Checking Things Off the List

We have a checklist of all the things adoptive parents need to do to have a completed dossier to take to Haiti. It is a fairly extensive list...two and a half pages worth of list. Next to each item is a place to check off when that step or process has been completed. This week was a week of doing a lot of check offs...Praise God! Yesterday Alec and I picked up our completed notarized home study (it took 2 months to complete) and then zipped it over to the county recorder to have it authenticated, then headed over to FedEx to send it to Albany to be authenticated at the state level. The day before, Thursday, I scanned fourteen documents to send via email to be translated into French. They are now in the hands of the translator who should have everything completed, including the translation of the home study, by the 6th of November. I can then send the translated documents that I need to send to the Haitian consulate in Chicago to, Lord willing, be legalized by them.

Yesterday when I picked up the home study, my heart was so full of gratefulness to the Lord for this completed step. I have been working on it steadily, along with other things, since the end of August. The study, as I read it, reflected God's faithfulness to Ted and me....on its pages were the record of our parents who have kept the marriage covenant they made, of sorrows that had been weathered by our families by God's strength, statements by our children that were full of sincerity and a desire to bring Spendy into our family, and a description of Ted and me- a description that, though the social worker has only known us for a couple of months, conveyed a picture of us over time that was accurate, a picture that caused my heart to well up with an acknowledgement of God's providential care and goodness to us, a sinful couple who have endeavored very imperfectly to follow Him. It was good to pause and thank God in the midst of all the doing and remember that this is a seed He has planted. This adoption is His idea. We are simply privileged to be the tool in His hand.

I would like to ask you to continue to pray for us in this process, thanking God along with us for His care and provision and sanctifying work in our lives and asking for His help. Besides the dossier, we also need an approved I-171h to come in the mail from Homeland Security before we can go to our DHS meeting in Haiti. This is a paper that declares that we have been approved to adopt using the pilot program "Orphan First." It is something we must have in hand before we go to our meeting. In my previous post I mentioned that Homeland Security is very behind.... the I-171h is something we need to receive from them. Please join us in praying that God would grant the workers speed in processing the orphan petitions, so we could get our I-171h soon! Gretchen (the Three Angel's parent liason) has made an appointment for us with DHS on Dec. 13th at 11 am. She is holding off canceling it in the hope that Homeland security might get things finished faster than they have predicted. Our social worker, who works closely with the woman in Albany who processes the orphan petitions, also thinks there is a chance that we might receive our I-171h in time for the December Haiti trip. We have not purchased plane tickets, and I had truly let go of going in December, but I have been given a little ray of hope that we might still be able to go next month. So, if the Lord allows the paperwork to process quickly, we will also need to find an affordable flight to Haiti. It would be wonderful to keep the meeting, to take Spendy his Christmas presents, for Ted to meet him, and most of all just to hold him in our arms. My arms daily ache for him. It is a difficult enough thing to be waiting for a child you are adopting. It is an added difficulty and joy when you have met that child. Pray that I would trust God's perfect timing and not forget that I can ask of Him, even when things look bleak. In other words, that I would remember that He is bigger than the circumstances. "The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will" (Prov. 21:1).