D-Day

Dossier Day, that is.

This one-and-a-half-inch stack of papers represents almost six months of work. Fingerprinting, police reports, letters from our doctors, employers, and friends, birth and marriage certificates, our home study, immigration approval and other government documents, personal letters to the Ethiopian government, scrapbook pages of our family, passports.... The list of everything included in this bundle is long. And it is done. Done! I Fed-Exed it to our adoption agency, America World, yesterday.

I am elated to have our dossier out of my hands. I have been so eager to get my nose out of all the paperwork and have time to focus on other things that are important to me, like preparing mentally and spiritually for the addition of our son to our family.

I am praying that angels will escort our dossier all the way into the hands of the Ethiopian embassy. And that God's protection will be with our little guy and his mom. We anticipate that if we don't encounter any delays we will receive our referral as early as late January and travel as early as late March. But it is all in God's hands, and although we are eager to have him in our arms as soon as possible, I know that delays may be part of his plan to connect us with the one that he has chosen for our family.

It is possible that our son has been born already. If not, his birth mom is certainly pregnant with him now. I think of her often. What heartache she must be experiencing now, whether she is terminally ill or in dire poverty wondering if she will be able to provide for her sweet baby. Lord, have mercy on her.

What an ironic combination of emotions adoption brings: both heartache and joy, loss and gain, pain and relief. We are the ones on the "easy" side. Help us, Lord, to feel her pain and to understand our son's loss. Give us hearts like yours so that we can see what you see and love how you love.