I have written before that there were becoming a lot of questions and concerns with the Ukraine program. With these new changes, we have been keeping our eyes open to other options. Meanwhile we were getting ready to move into our new home. The military gave us a 1 story/4 bedroom home just down the road from our old house to accommodate our growing family. On the same day that we received the keys to move in I received an email from Rainbowkids (an organization that assists in getting waiting children adopted). I receive emails from them often and most of the time I just pray for the children. Sometimes I will tell Jason about one and he will say "Yes Shannon, he/she is very cute, but NO".  Well this time he told me to call the agency and get information about this precious baby girl!! So I did. After talking with Terri from the agency we found ourselves hoping that this would be our child. After 3 days of waiting she told us that out of several families who had inquired about this little girl, our family could now move forward with the adoption. We could not believe it!! What happened next was just amazing. We were without intranet, had to finish setting up our new home for pictures/social worker to approve our home for a new child, do all of our dossier paperwork and redo our home study to reflect all the changes, all in 3 days. Terri wanted it all done by Wednesday. In that time I was crying and on my knees praying for God to move mountains, and he did. God put an army of people around us to help. Some helped move, some set up our new home, some helped clean our old house and our amazing social worker stayed up late and came over early to get our home study done in time. Jason's boss even took his place as work so that Jason could be home to get paperwork and everything else done!! Everything happened so fast, we were just exhausted and on our knees praying for strength. One thing that we have been learning about God lately is that he dose not keep His will a secret that we have to search for. He gives us his word and wisdom to guide us and we can move forward boldly, trusting in His sovereignty in our lives and to give us the grace and strength that we need. So we did. We moved bold and fast trusting in His perfect plan. After 3 exhausting days and nights, crying and pleading with government agencies to get paperwork right and barely making each dead line, we finally finished our dossier and put it in the mail. On Thursday we received a call from Terri saying that the dossier was perfect but that we had a problem. The problem was that our home study agency was on the Russian "black list". This was not good news. Since then we have been exploring all options to see what our next step should be. What I am about to say is skipping a lot of detail but these are things we are praying for (if this is our little girl) -we need the CYFD to comply with Russian adoption standard and to write us a letter with "international" wording in it. If they do comply, we can change our home study over to an agency that is not on the black list. -If they do not comply we will be waiting for the new "list" to come out and will be praying that our home study agency will not be on it. If either of these things can happen in a timely manner, we will be traveling to Moscow by June 1st and this will be our little girl. If not, we will still move forward with a Russian adoption but will be waiting for a new child through a different Russian agency. God is good and if we can trust him with our lives, we can trust Him with our adoption!! I pray for this sweet girl, I hope that she is mine and that we will be able to bring her home soon. Pray with us that God would once again move mountains!!! |
