Amanda is a native of Winter Haven, Florida and I am a farm boy from Maroa, Illinois. Our paths would cross at Baptist Bible College in 1997 during our freshman year. Amanda had never met anyone from Illinois (she pronounced the “s” much to my frustration). After two years of college and a small dowry paid (not really) we were married on a VERY hot and humid Florida day in July 1999. We soon arrived back in Springfield and settled in to our new life together.
In 2001 after our college graduation, and with no clear understanding of where we were supposed to go ministry-wise, I enrolled in the Baptist Bible Graduate School of Theology and focused on Biblical counseling. This would turn out to be an important decision for us, as during the next three years God would orchestrate events that would eventually lead us to Ethiopia. After graduation in 2004 and a trip to Ethiopia that summer, we would head down to Raleigh NC to work at Mid-Way Baptist Church. After two puppy dogs joined our family, Raleigh quickly became home for us - and we consider it so even to this day. After working at Mid-way and being approved as BBFI missionaries, we started raising support to move to Ethiopia. Things seemed to be going along smoothly as support was being raised quickly, but God had other plans…
In the fall of 2007 after 8 years of being married, it was thrilling to find out we were expecting our first child in the spring of 2008. Excitingly, we found out we were going to have a little girl which we knew right away we wanted to name Ava. Our joy quickly turned to sorrow on January 25th of 2008 when Ava Patricia Dyson was born and immediately was with Jesus. With broken heartedness and confusion of God’s purpose in this tragedy, almost exactly a year later God would once again bring the unexpected into our lives.
One of our supporting churches sent some encouraging notes on what would have been Ava’s first birthday. It was through these notes that God brought into our path a young lady from that church who was pregnant and needing to have a family adopt her soon to be child. After much prayer and guidance, we forever plunged ourselves into the world of adoption and on June 22, 2009 Amanda was in the delivery room as Jackson Zane Dyson was born. Six months later on December 30th Jackson legally became apart of our family…forever! Who would have thought that at the beginning of 2009 we would be finalizing an adoption by the end of the year! We sure didn’t - but God did!
