Caleb and Hannah's first day of school! They were so excited!!

This is Ryan. Caleb's best friend. He lives right across the street!!
It was his first day of Kindergarten today too!! We are very blessed that they
have the same schedule and the same teacher!!!

Hard to believe its the first day of school!!! The kids were very excited with only a few butterflies!!!!
(I was very excitd to find my batteries and charger this morning still packed away in a suitcase that was already put in storage!)

Caleb and Hannah do not go to school until tomorrow.

Cannot believe that Nik is in 5th grade this year and Heather and Katie are in 3rd!!!

At the bus stop with friends!

Well Tori! You are right those videos are very cool and yes they are a week old! LOL However we just got back from a long time of camping and of course since we have arrived home from Haiti we can not find our battery charger and extra batteries and my camera went dead just before camping so NO pictures. Of course today is also the first day of school and of course no camera. Sigh.

The kids are so excited about going to school this morning. Parts of me are very happy and parts of me are a little sad. The summer went so fast.

Video from Hillsong "Mighty to save" DVD

I loved this!! Enjoy!!





The 2nd video is what the first part went right into!!





My prayer is that we are NEVER ashamed of JESUS!!! JESUS is the ONLY truth you will ever find!!! I pray that if you are reading this and you do NOT have Jesus as your Savior that you will email us to find out more about Him!!!

Nothing special today

Nothing special going on. I have been trying to work on a very special video but youtube is giving me some issues. Hopefully soon I will have it up and running.

Have you ever been told by God something but you just are not sure what He means??


God woke me up the other night with a very big "Be Prepared". That was all I heard. I have been trying to discern this but its making me crazy.

I know with Nate being called into the comissioned pastor process that God is changing our direction in life and yes it is a little scary but also a ton exciting.

If you could keep us both in your prayers that would be awesome!!!

Amy and the translator that helped her giving the salvation message and
showing the kids how to put the salvation bracelets together.
House in the village. I believe this is the man that gave lifelines to land
to house the mission and the feeding program.
cute little girl at the feeding program.

More pictures

These are some of the houses that we see everyday from the mission grounds


The kids eating lunch after VBS. See them all in the shirts that they made
during craft time
Trying to stand up in the truck as its moving. It was much
more comfortable to stand then to sit.
After a really hard rain the road was washing out.

More pictures from Haiti

I had an nice comment from Tori this morning that I need to update so I will post some more random pictures and things. Its been very hard for me to sort out my thoughts from this last mission trip to Haiti. I LOVE Haiti. I never thought I would ever say that. I always thought my path would stay in Russia and that we would end up working in the orphanages there. Then God brought us to China to adopt Hannah and I thought maybe God would have me go back there on a mission trip someday God has totally thrown me big time. I cry when I fly into Haiti because I am so happy to be back and when we walk out to the plane in Haiti to come home I cry because I do not want to leave. God has placed a burden on my heart for the Haitian people and I have come to love them. God is so cool how he places different people on our hearts. Some people he chooses to stay close to home and that is so important too. some of us he chooses to go overseas. This last trip to Haiti was more about Evangelism and sharing Jesus to the people and I found I LOVED that part of it. I am not a builder of house and I cannot do things like that but I LOVE building God's kingdom. I would encourage anyone who to do at least one mission trip in their lifetime. Wether it is local, or somewhere in the United States or wether you feel God calling you overseas. The Great Commission challages us to go out and share the Gospel. I want to Challenage all of you too. I know some of you will worry about the costs. HOWEVER, if God truly is calling you to go HE will provide every single penny!!! I know that for a fact!! I did not have one penny to my name to go to Haiti!! God went above and beyond to provide every single penny needed!!! The extra money just went in a fund for things that we were doing in Haiti. So please pray about where God might be leading you!!! My heart is forever changed!



(these pictures are curtosy of Tammy Berghorst!!)
This is jaque (not sure of spelling) he is the worship leader at the church in luly where we went. This man has a fire and get the church praising!!

This was very funny!!! We had communion at church at it was real wine. Here Troy was telling me that in case I wanted a bigger cup. It was an awesome moment taking communtion with the Haitian people. We truly are one in Christ!!!!


This is Nathan's good friend Pastor Fritsno. He is such a gentle spirit and a true man of god!!! He walks 2 1/2 hours down the mountain everytime he hears Nathan is in Haiti just to say hi. Very humbeling.

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

Field day June 2007

I have been tagged by Cheri.

4 Favorite jobs:

1. Mom and wife
2. Stocking Hallmark stores
3. Avon
4. Working with the kids in Kingdom Cove (Sunday school program)


4 Favorite local places:

1. Cheri's, Michelle's and Julie's
2. Church
3. Grand Haven Boadwalk
4. On the border


4 Favorite foods:

1. Chinese
2. Anything seafood
3. Hot/spicy chicken wings with blue cheese (yes I am addicted(
4. Anything that has to do with chocolate

4 Favorite International spots:

1. Russia -because of Nikolas and Katie
2. China - Because of Haiti
3. Haiti
4. Switzerland - I spent a grand 3 hours there but what I saw was amazing and would love to go back


I am tagging:

1. Kimberly
2. Kaitlin
3. Terry F.
4. Kathy F.

Happy Birthday, Nathan!!!!


I have to tell you what a wonderful man that I married almost 17 years ago!!! He is the best father, husband in the whole world!! Ago I know I am a little biased!!! He is a missionary, he can preach, his heart is on fire for the Lord and I could not have asked for anyone better for the Lord to match me up with!!! Thank you God for this wonderful husband!!!!

I have some posts I need to get done of the past week or so. Field day, birthday pictures and so on but as usual my computer is not cooperating. However those can wait.

Today and tomorrow are very special days in our household!!! 1 year ago today we met Hannah for the very first time. I would like to repost what we wrote that day.

http://journeyforhannah.blogspot.com/2006/06/gotcha-june-12th-2006-wow-what-awesome.html

Try clicking on this link if doesn't work for you, you may go back into the Archives and look for June 12, 2006.


I will say that the last year has been just so easy with Hannah. I have had harder moments than she has. I cannot imagine our family without her.

Hannah some day you will read these posts and I want you to know what a treasure from God you are!!!