A Dream Takes Shape

—MY FAMILY TODAY—
Tamara Kay • Skyanne • Thea • Nate • Tamara • Evan • Daniel • Florie
Jasmine • Alex

Hi, my name is Nate Horton, and I love my family very much. I have an amazing, beautiful wife and 8 incredible children in our home right now, and I want to tell you about them. I will never understand how God can make two people fit together so perfectly as he has my wife and I. It just blows me away, but I can't go into that now because my purpose is to tell you what God is doing and how He is working in our lives.

In telling the story of my family, a dream will unfold that we knew was there, but may never realized how masterfully it was planned, step-by-step through the years by our awesome and unfathomable God, our Creator. He planted a dream in our hearts...a dream we are not just dreaming, but realizing together as a family—and I hope it rubs off in a positive way on everyone we come in contact with. 

Ours is a story that shows how true this passage is: "Take delight in the Lord and He will give you your heart's desires. Commit your way to the Lord, trust in Him, and He will act..." (Psalm 37:4-5, NLT) Our heart's desires. That is a big thing for God to promise. It almost sounds like a genie in a bottle, but it's even bigger than it looks on the surface. Yeah, we can wish to have something and think of that as a desire, but that's not really what this verse is all about. 

Can you imagine what the God who made you can dream up? He made the earth we walk on, and the stars all zillion of them in every direction, zillions of times the size of the earth, zillions of miles away...the numbers are so staggering we don't even understand the numbers we have to use to explain them in mathematical terms. It's THAT God that implants a dream into each of our hearts. It's HIS dream that become our desire, and can you imagine what THAT God can dream up? Frankly, I can't either, but I have seen God work enough times in my life that I can tell when He's up to something in our lives, though I don't know exactly what...

Tamara and I have dreamed early on in our 17 years of marriage of helping the hurting children of the world. It never mattered so much where the children are from, but if they are without hope and hurting, our heart has gone out to them and they have been a part of our dream. This dream began to take shape after the births of our first two children, Florie (16) and Daniel (15), when we adopted our little Tamara Kay from Russia in 1999. She's now 15. Someday, we'll post her story.  It is an incredible testimony of God's love and grace towards the most frail in this world and a beautiful picture of the Redemption story.

Soon after, with our three cute little toddlers, we moved to one of the most amazing places on earth...NW Montana, specifically the Flathead Valley, not far from Glacier National Park. We have enjoyed and endured many types of weather in this region where conditions can change dramatically in a very short time. We are currently in a warm, spacious, yet cozy home in Kalispell which we are so thankful for. God has provide for us in so many ways, and he proves Himself over and over. We've lived here for right at 7 years now.

Our dream began to develop further just before moving into our current home when we adopted Jasmine and Alex who are now 11 years old, bringing our kid-total to a handful! We had had the two of them as foster placements for a year, having previously completed our Foster/Adoptive licensing by the state of Montana. Then we took a few years to settle with these new additions to our family, during which time we only took one foster placement which only lasted part of one day.

Then, another angle of our dream became evident, to Tamara, anyway. Through her involvement with the Foster Care Review Board, she heard about a little deaf boy and his sister who were in shelter care and would likely need a foster home. It was early in 2009. Tamara had been interpreting for the Deaf in our area for several years already by this time and our family was pretty familiar with ASL (American Sign Language) as a result. We were told our family would be ideal for this placement. God was developing the dream, with or without my high sign. I wasn't sure we were ready for two more, especially if one was deaf, but the next 3 1/2 years proved that I was wrong and God, along with my visionary wife, of course were not. I initially resisted her asking to go see the kids with her, knowing that I would fall in love with them on sight and the rest would be history. Well, it was, and now, they too are safely adopted into our family. But, not before Skyanne moved into our home for the second time, this time without the State's help, and she's been here a lot longer than the few hours she was here a couple years before. That was in the Spring of this year, right about her 16th birthday. This story is also history in the making, but....more about that later.

We are almost to the point where our dream starts to really take off...but this boy needs some rest, cuz I got 8 kids now to be fresh for when morning rolls around. Oh...and I just turned into a pumpkin!

More to follow...we are just barely getting started.