Tell My Parents...

Tell my Dad and Mom that I am praying for them. Can you please tell me their names? I want to pray for them by name. What are my sisters names? I want to pray for them too. Tell them that the Lord has been so kind to me for providing me with a Christian Dad - he is in heaven now with Jesus, and now God has given me another Christian Dad. He is so kind, praise to God. Please tell them that I love them and I can not wait to meet them. ~ Noah Zelalem Patrick McConnell (pictured with a little boy)

A friend of ours, Rona, met our sons a couple of weeks ago and had a conversation with Noah. He kept asking one of the Ethiopian women there, "Teacher, can you please ask the mom (Rona)..." and then he would pepper her with questions. Rona said she was pierced to the heart by his gentle prodding for answers about his parents and his insistence that she tell us that he was praying for us. She said that there was such a spiritual urgency about him that it left little doubt about his spiritual state. We were very encouraged to hear this about our oldest son. In all the early pictures that we had received of him he usually looked very somber as if there was a deep sadness lurking just beneath those tender eyes.

He told Rona that when he and his brother were at court some Ethiopian officials brought his mother into the courtroom for her to release custody of the boys. "They brought her in on a stretcher." The deep sadness there is watching his father die a slow, painful, messy death and then to see his mother heading down that road. It has made me even more determined to bring him home, love him, disciple him, and pray that one day the Lord may use my children to impact Africa for Him.