A Year Ago Today - 12 Months with Davis

We first fell in love with this face in the fall of 2012.

Love grew with the subsequence pictures and updates we received. 

And then a year ago today we walked into a very nondescript office building in Guangzhou, China in the afternoon as a family of four, along with our own personal camera crew of two wonderful grandparents! And in the most surreal experience of our lives, we met Davis inside for the first time and walked back outside a couple of hours later with him as a family of five.

There really are no adequate words to describe the journey that has taken place since then. It has been a joy for Daryl and I to watch Davis' attachment to our family, to see his personality grow and shine forth, to watch him play and laugh with his brothers, to have a front row seat as he experiences so many firsts, to see him figure out language and numbers and colors and shapes, to watch him charm people everywhere he goes (school, church, the ball field, the grocery store, restaurants and more), to see him develop obsessions with Mickey Mouse, Jake the Pirate and Spiderman. Besides the joy of watching Davis adapt and grow, this adoption journey has changed Daryl and I, as well as Parker and Wesley in profound ways, not the least of which has been a more deeply centered relationship with God. We stepped out in faith to answer a calling we felt God had placed in our hearts. And God demonstrated overwhelming grace and faithfulness repeatedly in our journey toward Davis and in every day since. 

In some ways this has been both the shortest and longest year of our lives. Short in the sense that it still seems like yesterday when we met him; long in the sense that Davis' presence in our family feels so right it is hard to remember he hasn't been with us for every day of his almost 4 years of life.