DONE!

Dossier....DONE!
I-600A....DONE!

Oh man, I love it when things are DONE!!!!

Now I truly am very excited to be on our way towards getting our baby girl! I have had moments of frustration, but overall have been very impressed with how easy the process actually is. I have had more stress with say...buying our first house.

One of the questions I am often asked is if we know when we will get our baby. First we have to get a referral, which means we have been matched with a child. Before that however, the child must have been brought into the orphanage. This means that not too long before we receive our referral a terrible tragedy has occurred. Our baby has lost her family. There are so many unknowns. I don't know if right now her mother is sick, scared, dying, hungry, in trouble, lonely, sad...or maybe our baby hasn't even been conceived yet. It's possible that right now our daughter's fearfully and wonderfully made form is secretly being knitted together in her mother's womb. Maybe her mother has just figured out she is pregnant and is joyfully or fearfully sharing the news with the father. Sadly, it doesn't take much imagination to see all of the dark roads that will lead her mother to abandon her child. I can't help but think of those last moments our child will have with her family.

I am reminded of Moses. What could his mother been thinking as she set her tiny baby son adrift in the crocodile infested Nile river? What caused the Egyptian princess to take in the cursed baby of a dirty slave? Did she even consider the origin of his birth or was she simply responding to his soft baby cries? What if she had decided that such a child deserved to drown in the river? What if the color of his skin or shape of his eyes had caused her to look the other way? Obviously, God had a plan for Moses to have a special life set apart from those he would someday set free. Perhaps each baby adopted out of Ethiopia will have the same desire to someday return and bring God's grace and hope to their birth nation. I so glad that the end of the story is redemption, hope and love.