In the Beginning ...

"When does God begin His special plan in a life? Is it when He gives a promise or when He finally brings the promise to pass? Although it may not always be obvious to us, there seems to be one distict moment when God begins a new story in each of our lives. He writes words on our hearts that long to be spoken and strain to be lived out. Then with His own great hand, He begins to write the script. Experience by experience through seemingly ordinary days, He supernaturally orders our lives. Only when we look back and reflect on what appeared to have been the ordinary events of life does it become clear what a miracle the Lord has performed." - The Strength of Mercy, Jan Beazely.

Where to begin ... hard to start a new page when there has been so many pages previously unwritten ... so just to dive into this stage of our journey in life, feels vague and disconnected, but nevertheless, this is where we will begin ...

On January 4th we heard a sermon on adoption. A message of how we, as children of God, were orphaned children, lost without a home, until Christ came and adopted us into the Kingdom of God. And what a price He paid that we would have a place to call home forever. We have always had a little seed in our hearts to adopt a child someday, but with 3 small ones at home currently, adoption had been tucked away until "another day." At least, so we thought. After that service, our hearts could not be silenced or still. Not another day was going to pass without us taking the next step toward bringing an orphan to our home. On January 20th, after 100 hours of research on adoption agencies, we turned in our application to adopt through WACAP. We met with our social worker the following week and two weeks from the day, she had our notarized homestudy in our hand! Meanwhile, I was on turbo-mode to complete all the paperwork needed for the dossier (documents needed for adopting) and sent them off to the state for verification. We drive to Yakima next week to get fingerprinted and then just have to wait for our I-171H to be the final piece before they can send of our dossier to Ethiopia. Yes, Ethiopia. Without having a "reason" why we chose Ethiopia, other than our hearts kept being pulled back there whenever we looked into other places, we looked at the sheer number of orphans in Ethiopia and the massive growing number of orphans.

So for the most part now, we wait. We don't get put on the actually "Waiting List" until our I-171H comes back, and that will be an exciting day to finally hear where we fall in the scope of timeframes. I wonder if the waiting will be hard? The only bummer news is that the wait times to travel after receiving a referral have be increasingly longer and will only continue to get longer because the court dates are getting pushed further out because of the increased number of families applying to adopt from Ethiopia (what a great problem to have)! Ethiopia courts are closed August and September for the rainy season (we'd be closed year-round if we had a rule like that!) so they just fall further and further behind each year. So instead of it being 5-12 weeks to travel after referral, it now is growing to almost double that. But I told the Lord in the beginning I trusted His perfect timing and I still do. So it is a delight to wait on Him.

That is a piece of our update. So much more to come. The paperwork is done ... at least for now. Thanks for sharing in this with us.