A Step in the Right Direction!!!

This has been a good weekend for us in that we have made some progress, hallelujah! To get down to the facts, we finished all our paperwork we needed to redo, it was okayed by our agency saying we had all the necessary info to submit to immigration and sent to us to prepare to send directly to immigration at the end of January. The only thing holding us up at this point was money. God's timing is always perfect in that we were able to get our taxes done early and got the refund Friday. The paperwork was sent along with our check yesterday, Saturday, to immigration! Yay! I cried when I left the post office as it felt as one more brick was laid on our journey. Today, I went for a run and as I was out, I felt like God began to pose a question to me. What is the difference in intervening through adoption in the life of a child as a believer verses someone who is not a believer? It is a question I have asked myself especially as I see so many celebrities and those who don't know Jesus pursuing the same thing. There must be a difference, I know, but haven't able to nail down what that is. This question He posed was rhetorical in nature because I feel that He began to tell me. Papa God is benevolent by nature. He is good, He is generous, and He promises to "not leave us as orphans." But in doing so, we see that His motivation is not centered on us, but on the unveiling of His glory, His essence, His heart. He desires to be known and seen. As His reflections and image bearers, it makes sense that we would not only mirror Him in deed but in purpose as well. I am reading a book called Papa's Voice and in it, I read one of the most, for me, profound things and that is that when we observe and study Jesus' life, we see that He was constantly bombarded with interruptions, diversions, and the unexpected, yet despite all of this, He always completed every task and mission He set out to in accordance with what Papa God had laid before Him to do. He was unwavering in His devotion to not only complete what God had called Him to, but even more so was at peace with how that would come to be because His heart wasn't about the task but about revealing His Father's heart and glory through each interruption and each "unexpected" event or person that was along the way. As I thought about our journey with adoption and the question I mentioned above, it became clear to me that one such difference is in the journey. Is my heart, like the Son's, fixed on God's heart, His essence, His strength, His glory being revealed along the way or have a made this process about another human being only. If that is the case, and it has been at times, I get discouraged. I get frustrated when the unexpected happens. I lose heart, grow weary, question my decision and begin to question His goodness. Yet when I fix my eyes on Him, and allow my self to be quietly reminded of what He desires to do and Be in the midst of this that is when the peace comes. Peace that results not from promising circumstances or results, but from taking on His yoke that says , "In the moment, I AM." And letting that be the place my feet rest. Don't get me wrong, I see that as Christ so boldly and desperately asked in the garden for the desires of His heart, I can make mine known to Him as well. I desire for the rest of this process to go as quickly as possible, for immigration to get back to us with an appointment time for our fingerprinting and background check and for that information to be processed as quickly as possible so we and the baby will be free to travel asap. I pray that I would not have to wait one more day than necessary to bring her home and that I can just see her face. I have not seen her face yet, and we still don't have a clear time line as to when that will happen. They may have us wait until we get our final clearance from immigration to reveal this to us or they may do it sometime in the process. Either way, please pray for strength for us for this journey. It is a slow process, but necessarily slow. God doesn't do anything unnecessarily. Pray that our hearts would remain fixed on seeing Him revealed through this process, however long He wills it to take. Pray for the children at the orphanage, the workers, and all of those whose lives are touched by this process. Adoption is close to Papa's heart. We are all adopted and He longs to reveal Himself not just through the acquisition of a child but through the process.



Instead of making this a new post, just wanted to add that I spoke with the adoption agency after I wrote this initial post and it seems that immigration is moving faster than what we were told to expect. We are hopeful that our time frame for fingerprinting AND approval could be as little as 6 weeks! Also, we will need to wait for a approval before they send us a referral, which is fine. We were also told that there is only one family ahead of us on the waiting list. Thanks for your prayers...we will keep you updated!

Putting my faith where my mouth is....

Well, we knew this journey would be long, but just how long I had no idea. I am glad I had no idea. To make this uncharacteristically short for me, we are now waiting for finances to come in. We are good with our adoption agency itself as far as being caught up with costs there (thanks to Shoahannah's Hope and the grant we got from them) however, because of the Hague convention that I mentioned in my last post, we had to redo our immigration application which meant we also had to redo our homestudy. Both of these were costs we have paid that we are having to redo. So, we redid the home study in October, it was approved at the end of December, and sent to us along with several other documents that we now have to send into immigration with our application so we have permission to travel and to bring the baby back into the U.S. However, before we can send this in, we need to somehow come up with more money to file with CIS as well as to pay our home study agency. This is why I titled the post the way I did. I am believing that God will provide, again, for us in this way. I am trying not to be anxious. I do not want our paperwork to expire again, so I am ready to get this going again, but can't until the money is provided. So, for now, we wait. Wait on our Faithful God to provide. Please pray, in faith, with us for this provision. We have now heard that we will not, most likely, get a referral until we are approved by immigration. So, I don't know that this summer is going to be the reality we thought it would to travel. However, I know that God can do anything and that if He didn't with hold Jesus, his most perfect and precious gift from us, He will not now, with hold any good thing that we need. It is getting harder on my heart to wait, but He is enough for that, too. Thanks for reading, asking, and praying. Will hopefully report soon!