In the past six months we have been so overwhelmed by the amount of love and support offered to our family and our little boys in Haiti. The adoption process is slow and we knew that going in. As we wait we have used our time to begin the boys baby books, filling pages with notes that we've received of encouragement. We have also used this time to catch up on Kadan and Jaxan's baby books. A personal goal has been to keep our photo albums up to date and to create an album for Stephens memories as well. Basically as we settle into the long road ahead, we are doing our best to prepare our home for our growing family.
We are currently waiting for clearance from the Department of Homeland Security. We applied for this quite a while ago, but there is a mistake on the governments end regarding Stephen's age. We have sent a letter to explain the error, but we've been waiting for a response for about a month. Luckily, we do not feel impatient. We've had peace all along that God will send our boys at just the right time - that peace continues and we are thankful for that.
Once we receive clearance from Homeland Security we will then send our U.S. agency a huge packet of documents that collectively make up our dossier. These documents will be translated into French and sent to Haiti. At that point we will be much closer to being matched to our children. Although that will be a very exciting day, it does not mean we are a whole lot closer to bringing them home.
So as we continue on, we have heard God clearly. He's been reminding us to use this timely wisely and to continue to lead our boys well, to love them and Stephen recklessly and to keep the Biblical priorities in Ephesians 5 (God, Spouse, Children, Ministry) as our #1 goal. Stewardship remains a strong conviction too and slowing down and carefully discerning the good from the great. We are doing our best to be intentional with the months or years we have in this process.
Let me end the 1st blog of 2014 with a huge thank you for the amazing love you have sent our way from t-shirts, notes, donations, emails and simply remembering our journey. Every act of kindness has been recorded and we can't wait for the day when we can show our little boys how much they were loved even before we knew their names! I will update monthly if you want to keep checking in :)
Happy Chinese New Year!
