God at work

It's often when things work out easily, or quickly, or in time with *our* preferences that you hear people talking about God being behind it, or answering prayers.

We are seeing God at work in a completely different way with this adoption! With plenty of reassurances along the way that this is the right path to walk in, the process is taking pretty much absolutely as long as it possibly can to get completed!

We've been patiently waiting to hear that our dossier was submitted to the MOJ, and having not heard anything for a few weeks here, were thinking that maybe, just maybe they'd submitted it and not told us, and we were going to wake up any morning now to an email saying we'd been approved and would we be ready to travel in a few weeks!

This morning I emailed our US agency to see what they know about the status of our dossier, and the first surprise was that we didn't get a nearly immediate reply back to our email. Our contact person is VERY timely - sometimes I think she must sleep with her phone so she can get back to emails at any hour around the clock! So when it took over twelve hours to get a reply, that in itself was quite the wait.

But get this - it turns out a few dossiers all came in to our Bulgarian agency at the same time, and she's been working on translating them in order of priority related to their deadline, and ours isn't done yet!

We sent our commitment documents on December 31, 2015. They were approved by the Bulgarian MOJ on January 27th. From that date we have six months to get our dossier submitted. It's been over a month ago that we sent our dossier, and we're now sitting here with five days to go until it needs to be submitted. Phew.

So what does this have to do with this post's title? Well, back in November when I was very pregnant and Matt and I both heard God directing us to begin the adoption process again, we both, but me in particular, thought that was a pretty stupid time to be starting an adoption. Sure, it's one thing to find out you're expecting a baby by birth when you're in the middle of an adoption, but the other way around doesn't just *happen.* But we've learned enough to know that it's not our job to decide when to obey - as I tell my kids, obedience is 1) doing what you're told 2) right away 3) with a good attitude. So we did.

Watching this whole thing slog along like a sloth on a bad day has been incredible to me to watch. We are doing everything on our part to keep things moving as snappily as we can, but it's not in our hands. As we wait, we are getting to thoroughly adjust to life as a family of nine, and it's looking now like Gloria might even be weaned before trip two, meaning she could stay here in the States for the second trip, greatly simplifying caring for the girls for that week and the flight home.

Just like everything else that's under his control, God has this, too. And apparently one of the miracles he's working here is stretching out this time gap to the very longest it can be. It will be interesting to see how this happens.