God

This is one of my favorite songs right now. We have been singing this in church and it just brings me right before God's throne!! I just felt the need to share with those of you out there and I hope you enjoy it too!! Cheri this is for you!!!!

Love ya!!

I hope I can get this to work. I found this while searching things out on youtube. A lot of you do not know the story of how we actually able to travel to adopt Nikolas. We had waiting for almost 2 years for our little boy from Irkutsk, Russia.

We were getting closer to getting a court hearing when we got a phone call about a possible stoppage of adoptions in Russia (now we know that this comes up a lot but at the time we had no idea) we were told that possibly we could travel in February (this was end of Nov) if we were able to go at all. Of course we were devastated as we thought we would go anytime.

One Sunday in early December we were eating breakfast before church and I was reading the sunday paper and the first page had a huge picture of a military plane crash. It said Irkutsk right on the front page and that it had hit an apartment building and had burned down an orphanage next door. Of course we were horrified because at the time we had no idea which orphanage Nikolas had been in.

I found this on youtube so I hope it works. We were able to visit this site 1 week after this crash happened and there was a huge memorial to the victims.



This was the actual footage of the site that we were able to visit. The day after this happened we found out we had to get to Irkutsk by that Thursday to get our son because they had to make room for all the orphans that had been in the burned out building. The govenor was making special arrangements for all families waiting to get their kids immediately. I just came across this and it brough tears to my eyes to think of the way God works and that he knows ALL!!!!!!!

We had homegroup (through our church) on Sunday night at the park and there is a pond nearby and all the kids brought fishing poles made out of sticks and they used licorice for bait and most of the kids caught fish. this is one of Hannah! She was so excited!!

Thanks Tammy for having the cell phone handy to get a picture!

I know I said that I would post more but this summer has been just crazy!!

I wanted to share this picture. Some of you may remember that friends of ours had a baby one February 25, 2006. What was special about this baby was that she was 1 pound 13 ounces when she was born. She is now 15 months old and doing wonderful!! She is such a doll and so much fun!!!

Finally 4th of July pictures!!! The kids had so much fun tubing!!!

Create yours at BlingyBlob.com!

We finally have DSL!! Woo hoo!!! I will try to be much better at blogging!!!


This is Shiyan who works in China with Bethany. She helped us bring Hannah home!!

I could not remember if I had posted these or not but Nik made this in school! I thought it was very cute!! He is supposed to be skiing!!

DSL Soon!!

I have not updated anything in awhile and that is because we are still on dial up. Ugh!

My pictures are not loading well and it takes soooooooooooo long to do anything. However we now have DSL ordered and I cannot wait. So keep checking back soon for a big blog fest coming in the near future!!!!!!!!!!

One year and 2 days ago since Hannah and Bysuki saw each other and it was like they never were apart!! It was a wonderful and teary eyed day!!!! He looked great and is living with an awesome family!! Welcome to Michigan Miller! We are so excited to have you here!!!!!

Katie Field day June 2007

Nikolas's field day at the middle school with friends from one of the other schools