"Lord, I never asked for this."

We are moving forward. God has been so present. I can't wait to see how this unfolds. When we received our dossier back from the translator it seemed there was no urgency anymore. It seemed nothing would happen if we got it done now or later. However, we wondered why we felt we needed to get it done before? Was God saying something different now?

No, it didn't seem like it.

I went and saw Beth Moore speak at our church. She has been a huge mentor of mine. She spoke on two stories in II Kings 4. The first was about a woman who was told to collect jars from neighbors. The more she collected the more oil God gave her to save her and her son. This was a story God had brought to my mind when I prayed about if we should continue our dossier. he was telling us if we did the hard work He would perform the miracle. The second story was of a woman who was fine and didn't feel she needed anything. The prophet Elisha wanted to give her something so he told her she would have a son. She had this son within the year despite her old age. Several years later this son died and she found Elisha immediately and asked "Did I ask you for a son, my Lord? Didn't I tell you, don't raise my hopes?!" It occurred to me that this is what I have been saying lately as adopting Gideon seemed to be slipping away, "Lord, I never asked for a son, you were the one to raise this hope in me!" Elisha went and brought the boy back to life. God will breathe life into what He has given us. What an encouraging word

So Jeb took the dossier to FedEx Tuesday night and paid a lot to overnight it to the Haitian Consulate and included a return envelope for them to send it back legalized. When he got back I asked why he paid so much to overnight it when it didn't matter how quick it was done? He said "I thought that was our plan?" Coincidence that I wasn't there to talk him out of overnight? I had planned to go with him. I was concerned about all of the money and that night we were told our fliphouse sold for cash. Coincidence? In the meantime we went to get passport photos at Costco. I thought we needed 6 each but Costco would only sell sets of 4 so we had to get 8 each. When I was putting our dossier together I realized we did need 8 each. Coincidence? As I said the fed ex was sent Wednesday and we had it back in our hands legalized Friday morning. This timing allowed us to overnight the finished dossier to our friend in Missouri who will take it to Haiti on Monday. Coincidence?

What will God do next.

By the way, we are flying to Haiti next weekend to meet our little boy :)

Wait, Wait, Wait, Wait, Wait...

It is hard to do. It builds ones faith. I wish I didn't need my faith built. Do I trust that God is good? Do I trust that He loves Gideon more then me? Yes I do but I forget and I fret and I stumble and then I remember and then I wait.

We were waiting and not doing anything then we felt we should get our Dossier done (our Dossier is the paperwork that is sent to Haiti to be approved for adoption). Many things needed to happen to get this done and it all seemed to fall into place. As I type our Dossier is en route to us through the mail from South Carolina, sent from a kind hard working translator that grew up in a Haitian orphanage. Once we receive it we need to send it to the Haitian consulate in Chicago to be "Legalized". We don't know what this does but it is another step and several hundred more dollars to spend. As soon as that step is done we can send it to Haiti. The problem is... we have no one to send it to.

Haiti is changing things. This should be a good thing for future adoptions but for those of us still at the early steps it is not good. No one knows what these changes are. No one knows if these changes will really happen. No one knows how this will effect us. Possibilities are: we can adopt from OLTCH but we will need a lawyer, we can adopt from OLTCH but we will need to go through an adoption agency (at this time, no agency works with OLTCH), and the worst possibility of all is OLTCH will no longer be able to have children adopted from it. The thought is that we should know the answer in mid- October which will mean we will have a lot more questions.

We can wait a few weeks more to find this out, but... we have another problem. We are flying to Haiti the end of September to meet our sweet boy Gideon for the first time ever. We are so excited to see Haiti and meet him but... should we go? Gideon knows of us and asks for us to come but what if he meets us and then we can't adopt him? It seems impossible to imagine but it is a possibility. We are praying constantly about whether we should go.

Please pray for this process with us. There are a lot of precious families still waiting for their kids to come home. Please pray for wisdom for us to know what steps we should take in moving forward and pray that it will be clear to us if we should go to Haiti as planned.

Thank you for taking this journey with us. It is a wild one!