Adoption Update - the great and the difficult.

Well, we have great news and difficult news...

The great news is that our dossier was submitted this week to the adoption officials in our country! This is a huge thing and we are praising the Lord that He has accomplished this for us! The next step is for them to give us a travel date. Of course, like any responsible blog reader, I peruse the blog circuit of families adopting from our country. We are seeing some families traveling within 6 weeks and others not. We obviously don't know when it will happen for us, but thankfully the Lord does. We continue to believe He is working this all out in his perfect timing.

Now, the difficult news that we need you to pray much about... It has become apparent to us that there is a problem with the paperwork for our dear, sweet, little Samson. If this is not resolved he will become unavailable for adoption at this time. This is a very hard thing for us to take. If he is not adopted now by us, he will invariably be sent to a mental institution soon. His life and future there would be very uncertain. He may be available again in a year or maybe never. But, we have not lost all hope, because our hope is in Jesus. We believe it will take a miracle but that is exactly what we are asking the Lord for. In spite of the bleak outlook for him we sense the Lord is asking us to believe Him for the impossible. He is teaching us much about what faith truly is. We are grounded in His word and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Lord is in control of all of this. His way will prevail and we praise Him for that. I will post more later when I have my thoughts better organized. We so appreciate your encouragement and your prayers at this time.

Adoption Update

I realize it's about time I finally came up with some kind of update....now that I have laid out a bit of our history, here is where we are at....

We began the infamous International Adoption paperwork chase the middle of December. So, in the last 4 1/2, action- packed months, we have been...

-madly racing around trying to get the right forms filled out,
-waiting forever for them to be returned,
-running madly around once again getting more forms notarized and then waiting again,
-getting fingerprints done (several times),
-finding out that neither of us have a criminal record (whew),
-being declared free of numerous infectious diseases (whew again),
-getting more forms notarized..then more waiting,
-acquainting ourselves well with the post office personnel and mail carriers,
-completing our homestudy,
-throw in a bunch of phone calling, some made in panic pleas for help to public officials,
-add a ton of emails,
-then more waiting,
-then more notarizing,
-and finally, apostilling everything that even resembled a notary and (drum roll please)...

"Voila"....we finally had the "Dossier" - the bundle of magical papers which encompasses our entire life history, purpose and direction of our family for this adoption.

So, we now have a complete Dossier - it is in the hands of our adoption agency and will soon be in our country.

Now, what do we do?..............Any guesses?..............Why yes, of course we wait! :)

We hope our paperwork will be reviewed by officials in June. If that occurs, then we "wait" again for a travel date, which could happen in a short amount of time or not...Maybe we'll get to wait again! In short, if I could answer the question that of course everyone wants to know (including myself), is, "When will we travel?" Well, we hope within a few months. I wish we were leaving tomorrow. (accept of course for the fact that I have nothing ready and I would definitely be in an incredible panic and I most certainly wouldn't be sitting her yaking about waiting)

Actually, in regards to timing, I have felt the Lord challenging me again and again to trust Him for His perfect clock in all of this. He keeps asking me if I believe He will get us to our children exactly when we need to be there. So, I am trying to be patient and look at His calendar and not mine. I guess, after all, He can look at all of this through the eyes of eternity.

So, for now, we wait...stay tuned for more adoption developments! In the meantime, hang out with us and get to know our family a bit! (as soon as my very busy, significant other shows me how to download pictures from our camera, I will try to liven up the blog a bit...)