The Good, Great, and Yucky News

Some updates from the past week.  As my last post said, our home-study provider refused to finish the job they started and denied writing it at all.  For Americans living abroad, there are many challenges to adopting because of not being on our home soil.  One of the difficulties we have living in Europe is that there are only three social workers qualified to write home-studies for Americans living here.  We were denied by the one, and turned down by a second, there was only one left.  We didn’t get their response right away and I feared it was because they too didn’t want to help us.  I was discouraged and confused.  Why would God bring us this far only to have this happen?  Then a dear friend called who has adopted two children from Ukraine, called to encourage me.  It was definitely Holy Spirit lead.  During our conversation I began to realize that it isn’t Brandon and I saving Vitalik from the orphanage, it is God.  He is God’s child first, we can never love him the way that God does.  We haven’t laid down our lives for him but God has.  This is God’s Story and we play our part as he leads our paths.  Just like when Grace and Hanna were little and I had to give them back to God, I needed to do the same with Vitalik.  When my girls were young I used to panic about them getting hurt, kidnapped, getting a terminal illness, and more.  I would obsess about protecting them to the point where I would have nightmares about horrible things happening to my girls.  At that time I got counsel from a friend who told me, “These daughters of yours are a gift from God, they are His kids first and He knows best how to love and protect them.”  She was right and so was my friend that called me last weekend.  Vitalik is God’s son first and even if this adoption doesn’t happen it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t still have a plan for his life and for our journey.  I had another friend tell me that because of our obedience to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit to answer the call to adopt,  that she has started to look more seriously at adoption being an option in her family.  So I know that whatever happens, God WILL get all the Glory, Honor, and Praise because adoption is part of his restoration story. 

So the GREAT news is that the 3^rd provider said that he would LOVE to write our home-study for us!  He seems much more knowledgeable and willing to assist us with paperwork than the first.  God knows what he is doing.  He told us specific people to contact with their e-mails and phone numbers.  This is SO helpful!  The yucky news is that now that we are so behind on our time-line we need to re-get all the documents that we needed for our home-study again.  The reason is that Ukraine will not accept any documents older than 6 months and most of our documents were dated mid-October which only takes us to mid-April.  So instead of trying to get the adoption finalized before mid-April and possibly missing it by a couple of weeks we are going to play it safe and get all the documents again.  The good part of this is that now we know the paths to take to acquire what we need.  So please pray that we get them again in a good time without the hassle, especially our marriage certificate from Seoul, Korea. 

Thank you for your encouragement, support, and prayers.  I know that we are being prayed for and this truly helps move mountains!