dangling {but God is good}

Thought I'd share with you this lovely photo
of some of my fellow adoptive friends and me.

Dangling in mid-air.

I'm super tired of this ride and I'm ready to get off.

We didn't get notice of our consulate appointment yesterday.
And I was in a snit all day.

But then,
I was quickly reminded of all the families
(Karin , Sally, Robyn...just to name a few)
whose children
are undergoing extreme medical stuff
and I realize that I have much to be thankful for.
So I'm overwhelmingly grateful that I'm anxiously waiting for
a simple consulate appointment,
and not a sobering test/procedure result.

God is good.
He knows me VERY well.
He knows what I need.
Which is usually a lesson or two in patience
(and various other things).

And He also knows what our consulate appointment is.

So, I sure do hope to be filled in on that this morning too.

Urgent News!!

I feel like I have a lot of things to chat with you about today but it may not all come to mind right at the moment! So please check back in later....

FIRST....If you haven't read Lynsay's blog, please do!! They have some exciting news and really need our help if at all possible. For those of you who don't know, Bill and Lynsay have started a ministry in Ch*na, taking in special needs orphans. It has been a hard mountain to climb as they have had a lot of obstacles but WOW! God has answered prayers and performed miracles right before their eyes. You simply must follow their journey! They are on the verge of getting 5 more children!!!! THEY NEED A VAN!!! There is just no way around that...you can't fit that many people in a taxi. Thankfully, they are only a few thousand short! PLEASE, please let me know if you can help financially.

Ok, another URGENT need to share. Our agency (WACAP) has a 13 year old girl (Ch*na) who is turning 14 NEXT MONTH and MUST be adopted. She is in their Promise Child program, which means that MOST of the adoption fees (including orphanage donation) will be waived. If you have your dossier in Ch*na right now and are interested, please let me know and I will help get you to the right person, or simply call WACAP. **Whatever fees you have already paid so far will be reimbursed or put towards your travel fees if you choose to adopt this girl!! Her only SN is that she had an elbow deformity but it has been surgically corrected.

As a follow-up to our saga, there's nothing new to report! As of right now, our agency has tried to call, fax, and email the Consulate...with no response. Nice. But since we are still within the time frame that it normally takes to get these documents back, we aren't taking any further measures yet. Thanks for the idea of a courier....we may do that if we don't hear something soon but our agency was uncertain that they would release any information to a courier who had not previously been involved in our case. (Kim H. please email me...I don't have your email address).

Ok, I gotta run for now! I hope to post good news later regarding any of the above! And perhaps some pics from our basketball awards ceremony last night!

And don't forget to read Lynsay's blog AND the Morning Star Project blog!!!

Things are.....not as I thought

Well, to continue yesterday's story of our dossier gone AWOL, I found out that I misunderstood my newest sweet Colorado friend. I could have sworn she told me she had received our homestudy AND other documents.....but when our agency opened the overnight-package, it was ONLY our homestudy. As I try to re-rack the conversation I had with her....I guess I do recall her saying homestudy over and over....and not dossier. **sigh**

Our case manager emailed to tell me that they received the homestudy and then immediately called the consulate.....and was unable to talk to anyone. **sigh** According to the tracking information, all of our documents arrived in Chicago on March 2.

SO.....I am trusting that all of our documents (and seriously, I am way more worried about all of these than the homestudy because at least we can easily get copies of that. Getting copies of all the other stuff would take SO LONG) are still at the consulate being processed. But what I'm wondering is, what if they have realized that the homestudy is missing (they know how many documents were sent and needed to be authenticated), and as they were perhaps preparing to send it all back....the homestudy is missing. And they are frantically looking for it. And our agency can't reach them to tell them what's going on!

That would truly be the best case scenario. I'm sure that eventually our agency will be able to talk to SOMEONE there. What gives me shivers is that WHAT IF all our other documents went to visit someone else's house? Surely not. According to CF (Colorado Friend), our homestudy was stuck to the bottom of their paperwork. So, I'm thinking it was just a fluke and all the other stuff is safe and sound.

Sooooo, it sure is easy to have great faith when things are going well....or when things appear to be ok. But when things are uncertain....ummm, yep....that's when our faith must be just that, FAITH.

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Hebrews 11:1

So as this saga continues, strap on your prayin' caps and join me in praying for protection over all our documents. I don't have to tell ya'll how precious each and every item is.


Ok, this picture has nothing to do with today's post but there's nothing like a cute Lucy pic to end on a good note!

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.