Email, Phone Calls & Dinner Discussions

Apparently, God is up to something huge in this adoption world of ours. I know of so many people who are receiving good news just in these last couple of weeks. Friends of Jay’s have recently received referrals for 2 Ethiopian babies and are praying for court dates! Blog friends of mine just got a referral for twin Ethiopian infants! Our friends from church are in Uganda right now and officially have legal guardianship of their daughter and are just now working on the US visa process to get her home!

And we have news too!!!!!

When the US Department of State suspended all Nepal adoptions on August 6, our agency told us to hang tight and just see what would happen. Until yesterday, we hadn’t made any decisions about our Nepal dossier. It’s technically still in Kathmandu. Some agencies have just ended their programs and have pulled their clients out of the program. Ours did not.

We received an email yesterday morning with an update on the Nepal program. There is very little hope that our Nepal adoption would ever come to completion. So, the Director at La Vida told us to consider their China and Colombia programs. I sent a quick reply saying that we have every intention of switching over to their China Special Needs program but that we can’t start now because we don’t have the funds in our savings account to start all over again from scratch. I gave them an estimated time frame of November or December to start up again. This short email I sent led to a 1 hour phone conversation with the Director yesterday afternoon.

“You don’t know!” she repeated over and over to me.
“I don’t know what?” was my reply.

She explained how she read my email about not having the funds to start up with a new adoption program, but told us that we have a CREDIT in our account at La Vida! We have a credit of $3000 in our account! My eyes bugged out of my head and my jaw dropped to the ground like a cartoon character! This amount would have been wired to Nepal upon being matched with our daughter, but because that never happened, it’s just been sitting at our agency on our behalf.

Then I was given our options:
1. Stop our adoption process all together and get refunded the $3000.
2. Keep our paperwork in Nepal and hold the $3000 until we get a referral. This is very wishful thinking and she gave me no hope that Nepal would open up again, but in the same breath told me that miracles do happen.
3. Move to the China Special Needs program and use the $3000 to start.

It doesn’t end there. It turns out that the start-up fees for China Special Needs are… $3000, not $4000 like I had assumed from that of our Nepal program! And here’s what really gets me… What’s even more amazing is that the donations we received from our support letter to family and friends, the donations that we thought were lost forever to Nepal, totaled… you got it, $3000. If you have donated to our cause, I am relieved, shocked and thrilled beyond imagination that your cash donations were not lost after all! You can hear my sigh of relief, can't you?

There is so much more to write, but it would go on for miles. So, I’ll break here and fill you in on the rest in another week or so as we make decisions. What I’ll leave you with is this…

While losing Nepal, thousands of our own hard earned, frugally saved dollars, the dreams of a sweet Nepali daughter was devastating, I’m glad it happened the way it did. Did I just say that? Oh yes I did! Moreover, I’m overjoyed that our agency hesitated to mention the positive balance in our account! Had we known that on August 6th when we lost Nepal, we would have just picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, washed our hands and moved into a new program. Instead, the not knowing allowed us to grieve the loss, to question our motives, to ask God again for His purpose in our lives. Had we known we could jump right into China, we wouldn’t have struggled spiritually, studied from His Word, asked friends for prayer, yearned for God. These 7 weeks have drawn us closer to Him, made us dependent on Him and Him alone. He is the one responsible for the gift we received yesterday, a gift I almost don’t feel worthy of.

I am thankful for these last 7 weeks. Please join me in thanking Him!