 background picture compliments of Unsplash For today’s promise, Matthew 3:11, I am praying a Spirit Baptism for my children. I am praying by faith. In Hebrews 11:1 the bible says, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." As you pray, pray by faith. You may not see the evidence of your prayer yet but believe it will come forth. I invite you to pray along with me for your children, young and old, or anyone you feel led to pray for.
Spirit baptism is different from water baptism. Matthew 3:11 says, “I (John the Baptist) baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes One who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with THE HOLY SPIRIT and fire.” This is what I am praying for my children today – spirit baptism, baptism with the Holy Spirit! Father, I come before You today to pray the Spirit Baptism promise over each of my children. Your word says in John 7:37, they must thirst for Your spirit. May my child/ren thirst, crave and have a passion from within their soul for a complete union with You and the fullness of the Spirit. Your word says in John 7:37, they must come unto You. May my child/ren come unto You, Lord. May they completely surrender their life to do Your whole will as they receive Your light. I thank You for removing all hindrances and road blocks from them coming to You. Your word in John 3:37 says they will come unto You and drink. I thank You that my child/ren will receive into their soul what strengthens them and nourishes their life. Your word in John 7:38 says, “He that believe in Me, as the scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” My child/ren are believers in Christ and out of their belly, out of their innermost being, their seat of intellect, their emotions and desires will flow rivers of living water. This flow is an unlimited power to do the works of Christ. My child/ren will have living water flow through them and bless a thirsty world, Lord! They will have a constant flow from the Spirit without measure. I thank You that a Spirit Baptism is for any person who believes in You. I thank You that the Spirit of God in my children satisfies their inner person and enables them to bear fruit. I thank You that they will place confidence in You, Lord. They will hope and have assurance of things not seen yet. They will fully surrender, have absolute dependence upon the word of God. They will have full surrender, they will yield and will be obedient to all known truth. They will trust wholly and unreservedly in the faithfulness of You, Lord. They will give one’s self over to a new way of life, joyful faith in and the acceptance of Christ as the substitute for sin and our Savior whereby one receives salvation, access into grace, fulfillment of the promises, the Holy Spirit, righteousness, sonship, healing, eternal life, and answers to every prayer. I thank You that the Spirit is giving my child/ren a new birth, He's a life-giver, imparter of power, eternal comforter, eternal helper, teacher of truth, reminder of all truth, guide into all truth, revealer of Christ, revealer of events, glorifier of Christ, witness for Christ. Through the baptism of the Holy Spirit my child/ren will receive the gifts of the Spirit: tongues, prophecy, word of knowledge, word of wisdom, miracles, healings, discernment, faith, and they will manifest the fruit of the spirit because of a spirit-filled life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. They will be earnest and united in faith and prayer with other believers. They will walk in the Spirit this day forward, they will be led by the Spirit this day forward, they will crucify the flesh of wrong affections and lust. My child/ren will live in the Spirit. Thank You, Lord, they will continue in Christ all the days of their life, be patient in hope, and continue in faith. I thank You for Your spirit, the spirit of truth. I thank You my child/ren have received the fullness of You: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Jesus’ name Amen. If you just prayed this over your child or any other family member or friend, please know you have just given them the greatest gift you can give them – PRAYER and INTERCESSION! God will answer these prayers for them. Just believe!
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 A promise. A promise is a declaration or assurance that one will do a particular thing or that a particular thing will happen. A promise is a guarantee. It is an oath, an agreement, a contract. A promise is a covenant. God has many promises in the bible for us. His promises can be found from Genesis to Revelation. For the rest of the year, I will be praying God’s great and precious promises from Matthew to Revelation over our children we birth, adopt and foster and I invite you to join me and pray for your children. The effective, fervent prayer of a person who keeps God’s commands has much power. Prayer does change things.
Today, I am praying the promise of salvation from sin through Jesus Christ taken from Matthew 1:21, “And she shall bring forth a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” Father, I bring forth my child/ren (call out their name) to You. The very name of Jesus means Savior. Thank You, Lord, for saving my child/ren from their sins, saving them from the darkness of this world. I pray for their mind, Lord. Help them be disciplined in their thought life. Let them desire to want to think on what is just, pure and lovely and of good reports (Philippians 4:8). Lord, I pray for their eyes. Let them be strong to turn away from things that displease You, from seeing things that can lead them on the wrong path. Let their eyes be open to recognize You in their life (Luke 24:31). I thank You that any veil that is over their eyes is taken away as they turn to You, Lord (2 Corinthians 3:16). I pray that the eyes of their heart may be enlightened in order that they may know the hope to which You have called them, the riches of Your glorious inheritance in Your holy people, and Your incomparably great power for us who believe (Ephesians 1:18,19). Lord, I pray for their ears and what they are listening to. May they hear Your still small voice. May they hear You crystal clearly when You speak to them. Lord, I pray over their hands and feet. I rebuke laziness and apathy from them. I declare the works of their hands will be pleasing to You, Lord. They will know the value of hard work at home, at school, and in their calling and purpose as adults. They will be diligent in the work before them and they shall prosper. Their feet will carry them through and bring forth peace to people on their path. They will be strong in the Lord, unshakeable and not afraid to share the good news of the gospel. Thank You, Lord, that You make known to our children the path of life; You will fill them with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand (Psalm 16:11). So today, Lord, I thank You for sending us a Savior; for sending us Your Son Jesus Christ, for dying on a cross for my child/ren, for conquering death and raising from the dead so that my child/ren can be saved, can be one of Yours! In Jesus’ mighty name. Amen.  As a Mom to eight children, six adopted and two birthed, I can tell you story after story of countless moments in the past 14 years of Motherhood of how I looked at the circumstances in front of me, the hard experiences of raising and loving children that we adopted at 9, 13, and 15 years old, raising and loving children who had immense needs that seemed impossible to meet and thought, “I must have heard God wrong.”
I have always been a passionate person as far back as I can remember; however, my passions before giving my whole life to Christ were directed to worldly pleasures and full of self-focused desires. The day I gave my whole life to Him, my passions turned towards His Kingdom, towards the ways of my Lord. It’s beautiful what God does. Once we give our life over to Him on this side of heaven, God takes what the devil meant to further his dark, hate-filled agenda and turns it into a powerful tool to further God’s Kingdom, to bring hope to a truly dying world. My passion before salvation was a tool for the enemy. My passion after salvation is a weapon towards the enemy! One of the greatest pieces of this world are the eight children God has given to my husband and me. These are the gifts that are the most valuable to us. These are the gifts that are most valuable to Him….. His children! The enemy would love nothing more than for Moms and Dads to bow down to depression, to bow down to giving up, to bow down to indifference and spinelessness. The times of “hard” during the parenting years are the exact times to dig your feet deep and let determination rise in you. These are the very times to grab hold of staying power and be determined to endure through the tough and the hard days of parenting. As I look back and remember the moments of thinking I don’t see how any of this is going to change. I don’t see how my daughter is going stop hating me for adopting her. I don’t see how my son is going to heal from years of abuse in an orphanage. I don’t see how to balance the joys of motherhood with the hurt and frustration I feel during motherhood. As I think about these moments, I see how one decision early on to war in prayer for our children, for our family, has no doubt changed the future of our children; changed the atmosphere in our home. The bible is filled with His great and precious promises for His children; for us, for our children, we just only need to pick it up and speak it forth. God’s word says in Isaiah 55:11, “So is my word that goes out from my mouth: it will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” For the remainder of the year, I am going to write on the promises God has for our children. I hope you will join me in praying these promises over your children as well! One of the greatest treasures you can give children is the gift of God’s word being spoken over them! 2 Peter 1:4, “And because of His glory and excellence, He has given us great and precious promises. These are the promises that enable you to share His divine nature and escape the world’s corruption caused by human desires.” So I invite you to come back as I post about praying His great and precious promises from His word over our children! Be blessed today! In Christ, Aimee'  Meet sweet Lila Lou! Lila Lou is a beautiful little girl who enters the foster care system..
I am excited to start writing several adoption and foster care books for children and families. These books will be a great resource for children who are adopted or in the foster care system, for parents who adopted, for parents who are fostering, and/or for foster care workers and social workers who want to help children better understand adoption and foster care. These books will also be a great resource for schools and churches to have healthy conversations about adoption and foster care during class reading time and children's church. Can you recall a moment when you have walked through something so hard that during the crying out to God a bold prayer is birthed and a war cry prayer is spoken? I have had this happen more times than I can count. Today is about one of those times a war cry was birthed and I was determined to take back what the devil was trying to steal from me….. my children.
I am posting at Adoption Strong today! Read the rest here.....  I am happy to announce that we launched an adoption and foster care website called Adoption Strong: Finding strength together. We understand and know that choosing the path of adoption or foster care can be exciting and fearful at the same time. We know sometimes you can feel lonely on these paths. We also know that when you choose to adopt or foster a child, something is birthed in you and a passion ignites and compels you to make a difference in the lives of the fatherless in this world. I believe you will be so encouraged if you are a family that is praying or has chosen to take the journey of adoption or foster care. www.adoptionstrong.com
 It's a new year and I love the week leading up to the first of the year. It is a week of anticipating how I can do things better, dream about what I would like to accomplish, and intentionally get excited about all that God has planned for my family and me for 2017. I use the first 21 days of January starting January 6 to fast and pray and get Godly direction for the new year. During this time, God will usually amplify a word or two and highlight a specific scripture that I know I will be coming back to again and again in the coming year. Several years ago I started sitting our children down at the family table and making our children a New Year's Resolution template. I want them involved in new year goals. I want them to see the new year as a way to step back, look at their accomplishments in the past year or areas they need to focus on improving and pray and work towards those goals in the new year. Their growth spiritually, mentally, and physically not only benefits them but our family as well. Feel free to download our simple New Year's Resolution Template to use at your home with your children. You can modify for adults too :) I would love to hear if you are downloading the template and using them with your children. Comment below and let me know! Also, please feel free to share using the facebook and tweet button below for others to download as well. May God bless you and your family in abundance in 2017. 
 As a Mom to eight children, six who are adopted and two who are birthed, I learned early on that children love to hear stories especially their birth story! Telling our children stories has been one amazing tool to reach the heart of our children that we adopted and birthed. My husband and I parent with the goal of striving to reach the heart of our children. Matthew 6:21 says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” As stated in Strong’s Concordance, our heart denotes the center of all physical and spiritual life; our soul and our mind. Our heart is the fountain and seat of our thoughts, passions, desires, affections, purposes and endeavors. It is where our will and character begin. It is the very place in which we store up our treasures; where good and precious things are collected, and kept.
One of the first stories our children heard from us while growing up is their birth story. Children love to hear their birth story; the way we cried tears of joy when we first saw them, the joy we felt when we held them close to us; however, in our situation with adopting some of our children at different ages, 2, 9, 13, and 15 years old, not all our children’s “birth” stories we tell start when they were born. Some of our children came from hard places. Some of our children’s original birth story is one of rejection, abuse and abandonment. They came to us insecure and with hardened hearts. As parents who adopt children from hard places, we cannot change what others have done to them, however, we can draw from God’s word that He takes what the enemy meant for bad and turns it to good. Adoption is one way God turns bad into good. In Ephesians 1:5, His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into His own family through Jesus Christ and it goes on to say that it gave Him great pleasure. Adoption was created by God. It is a way that God takes a child out of a bad or hard situation and places them in the arms of a loving family with the intention of nurturing and loving that child the way He nurtures and loves us. For our children that came from hard places, their “birth” story is about how we prayed for them, the first time we met them and how we felt. One of our children got sick from a bag of candy we gave him the first time we met him in an orphanage in Peru when he was 8 years old. He loves to hear this story. We may not have experienced the first time he talked or walked but we did experience the first time he ate ice, the first time he rode on an escalator, and the first time he went ice skating when we went to Peru to adopt him. This is his “birth” story. Every time we tell our son his story he smiles real big. This story reaches his heart. It is a story of love and how we, his Mom and Dad, pursued him and wanted him. Our children that were older when we adopted them love to hear their “birth” story as much as our children we received at birth love to hear their actual birth story. When we reach the heart of our children with their “birth” story, we begin the attachment and bonding process our children need. We provide a way for our children to feel secure and develop intimacy. Positive life-giving stories reach the heart of our children. Aimee and her husband, Tommy, have eight children God blessed by adoption and birth. She and her husband lead His Heart for Orphans adoption ministry at Healing Place Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Aimee is the Director and Coordinator of a statewide initiative Louisiana Heart Gallery where she advocates for children in the foster care system that are available for adoption. You can read more of their adoption and birth story here. |
Hello and Welcome!
Wife, Mother, Adoption Advocate, Writer
Who am I? Galatians 2:20 does a great job of summing up who I am. My life is His, the One who loves me and gave Himself for me . In return, I want to be all He wants me to be and do all He wants me to do on this side of Heaven. 
Recipient of the Angels in Adoption Award 2016. A program of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute in Washington D.C.
Adoption and Foster Care Support
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