Answered Prayer
In the blog below, please read about our wonderful visit with Oleg: Such an awesome 'God thing' for God to bring Oleg all the way to Texas and allow us to meet him and hear all about how Luke is doing. God is constantly showing us that He is taking care of Luke while we are waiting for our adoption to happen.
Thank you God for constantly blowing our minds! (11/18/2011)
The next day, Saturday, we went to our son's soccer tournament. That night, we took off to College Station to hang out with our freshman in college, Brian, and nephews who were visiting him. We were so blessed hanging out in a dorm room with about 8 or 9 guys just talking and watching football. I guess we talked too loud because a security guard actually came and told us to be quiet. I was shocked. I'm sure the dorms who have parties and drinking are much louder than we were!
We all went to church the next morning and had such an awesome day together.
Monday was a busy day of meeting friends for lunch and looking at some land that was recently purchased by a ministry called Trinity Oaks (https://trinityoaks.org/). It's the Outdoors Youth Ministry that we're involved in, so we were checking out the beautiful place that God provided. When we left the land, we headed off to a small town about 1 1/2 hours away to go to our youngest son, David's, basketball game.
On the way to the game, I checked my email on my phone and saw that Dima had written a few emails. Dima is my facilitator in Kiev. He wrote 3 e-mails. The most important one said that he needed our dossier by this coming Monday or he would not be able to give it to the adoption office until February. I was in a slight state of shock because I knew we still had some important papers to get together. We also still needed our corrected home study that we had been waiting for. I called Maria, who helps me on this side of the world with all the paper work. After the game, we went over each document to find out what else I might be missing. I was short two documents that I didn't know I needed and also just one more that we knew we were missing. We picked up the home study and got things ready to be notarized for the next morning. This sounds like it was no big deal when I write it, but this was hours and soooo much stress! Maria helped me put all my papers in order and told me how to take the papers to Austin to get them Apostilled and then how to priority mail them all to Ukraine.
This was all last night after a super busy, but fun, weekend. I happen to be off this week due to Thanksgiving, but my husband is not off work. Thankfully, he was able to take off to help me get all that needed to be done today. I was so nervous, excited, anxious, scared. I was shaky; I'm never like this! My sweet daughter, Dana, gave me some verses before we left. She actually wrote them for me last week but had not had a chance to give them to me. Obviously, God knew I needed them today.
Proverbs 16:3 "Commit to the Lord whatever you do and you will succeed." and
Psalms 27:14 "Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord."
Those verses really comforted me and I claimed Proverbs 16:3 as we pulled out of the driveway. OK, To make a long story short (why do people always say that but they don't make the story short?) :)
We got our papers notarized and took off to Austin to do what needed to be done there. No problems at all, yet I was so nervous! When the lady handed me the stack of completed documents I wanted to hug the lady....or at least the stack of documents....but, I didn't. I just smiled really big and I think I jumped up and down a little, but didn't actually leave the ground.
The dossier is now on it's way to Ukraine and may even be there by Thursday! It's completely in God's hands and I'm so relieved that it's completely out of mine. There's nothing else I can do at this point.
The SDA office is still not issuing court dates, however Dima feels they may begin issuing dates next week. Until that really happens we won't know, and they will issue dates for those who filed their papers first. One thing in our favor is that our child is older. If we were adopting a young child, we would be on a very long waiting list for a date. Either way....no matter what....it's God's timing. He's in control.
The cool thing about all this, even though we were so stressed getting everything done in less than 24 hours and even though we had to rush off to Austin to get our documents Apostilled and mailed off so quickly... The cool thing is our prayers from Friday night, with Dima, Craig, and Nancy were answered. God certainly sped things up with the adoption papers. We've been praying for things to speed up for quite a while and they've been moving. Now the dossier is mailed and we're so thankful for this answered prayer.