Can you help the Damkoehlers bring Nola Mercy home?

Friends,

Many of you know Nancy and I are leaving the country sometime this Fall for a 3-5 week journey to bring home a little girl from Popayan, Colombia.  Nola Mercy Damkoehler.  We are blessed beyond words.  Nola's story is a miraculous one.  An abandoned  little girl who almost died of neglect and multiple diseases at 4-months-old, only to make an amazing turnaround.  You can read about it in our Nina to Nola post.  It will give you a good idea of why we feel called to adopt again.  We are absolutely blown away that we get to bring her home!

Nola Mercy at her 2nd Birthday at her foster home on July 29, 2011

The biggest challenge for us is not opening our hearts and home to another child, but it is in finding the finances to make this happen. We estimate our total cost for adoption fees, document preparation, home study, airfare, travel, attorney fees, etc. to be $36,000 - that’s certainly money we don’t have, but we know God is faithful and is leading us to trust Him. By God’s grace we’ve been able to pay the initial $10,000.

Honestly, it’s a little difficult (because of our pride), to make our needs known to friends around us, but we also know it’s the right thing to do. We appreciate your friendship very much and would like you to pray & consider helping us in our adoption. There are two ways you can help:

1. Prayer – Please pray God would tenderly care for Nola in Colombia until we are able to bring her  home, that God would prepare Luke, Clay, Kole and Nina for the upcoming changes to our family, and that God will give us wisdom, discernment, and insight as we raise Nola and deal with any medical conditions she may still be battling.


2. Financial support - Will you please consider making a tax-deductible donation to help us pay the remaining $26,000 in adoption expenses, to bring Nola home?  Again, hard to ask, but we could sure use the help.  Feel free to forward or post this to any friends we may have missed :)


Lifesong (www.lifesongfororphans.org) has graciously given a Matching Grant of $3,000 to help jumpstart us and pay the “ransom” to bring Nola home.


If you would like to help out, you can send your tax-deductible gift between now and October 30th to the address below. 


You can give right now through PayPal by clicking the link below.  The fund are made immediately to our adoption agency to cover our expenses.  EVERY gift is a big gift, regardless of the dollar amount!

Lifesong is a trusted organization administering the funds on Nola’s behalf, and will pay adoption expenses out of 100% of the funds received.


Or if you prefer:

1. Please make checks payable to: Lifesong. You may preference how the donation might be used by writing “preference Damkoehler #2217 Adoption” in the memo section of your check.
   (*Note: In following IRS guidelines, your donation is to Lifesong which retains full discretion and control over its use.)
   
2. Mail checks to:
   Lifesong for Orphans
   Att: Damkoehler #2217 Adoption, PO Box 40
   Gridley, IL 61744
   

Thank you for investing in our lives and Nola's through prayer and finances – it will be an investment with an eternal return! (Matt 6:20).  And please subscribe to our blog!  We’ll give you regular updates with pictures and blog the whole time we are in Colombia! 

Thanks so much!

------------------------

Below is our confirmation letter from LifeSong:

September 5, 2011

Dear church, family, and friends of Jason and Nancy Damkoehler,

LifeSong for Orphans (www.lifesongfororphans.org) is a non-profit Christian ministry dedicated to help meet the needs of orphan children around the world, and obey God’s call to “visit the fatherless...in their affliction” (James 1:27).

The number of children worldwide without families to love and care for them is astounding... there are
over 143 million orphans in the world today!

God tells us in His word He has heard the cry of the orphaned and abandoned children (Psalm 10:17,18) and He has made a way for them to be cared for – through adoption. As believers, He adopted us into His family through Jesus Christ, and did not leave us as spiritual orphans!

We believe adoption at its core is evangelism; a vital part of the Great Commission is bringing the mission field home. God desires orphans from all nations to be adopted into Christ-honoring families so they may ultimately be adopted into His eternal family through Jesus Christ. God calls us to fulfill James 1:27, “visit the fatherless...” but not all are called to adopt. Some are called to pray, some to give financially, some to go on mission trips and some to adopt.

Jason and Nancy have sensed God’s call...and have joyfully stepped out in faith and obedience to adopt Nola Mercy from Colombia. As you may already know, international adoption can cost around $30,000 and prevents many godly families from adopting. Lifesong believes God has raised up the Damkoehler family “for such a time as this...” and we have committed an Adoption Matching Grant of $3000 to help raise the funds necessary to complete the adoption of this precious little girl. This means Lifesong will match “dollar-for-dollar” everything the Damkoehler family raise from their church, family, friends between now and November 15, 2011 up to $3000. We invite you to support them financially to make this adoption possible. As a 501(c)3 organization, your gift is tax deductible.

*100% of all funds raised will go directly to cover adoption costs, nothing will be taken out for LifeSong administrative costs.

Will you invest financially in the life of this beautiful child?... it will be an investment with eternal return.

God bless you for laying your treasures up in Heaven,

Andy Lehman 
Vice President

p.s. I trust God will do great and mighty things through this, and all for His Glory! 

From Nina to Nola: A brief history of our adoption adventure

Left to Right:  Kole (8), Luke (14),  Jason, Nina (6), Clay (11), Nancy

For those of you that don’t know us, my name is Jason Damkoehler. I am the privileged husband of my beautiful wife, Nancy, and the father of four amazing children. Nancy and I were married in 1994. I work full-time as a business analyst at State Farm Insurance Companies. I also serve an amazing group of people as the senior pastor of Journey Family Fellowship, a church my wife and I planted back in 2005.

God began to work on Nancy’s and my heart back in 2001. We had been happily married for eight years and had two children. No one we knew was adopting at that time. It was still a very foreign concept to us. However both of us began to feel a tug to explore the adoption process and discover what it would take to bring a child home.

 Well, we discovered it took a lot ☺. But amazingly, neither one of us were worried about the process, financial cost, and sea of paperwork . . . God has led us through much.  And our entire married life we have had a great confidence that God will always supply our every need.  He’s never let us down.

 In 2004, we made the decision that we were going to adopt and began the home study process. We had just added another biological child to our family and felt a release to begin pursuing adoption. At that time several of our friends began to adopt children as well, bringing more faith that the decision we made was truly from the Lord.

 Over the next two years God led us through a process that would bring us to our daughter Nina. It’s an amazing story, but is too much for this short post . . . if you’d like to read more, here the address of our Journey to Nina blog. Suffice to say that adopting Nina revealed to us so much about the heart of God that it ignited a desire to continue adopting children as long as we feel the Lord allowing.

The little girl we are adopting from Columbia has an amazing story as well.  She was born in late July of 2010. Her mother abandoned her at four days old into a very bad situation. After four months, she became very ill. The woman who was taking care of her brought her to a local hospital and explained that she could no longer take care of this little girl. She was diagnosed at that time with multiple severe medical conditions.

 Back in the US, Nancy and I were feeling it was the time to adopt again. We were asking God for a child between zero and three years old that would be brought to us, rather than us going through the standard referral process. We were open to special needs.

 Just by happenstance, my wife called an obscure agency in Florida called Adoption by Shepherd Care that she had seen on the Internet. She inquired about domestic adoption was told that Illinois residents could not adopt from a Florida agency. My wife thanked them and just before she hung up she was told by the agency that there may be little girl in Colombia that is available, but that they had very little information and that we would have to be patient. They also mention the child was suffering from numerous serious medical issues.

 Until then, we have never considered a special needs child, God gave us both a peace that we should pursue this little girl. Several weeks later we received a referral picture of Nola Mercy and began the process of adopting her.

 We still did not know the extent of the illnesses that she had, or how she was recovering from them.  But we had faith that God’s hand was in all of it.

 In early March my family and I were in our living room having a night of prayer  and worship together as a family. As we prayed, my eight-year-old son Kole all of a sudden said, “guys, I think God just told me something.” He was very excited! We said, “what did he tell you Kole?”

 He said, “God told me that Nola is going to be fine and that she is not sick anymore.”

 Just a few days later I got a call from our agency. The agency director herself called and said, “are you sitting down?” She took a breath and said, “we just ran a bunch of medical tests on Nola and received the results today. She has no more signs of the sicknesses. Kole went nuts and so did we ☺

 God is so good!  The reality is that Nola may very well still have the ill affects of her medical conditions. . . . only time and tests in the U.S. will tell.  But we are grateful to have a very strong support group in our church  (many have been adopted or are in foster care), a great network of doctors that are dear friends to us (who have also adopted children) and a powerful God who is already moving miraculously in our little girl's life!

Nancy and I desire more than anything to raise children who have a passionate love for Jesus Christ and the fervent desire to serve Him well with the life that He has given them. We are so proud of Luke (14), Clay (11), Kole (8) and Nina 6).   God has really grabbed a hold of their hearts.   And we are committed to do everything in our power, while leaning on God's supernatural power to " train them in way they should go, so when they are old they will not depart from it."

  So much more we could tell you, but will leave it with this… We serve a mighty God . . . and He is MIGHTY to save!

P.S. We're raising funds to bring Nola home right now.  If you feel led to help or know others that might, please read Can you help us bring Nola home?  Blessings!