Hallelujah...Matt's First Blog Post

Greetings from Guatemala. Matt here. I arrived in Guatemala yesterday, after a mostly uneventul trip down. (See below for more details.)

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Over the past many months, people have commended me on "our" blog. I have humbly confessed that I have nothing to do with "our" blog; it is Michele's blog. In fact and in general, Michele has been the heart and administrative hands of this adoption. I've been her gopher and servant: "Matt, Sign here...Take this to the post office...Email this person...Pray this prayer." Not to say I'm not THRILLED and EXCITED by Miranda entering our life. Just that Michele's been in charge, as she should be. What do I know about raising little girls? I'm just now getting the hang of raising little boys, and now they're not so little.

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Anyway, it's time I made my mark in this adoption process. So I suggested to Michele that I make my own blog post. To this suggestion Michele said, "Hmmm...Are you sure you can do that?" I said, "Michele, I pastor a medium-sized church. Surely I can make a blog post." Twenty minutes later she was pointing to keys on the keyboard saying, "Type this. Now Return. Michele is spelled with one L. Geesh."

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In a further effort to demonstrate my independence and contributions to this process, I took some pictures of Miranda and myself BY myself. Michele offered to take them for me, but as a self-made man I insisted I could do this myself. Here are those pix.

I know she doesn't seem especially happy to be with me, but she is. Trust me.

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Perhaps you notice the resemblance between Miranda and I. My brother Brad and his wife Allison recently had a baby named Lucy, who is a sweet and adorable little girl who is the SPITTING IMAGE of my mother at Lucy's age. (She has the pictures to prove it.) Well Brad, Mom, Allison, Lucy...if you want to talk about spitting images, surely you agree that a father and daughter never looked as much like each other as Miranda and I do. It's in the eyes, the cheekbones, the forehead. If you can't see it, picture Miranda with a gotee and it'll jump out at you.

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Anyway, my trip down here was nice, except having to sit at the back of the plane from Houston to Guatemala. (Why don't people want to sit at the back of the plane? It's because after breakfast everyone needs to take a big early-morning poop, and those lavatories do NOT contain very well the smells of early-morning poops.) Also, our plane in St. Louis had some hydraulic problems, so they had to reload us on a different plane. I didn't complain. Thank God for plane inspections. But it did make catching the next plane in Houston a bit too close for comfort.

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Once here, I had a nice conversation with Marvin (Mar-veen) on the way to Antigua, where Michele and the kids (not just "the boys", anymore) are staying. Mar-veen was the driver sent to pick me up at the airport. In broken Spanish we talked about politics, family, life, religion. Mar-veen told me that in Guatemala more and more people are leaving the Catholic Church for the Evangelical Church because evangelical preachers preach better. They use illustrations, humor, they talk about peoples' lives. They keep it interesting. I said "Amen, hermano!" Apparently they don't need me down here.

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Miranda is beautiful and lovely. She really seems to like me: she smiles at me, laughs at me. However, I think Miranda likes everyone. And, of course, everyone likes Miranda. Among all the Guatemalan babies God could have given us, he seems to have chosen one of the friendliest and happiest and prettiest kiddos in America de Central. We're grateful and blessed.

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Today we are going to continue bonding. We're going to go on a walk, we're going to go to the market. We're going to go see the sites of Antigua. I brought a bunch of church stuff to do on my down time here in Antigua, but this morning I agreed with God that getting work done was a distant second priority to my first priority of family-bonding. (Some of you are thinking it shouldn't be any sort of priority while down here.) So while I have church email access down here, if I don't respond your church-related email, deal with it. And God bless you.