Practicing patience

Remember how excited we were that we got all of the necessary paperwork to keep the homestudy moving along done the day before Gloria was born? It was so nice to be sitting in those early weeks after her birth knowing that things were in process for all of the various state government background checks that we needed done to process our home study, since there's not really anything we can DO during that waiting period. Until those are returned, the home study can not be officially completed, and until the home study is done, we can't get going on the next step - our immigration pre-application.

So, then, imagine our disappointment to learn last week that two of the states we'd sent in request forms for Matt's Mom were outdated, and we're now set back six weeks in getting those processed. (Now that she lives with us, she needs background checks done in every state she's lived in since she was 18 years old. Thankfully we don't need anything done for the three years she lived in Africa!! I'm guessing getting something like that from a foreign government is even more complicated than from other states!) To our credit, we simply filled out the forms that our home study agency sent to us and sent them to the places/people they told us to send them to. To their credit (because I'm trying to not place the blame for this delay on them), they probably don't have to regularly go beyond MN background checks, or I'm assuming this issue would have surfaced for earlier home studies they've done for other clients!!!

It was easy to be discouraged - not only did it feel like nothing much was happening on the adoption front, now we knew that on parts of it, nothing is really what WAS happening!! So off we sent two new forms that we now have to wait on.

Into this discouragement came a few real reminders that we hear as God telling us that we are still walking on the right path, but that He will guide the timing of it as He sees fit.

The first reminder came in the form of a sort of rush of financial provision over the last 5 days or so.
- an unexpected gift of money from friends
- a disbursement from Matt's Dad's trust that we weren't expecting
- an insurance explanation of benefits that shows us hitting our yearly deductible through Krassi and Reuben before the visits that Gloria, Owen and I needed for our home study. (Because Krassi and Reuben have secondary insurance through the county because of their disabilities, if we hit our annual deductible through them, we don't actually have to pay anything because their secondary covers it, and then the rest of us have our medical expenses paid 100% through our primary insurance for the rest of the year. That's a few hundred dollars of medical visits we don't apparently have to pay for! I'd been thinking we needed them too early in the year to have met our deductible yet!)
- another, larger, unexpected gift from another friend
- a camera that fell onto the floor and stopped working, and since we're not fancy cell phone people, and use a plain old camera not just for photos of the kids, but also as a tool for our design work, this was an unexpected expense...until we realized that putting the battery back in facing the right direction was a cheaper way to fix the problem. :P
- a partial reimbursement for our home birth expenses. We usually go into home birth expecting it to be not covered at all, but each time our midwives have submitted to our insurance - sometimes the prenatal care is covered to some degree, and this time it was...in the amount of $858.03!!!
 With an adoption that we know will be paid for differently than our last one, having this money come in BEFORE we need it and especially during this gap when it feels like nothing is happening, is significant to us. Just because we don't feel like anything is happening doesn't mean our Provider isn't working on His side of things.

The second was a simple statement from a friend we saw on Saturday. "Satan hates adoption." It's simple, but a reminder that this is more than just an adventure that our family is undertaking, but it's a battle for truth and the value of human life. So some delays along the way are to be expected.