First a little about the Johannsen Family. My wife and I met on the Internet and were married in July of 2001. We have a 10 year old boy who is everything any parent could ever ask for. He is smart, funny, good in school, popular, a good athlete, well mannered, and loving. James is more than any parent could ever expect out of their child. As you can tell I love him dearly. My wife Lana, is really Svitlana, and she is a native Ukrainian and James was born there also. We were able to have children of our own but never felt the need, we had James. We talked about adopting a Ukrainian child, but always decided against it because we had James; it also is not looked on favorably by the culture in Ukraine even though they desperately need help. Our family was comfortable and close and we felt so complete. There was no need to add to it other than our three Dachshunds, Calico cat and our Parrot. We live happily in a wonderful small town 80 miles southeast of the Atlanta Airport. We are active in our Church and Lana has been the key in starting a mission program back to her village where they are just finishing a church and have had 3 very successful mission trips in the last 4 years. Our life was full and our mission laid out in front of us, or so we thought.

It was right around the first of the year, and I was in the office at work, It was almost deserted as most folks were taking vacation when I received an email. This email was sent to me by a wonderful Christian woman about the heartbreaking story of this great little boy who had found a family who loved him and wanted to bring him into their home and were unable to due to a reason beyond their control. This little boy was from Latvia. It was a letter that Krista had sent out to a couple of people and they sent it on and on and on. My wife and I get all kinds of things like this because it seem everyone thinks all of those countries over there are part of the same country almost as if the Soviet Union was still around. So, I walked to the woman’s office who sent me the email, spun a chair around backwards, sat down, leaned on the back and said, “Ok, what’s the deal?” She calmly looked at me and said, “I was told to send it to you.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know, I just was told to send it to you,” she responded. Since I didn’t know anyone on the email list other than the person who sent it to me I wanted to know who told her, so I asked her. She coolly calmly said,- “God told me”. At that I got up with out saying anything else, went back to my office and sent it off to Lana.