Long Overdue...

I truly didn't mean for this post to take so utterly long. I tried with great effort several times to write this post, but words seem to fail and everything that appeared on the screen in front of me sounded....well, not-enough. So no more deleting, backspacing, pausing or doubting. I'm gonna type, publish and pray that the words you will read attempt to capture my Thanks and Awe over the last weeks events! Here goes....

May 14th finally came! And was over way too fast :) The Auction fundraiser was a HUGE success! My Mother-in-law and Doug's Aunt truly out did themselves to put on an amazing outpouring of love for Doug, myself and our soon-to-be kiddo. We spent 2-3 hours with some of our dearest friends and family laughing, crying and sharing our hearts over adoption and orphan care. Did I mention crying? I felt like a leaky faucet all evening. With less than 100 people, the Lord did AMAZING work! People were so generous, joyfully giving. So much so that Doug and I are now only short the money for plane tickets!! Can you belive that? Lets recap... Ethiopian adoption runs about $25,000.00! We are only needing the last 5-7thousand!! I am blinking as I reread that. When the Lord calls, the Lord equips! And now my prayer? "Lord, make us worthy of this calling."

To those of you that came on May 14th, that loved generously on May 14th, Doug and I can not express our gratitude. It means we can accept a referral in hopefully a few short months. It means our arms are almost done aching. It means the Kingdom of God was shown and proclaimed here on this earth. It means that in our hearts, you will always be remembered as the ones God chose to help bring our little one home, bringing ultimate Glory, Honor and Praise to Him and Him alone. WE LOVE YOU ALL!!

Now, a quick update about May 18th! Doug attended his 2nd Oral Review Board for the Fire Dept and did a great job! We won't know if he made it to the next step in the process until July 1st, but my prayer was always that he would walk away knowing he did his best. And he walked away with a huge sigh and no regrets! I'm not sure who this process is more painful for, Doug or me :) I get so anxious for him, and even more so this time because I sat in the car as he faced the panel. We needed to zoom down to immigration for our fingerprint appt directly following so all I could do was pray, bite my nails, sing to myself, and read blogs on my phone as I waited for almost 2hrs! (Mind you the actual review was only 15min in length!)

We made it to immigration and checked another huge box on our adoption checklist!! There aren't very many boxes left! Now we wait for our official seal of approval from the American government that we are cleared to adopt. This wait time is estimated at anywhere between 2-6weeks. When we get this approval it's time to send in our stack of documents to Ethiopia and we can get a referral!! WOW!! It is definitely hard to belive we are almost ready to see our little one's face. The child God has chosen to add to our family. Whoa!

So for now, we will hurry up and wait some more :)