DTC 1/30/09

That means Dossier to China on 1/30/09. Our dossier is finally complete and will be sent to China this Friday. I'm glad to get over that hurdle and move on to the next. Hold on, Hannah, we're coming!

Piecing Together the Past

We got a thought provoking email from someone on our Gaoming adoption group this week. She included a picture of a little girl who she thought might be our Hannah. She had visited the orphanage on a trip with Love Without Boundaries in 2007 as well as adopted a daughter from there. The picture that she sent us was one that I had seen when we first started looking for pictures of Hannah. It really looked a lot like her but it was a year old and it's hard to know with little ones. I eliminated the picture as our Hannah because the newsletter that contained it noted that this little girl was going to be adopted in China soon. Since that was in 2007, I thought surely this wasn't our girl.

Then, we got this picture again. We started really comparing every picture we had of our Hannah with this picture. More and more we started to think that this was, indeed, our Hannah. Little things like the way her left ear is more squared than rounded, her eyebrows are fuller at the outer edges, the shape of her eyes and nose. WOW! We can't be sure, but we really think this might be her.

Why do I make such a big deal about this picture? It shows me that God has been planning her to be in our family from the start. Another adoption might have fallen through in her past so that she could be waiting on us to find her. God sovereignly ordained her to be ready when we were. I am profoundly moved by this thought. She has been waiting an extra year or two for her family, because we were supposed to be her family. How great is our God! As we endure the next wait in our process, this will remind me again and again that God's timetable is the only one that matters.

The I-797c is here!

It came! It came! That paper from USCIS (Immigration) that we've been waiting on since September came yesterday. God is good and allowed it to come on a Wednesday (Eric's day off), so Eric could run it all over creation to get it notarized, county certified, state certified and UPS'd to the Chinese Consulate in Houston to be authenticated. After that it will go to our agency, Holt International, in Oregon and join up with the rest of our dossier. Finally, our dossier will head over to China. We'll get a Log in Date (LID). China will process it in 3-5 months. After that, we'll get an LOA (Letter of Acceptance) and TA (Travel Approval). All these acronyms!!! We're a little later than we had hoped to be, so we might not get to China until late summer. We trust that God has the timing all worked out and He is taking care of Hannah.

What God is Teaching Me
This whole process of adoption is definitely a faith-building experience. God knew that I needed more patience and more trust in Him, so He called me to adopt. I'm sure this waiting is just the beginning of learning to trust Him more and more. I am humbled by how easily I fall back into trusting in myself and my abilities. For example, we had a little scare last week. We got a call from our agency that China needed our dossier in China by February 7. On that same day we got a letter from USCIS that they couldn't process our paperwork because they were missing some approval letter. All at once we were struck with the fear that we might lose Hannah. If we couldn't get this paperwork snafu worked out, would China give her to someone else? Oh, the feelings of fear and despair that so quickly entered my heart! I bowed on my knees asking God to work this all out, but I desperately wanted to work it out myself. Couldn't I prod and push someone along so that we could be assured to meet the deadline? Why couldn't the system work more quickly so we wouldn't be put in this pressured place in the first place? Then, I realized it again. I was not trusting God to do this for us; I was trusting in myself. Only anxiety and fear came from that self-driven effort. I prayed some more. You know what? God brought me this overwhelming sense of peace. Somehow, I knew it would all be OK. God called us to this and He was going to provide the way. He reminded me of Proverbs 21:1 - The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns it wherever He wishes. God will move the paperwork, the process, and all those people reviewing our documents as He wishes. The international bureaucracy doesn't control God; He controls it. He will accomplish His purposes. Thank the Lord for His continual grace and mercy to me, a slow learner in the trusting department! Lord, help me remember this as we wait through this next phase.