HE knows....

The familiar phrase... hind sight is 20/20...

One of the things I love most about our Savior is when you can look back at the beautiful way HIS plan has unfolded in your life or in a certain situation...

Something I love even more is when you get that special feeling... knowing at that moment that you can actually recognize, in the here and now, HIM at work in your life doing something really special...

Meet the Dinks...

Literally the Lord has woven our friendship together from across the ocean and across the nation...

When Samuel died, I struggled so deeply... I was hurting like I never thought possible... I was struggling to process my own grief while caring for our 4 kids and making sure they were doing ok through the whole process of losing a brother...and I was incredibly lonely in my sadness... 

I think I cried through church every Sunday, sitting in the pew alone just me, my kids, my tears, my broken heart... 

And then they walked in one Sunday... sought me out... and low and behold in that moment I knew I had found a friend....

God was moving them from Sweden, of all places right to our town in Oklahoma... we had a ton of mutual connections at the church I had grown up at in Wisconsin, they were close to my college roommate, and I will never forget asking them if they knew so and so from my home church... Their response, "They get custody of our children if anything ever happens to us!"  We had so many connections...

The next time they came to visit before they moved was just 2 days after Joel was stillborn, the baby that we were supposed to adopt.  I remember when  Nik asked how I was, I gave her a very real honest response... Not so good... I shared with her a little about what had happened, how we had gone to see him at the hospital, how we had spent time with his birth mom... 

And that is when I saw it... a tear falling down her cheek... She cared... She wanted to hear... She was sympathetic to our new loss... She could step beyond herself and maybe even her possible uncomfortableness of an almost stranger sharing a recent personal experience of death with her...

But it didn't stop her from caring for a single second.  In that moment,  I knew God had done a beautiful thing moving them all the way from Sweden to our back door...

 This sweet precious family walked with us through a very difficult Samuel's first birthday in heaven, our crazy adoption with Hope, our embryo adoption and scary pregnancy of Levi, and our premature birth and adoption of Isaiah... She was even with me when I got the news that the pregnancy I was experiencing would end in a miscarriage... They supported us compassionately through all of that as well as doing regular fun, exciting life together with the rest of our kiddos and their sweet 3...

And as if once wasn't enough... 

While we have finally settled in here in Illinois after arriving a year ago...

They are now newly settling in less than 30 minutes from where we live...

God has moved them once again right to our back door...

And we couldn't be more grateful to God for moving our precious friends so close:)

 

(I am so thankful for the many precious friends we made during our time in Oklahoma... this is just like the cherry on top that they are now here with us too:)

The Lord's good plans for us amaze me sometimes... As much as we teased them to move up here... I honestly, never really saw it coming... 

What a beautiful, fun, wonderful surprise and addition to our lives here in Illinois...

 

I am amazed at the Lord's goodness to us! 

 

 He sees the full picture...  All the way from Sweden to Tulsa, to Illinois... And all the way from my heart to the Heavens...

 

He always knows... He is so faithful...