...or maybe not

The dossier is sitting on my shelf right now, hoping to go out tomorrow morning.

What a reminder that the timing of this adoption is in God's hands, and not my own. I've worked so hard at waiting patiently when it was my turn to wait patiently, and to keep things moving along when it was in my power to do so.

This week has been a reminder that it's never really in my hands. The simplest way to share this story is to clip it from the email I sent to our adoption agency worker.

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So here's the story.

Yesterday [Thursday] morning the mail came with our apostilled FBI clearances back from [an agency in Washington, DC that offers walk-in services for apostilles on important documents such as these]. I lifted the apostille on each to check, and, yes, they were both FBI fingerprint clearances. I noted a tiny 1" x 1/4" post it note saying "Columbia" on one of them, which I thought odd, but I took it off, and looking at their packing slip which clearly said the correct country, I brushed it off.

We'd gotten our other documents notarized Wednesday evening, so Thursday afternoon, with the apostilled clearances back from DC, we all six of us piled into the van to go to the MN SOS for the state apostilles. We were the last people through for the day, but got them without a problem. So then off to the UPS/DHL place by the grocery store. Matt took our youngest to pick up a few groceries, and I took the older three to mail off the dossier. I took one last check through against the checklist to make sure I had everything, and that it was all in the proper order. All good. Send it off, though they note that it's after the cut off for Thursday, so it will go out Friday morning. No problem.

I wake up this morning [Friday], and am in the middle of starting our home school day when I get a phone call. From the walk-in service in DC. She wants me to check something on the documents they sent us. I explain I don't have them - they were sent to Eastern Europe last night. She says they were the wrong ones - belonging to someone else who lives in MN. Ours are sitting in front of her on her desk.

I had sent our dossier with *someone else's* FBI clearances!!!!! As the panic began to rise it was immediately quenched by Isaiah 26:3-4 which has been rolling through my mind all week long - starting Sunday, the day before any of these papers even showed up! So choosing that over panic, I hung up with her and called DHL, hoping that maybe they could track it down before the airplane took off or something.

It was on the counter in front of the lady I spoke to at DHL. "Don't send that package!!!" I told her. So the kids and I ran over there and got our dossier back out of the DHL envelope, and sent the wrong clearances back to DC while the DC office sent ours to us today, so we should get them tomorrow [Saturday], and will take ONE MORE LOOK over the dossier, and then send it to K's country on Monday.

So for some reason God saw it fitting to 1) delay our sending of our dossier which I cranked on all week to be able to send as soon as I had everything back but 2) to have it delayed only one business day, and not weeks or even months that it could have been delayed if this situation had played out fully!
~~~

Can you even imagine the complications if our dossier had ended up in K's country with someone else's FBI clearances? Serious time delay here! Not to mention the delay it would be for the couple whose clearances I almost sent with our dossier.

Yesterday (Saturday), the younger two and I went to the DHL office since we were next door for another errand anyway. We spent 30+ minutes in there while the young man behind the counter tried his best to figure out how to send documents to K's country, and I finally asked him if I should just come back Monday. He breathed a sigh of relief and agreed.

So, the plan is that I will pack us all up and drive to our favorite local DHL office tomorrow morning and get this dossier sent. But this time, fully reminded that there is an intricate balance of timing surrounding this adoption that I have no idea about, and try as I may to hurry things along, K is going to come home at just the right time.