God is Good!

 

God has come through again! It's amazing when things start to get bumpy and God sends along a little reassurance that things are going to be okay.

My previous post talked about receiving an email from our agency stating that our fees for Kazakhstan were going up $1,000. The very next day, there was an envelope sitting on my keyboard at the store with $100 in it. A penpal of a friend heard about our story and wanted to help contribute to bring Emily home. A total stranger that I've never met and my friend has never personally met had a compassionate and generous heart and was used by God to remind us that he's still on this adventure with us.

Yes, we'll be doing more fundraising... but after the little speed bumps on this journey, we will have a new member in our family that we can tell about how God was faithful.

On the paperwork front, we're still waiting to hear back from USCIS on our immigration paperwork. We're also waiting to receive our passports in the mail. As soon as those come, we'll be shipping our dossier (bundle of paperwork) to our adoption agency to be processed and translated and sent off to Kazakhstan. We'll wait for travel dates and then off we'll go to Kazakhstan... hopefully in the spring!

Have a blessed 2006 everyone! We can't wait to see how it all unfolds!

Getting Ready

Our lives are going to change forever.

Last summer Tom and I took several Foster/Adopt classes to learn more about the process and to see if we could determine what we wanted to do. We both had a gut reaction that fostering just wasn't for us. We stay fairly busy with work and church and it wouldn't be fair to a struggling child to impose that type lifestyle on them. More importantly, we didn't feel we had it in ourselves to be able to send children back into a potentially bad environment after growing to love them.

After attending our classes, we began to feel led to adopt a baby girl. We debated between adopting from China or Kazakhstan for several weeks until one day on my way to work I felt God was telling me "you have a daughter in Kazakhstan that you need to go get". That's it. We're adopting from Kazakhstan. I don't know about you, but that's all the more convincing I needed!

After Thanksgiving, we started researching adoption agencies and home study agencies and finally after New Years we had decided to use World Partners Adoption and Cherub International. We have been slow going for a while as we are still learning what types of things we need to be collecting for our paperchasing adventure but we're picking up speed.

This Sunday, May 15 is our first home study visit. We're cleaning house this week in preparation and filling out lots of paperwork for our social worker. We're anxiously awaiting our first meeting to make all of this official.

Please keep us in prayer! We've got a looooong way to go!