adoption update

as much as i would like my post about deer safety to remain on top for awhile, i couldn't wait to share a few adoption updates. we received a letter from CIS (citizenship and immigration services) yesterday saying that we should receive our fingerprint appointments in the next 15-30 days. the letter also said that based on our filing date with them (the filing date is when they received our i-600a and $830), they should be able to process and approve our homestudy in 30 days from whenever our homestudy is submitted to them for approval. this was huge news to us because we had been preparing for it to take up to 4 months. at this point, i don't see our homestudy being submitted until mid-november or december, so i think it's still safe to say we're aiming to send our dossier in january.

we are still in a bit of a stalemate concerning our homestudy documents. we have every document we need, but are now waiting until jamie receives his first paycheck so we can record on our financial statement his income after tax deductions. i'm ready to get these documents out of my hands, but jamie reminded me this morning that our social worker may not even write our homestudy until after we've had our second meeting with her, which will be whenever we get our fingerprints done. SO, please pray that the fingerprint appointments are sooner rather than later, and that when she has all of our documents, our social worker gets our homestudy done ASAP.

in other good news, we sent fees to CWA today. finally. we sent $1900 for our first agency fee, and also went ahead and paid a $600 translation fee (they have to translate all our documents before they get sent to ethiopia). this leaves us owing 3 major fees before we can send our dossier: $7500 to ethiopia, $2500 second agency fee, and $2500 unrelated child fee. i have not found proof of any fees related to adopting 2 children in any of our paperwork, so i'm wondering if our friend who told us about that was mistaken. as of now, we plan to use our $8000 homebuyer's tax credit to pay the ethiopia fee. so before january, we need to fundraise $4500. we're having a yard sale on oct. 24th, and also just got word that the chick-fil-a near us is going to do a fundraising night for us where a percentage of their profits will be donated to our adoption account. we are praising jesus for this and continuing to be bold in asking for provision.

most days, i feel like noah building the ark. i can imagine that noah must have told his friends that building the ark was quite an exhausting task. and i'm sure their replies must have been: "well, you're the one who chose to build this boat for no reason," not understanding that noah had received a calling from God that literally saved his life. i have had one too many people tell me that we're "choosing" to do what we're doing and thus shouldn't expect people to help us financially. and it's true, if we had started this adoption at a time when we had all the money to pay for it, we wouldn't need anybody's help -- including God's. i say that because i think God calls us to do things when we're not at all prepared to do them so that we have no choice but to rely on him. sometimes, i don't particularly like when people say "God called me to do this" or "God told me to do that" because i think plenty of terrible things have happened in our world because God "called" someone to do something. but in our case, i have no other way to describe our adoption than a calling on our life. and personally, i don't think we have much of a choice but to obey.