God's Protection With Every Step

Throughout both of our adoptions one of my constant prayers has been that God would go along side our paperwork and get it into the hands of compassionate people who treat it with urgency and not let it set idle. There is a certain amount of uneasiness when your hard work of gathering and notarizing every document, making sure that everything is PERFECT, is sent off to various places. You definitley realize that YOU are not in control. Prayer makes a difference, I'm sure of it.

In fact, I got proof of that yesterday afternoon. While making dinner the phone rang. K-man answered and listened intently as whomever on the other end was obviously giving him a lot of information. The look on his face was not that of being annoyed by a telemarketer but that of concern...and confusion. He quickly told the lady that she should talk to me since I am the one who handles our paperwork. Oh dear....what does that mean?

I got on the phone and the gal on the other end introduced herself as another adoptive mom who lives in Colorado. With urgency in her heart, she explained that apparently, OUR dossier, which had been sent to the Ch*na Consulate in Chicago to be authenticated, had been accidentally sent back to HER with HER dossier. For those of you not in the adoption circus, this means that all of our PRECIOUS paperwork...ORIGINAL documents (doctor forms, financial forms, birth certificates, marriage certificates, etc.), had been sent to be "authenticated" by the Ch*nese Consulate. Basically, they just look over the paperwork, making sure it looks in order and good to go, giving each document individual attached sealed certificates...this is NOT the adoption approval process, just paperwork approval. Are you following me here?).

So, what obviously happened was that our dossier somehow got sent back with this family's dossier. BIG, BIG mistake by the Consulate...ALL of our sensative and very confidential information was now in the hands of complete strangers (they are not even with our adoption agency).

The gal said that they had been on vacation (I think that's what she said...it's all a blur to me now) and that they had just opened their mail, finding the mistake. She immediately called me to tell me about the error. She told me she would overnight it to our agency.

I called our agency to tell our case manager and she was very perplexed and I could sense that she was also a little worried.

Soon after, I received another call from the Colorado gal (I'm withholding her name since I don't have her permission to use it), and she told me she had just been to UPS to overnight it to our agency. I insisted that we pay her back for the shipping charge, though she didn't think that was necessary (adoptive families are the BEST!).

Anyway, when I think about what could have been, if this gal hadn't noticed it for a while...or simply dismissed it as not theirs so just tossed it in the trash (of course, most people wouldn't think of doing that, especially knowing how important it was). It could have set us back MONTHS in our process.

So I'm here today to GLORIFY GOD for answering my prayer of protection over our paperwork and to say a BIG FAT THANK YOU to the caring woman who PROMPTLY went out of her way to help us.