a big day!

I really cannot believe April is almost over…where has this month gone?? Does anyone else feel that way lately? I was hoping to have a great adoption update long before now, but better late than never I guess. We FINALLY received a draft of our home study a couple of weeks ago for us to review before our agency could finalize it. Well of course I had it reviewed and sent back to our agency within one hour of receiving it via email (that’s gotta be some kind of record), and we then patiently waited to hear back that the final copy was on its way to us. Two weeks later, after many of our documents that had previously been approved all of the sudden were not sufficient and had to be re-drafted and re-approved, we finally got the email saying the final Home Study was on its way to us. That was on Saturday, and we received the package this morning! I’ve had all of our other documents signed and ready to send to USCIS (US Immigration Dept.) for almost a month now, we were just waiting to receive the Home Study to include in the package, so once it came in this morning, I was able to just slip it in the package and off it went! It feels SO good to have that sent off- now we wait some more to receive our approval letter, which is the last thing we need before we can send the rest of our paperwork (our Dossier) over to Ethiopia. There are only a couple of other items we lack for the Dossier besides the US approval letter, and those should be done within the next week or two, so we literally are just waiting on the US government to approve our application at this point. Our agency told us that it can take *up to* 3 months for USCIS to process our approval, but we are praying that our application makes it into the right hands and that it happens MUCH quicker than that! Please pray with us for favor and speed during this part of the process, and if you (or someone you know) have a testimony of receiving the I-600A approval in record-time, we would love to know about it, as testimonies build our faith that it can be done for us also!

In other news, we have been steadily raising money for our adoption for the past few months, and the financial support we have been given has been overwhelming! I hosted a Noonday Collection trunk show last weekend, which was so fun! 10% of everything sold that week for our show was donated to our adoption fund, which was a huge blessing as well. We also had a garage sale back in March and our friends here in San Antonio donated a TON of stuff for us to sell- and we made over $1,000 in one day! That was particularly huge for us, because that package we just sent off to USCIS today required an application fee very close to that amount, and the garage sale was able to completely cover that cost. God has been so faithful to us in this journey so far, which has been a huge reminder to me that we are on the right path. Thank you to everyone who has been interceding for us in prayer as well during this time, we are really feeling it! 

a season of grace

I feel like GRACE has been a really common theme in my life lately. I have had more opportunities to show grace to people this month than I would have cared to, honestly.  Unintentionally hurtful comments, hold-ups with paperwork, and changes within our agency…I guess in all fairness, I was warned that adoption would not be an easy road. God has been working on my heart through it all and teaching me the art of grace, an area in which I apparently needed quite a bit of practice (He’s also been pouring it out on me, which has been pretty amazing!)

We are so close to being finished with the home study part of the process, which is basically approval by our agency and by Texas to be an adoptive parent. This part involved several face to face visits with a social worker from our agency, including a home inspection, and multiple interviews about how we were raised, how we plan to parent, our strengths and weaknesses in marriage, and our ideas on adoption/ raising a child of a different race. Like a really intense job interview that lasts for days. It also involved a lot of paperwork from outside sources, sources that I cannot control or manipulate to get documents completed on time, and that has required a lot of grace and patience on our end as well. Just when I think my grace tank cannot be depleted any more, something else pops up that requires me to squeeze just a little bit more out. Thank you, Lord, for refilling my tank when you know I’m going need it!

As if the home study process itself wasn’t stressful enough, our home study coordinator (who we absolutely LOVE) ended up needing to resign in the middle of it! She had already completed most of our visits for the report when she decided to step down, so she agreed to continue to work with us to at least get our report written up. As frustrating as it is to have to now wait longer for a new person (who doesn’t know anything about us) to finalize the report when we have done everything in our power to speed the process along, I am reminded of the grace our home study coordinator showed us in staying on longer just to help us out, and it makes it easier to extend that grace to the next person we will be working with to get it finalized. {Side note: we are praying that our home study coordinator will be able to stay on contract with our agency so we can continue to work with her personally, so you can add that to your prayer list for us!}

Once our home study report gets finalized, then the first round of paperwork can be sent off to the US immigration department (USCIS), which will hopefully approve us to bring an internationally adopted child back into the US whenever we receive a referral. Once we receive the approval from USCIS, we are then ready to ship all of our remaining paperwork (which is actually the bulk of the paperwork we’ve been working on the past few months) over to Ethiopia and officially be placed on the waiting list! Woohoo! In the meantime, we have a few more documents to collect and finalize, and we are basically at the mercy of our agency to get our home study finalized soon. As I mentioned in a previous post, our goal is to have our paperwork to Ethiopia by early June, before the rainy season begins. During the rainy season in ET, the government basically shuts down due to the lack of drivable roads, etc. so we would like to have our paperwork delivered before that happens. {Please pray with us that our agency will finalize our home study quickly, and that USCIS will have a quick turnaround time for our I-600A application so that we can make it to ET by June!}

I know I have been unusually bad at answering emails, returning calls, and being a good friend in general that past couple of months, but I promise it won’t last forever, and to continue with my theme of grace, we so appreciate the outpouring of grace we’ve been given by everyone during this season!  We have been blown away at the generosity and support from our friends over the past couple of months, feeling like we are in this with SO MANY PEOPLE! I can’t imagine walking this road alone and I am overcome with gratitude for the people God has put in our lives to support us in this season…we are already seeing how amazing adoption is, and we haven’t even seen our children yet!