Approved!

I have to start his post out by saying a huge thank you to Ryan for his last post. I think that his posts are WAY more interesting than mine, so we have agreed that he will right one here and there, even though he really doesn't like doing it:) 

As Ryan mentioned in his post, we received our fingerprinting appointment in the mail on Sat, April 30th. The appointment was set for Friday, April 12. At encouragement of our case worker, we decided to drive over to Memphis on Tuesday, April 2 in hopes that we could go ahead and get fingerprinted to get a 10 day  jump on this thing. What Ryan didn't mention is that I couldn't sleep Sunday night March 31 due to feeling extremely sick. Feeling sick quickly turned into a very vicious stomach bug on Monday. Between bouts of sickness, all I could do was lay in bed. While laying there miserably, the thought kept coming to my mind that it was not a coincidence that I was extremely sick the day before we were hoping to get fingerprinted. On the surface, it would appear like bad luck or terrible timing...which it was. I believe that there was more going on though....a battle. You see, when the stakes are as high as adopting a  teenager into a loving, Christ following family and sparing her a life of despair, hurt, and oppression I think Satan tries hard to foil the plans of the Lord. And, in case you didn't catch it, I give ALL the credit for this whole journey to Jesus. I could never have dreamed this up on my own! So, with all that said, I give credit to Satan for making me so sick that making the drive to Memphis seemed {almost} impossible. At about 11:30 on that Monday, after praying all morning on my own that I would stop getting sick, I decided to send out a SOS message on facebook, asking all my prayer warrior friends to pray that I would get better. And you know what? I did not get sick another time after that! You could call that another coincidence, but I like to think that as the bible promises, "Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven" Matthew 18:19, that the Lord was just answering His people's request!

The rest of our fingerprinting appointment was a success, as Ryan mentioned. Yay!! We were thrilled to get that out of the way, and not have to make the trip back to Memphis on our appointment date. Thank you to all who prayed for us as we went early! 

Fast forward to this week. This past Monday morning, Ryan called USCIS to find out if our case had been assigned to an officer for review. He was told, by a not helpful/kind individual, that our case had not been assigned, and that it could be 60 more days before it was assigned. That stressed me out quite a bit, as you can imagine! So, I asked Ryan to call again, but this time we both prayed about him getting connected to a nice, helpful officer that would give us more information. Ryan called back, and was connected to a wonderful officer who, by the end of the conversation, told Ryan she would pull our file and work it herself. She told him to call back at the same time the next day (yesterday, April 9)!! We both prayed for the next 24 hours that Officer White would actually pull our file and  go ahead and work it. Ryan called back the next morning, and Officer White told him that she had approved our file, and that we should get our official approval letter by the end of this week!!! In case you have lost track of all of this, that means we are approved BEFORE we were even supposed to go for our fingerprinting appointment!! That spares us weeks, if not months, of wait time. Thank you Lord!

Through all of these events, we can't help but be in awe of how God is so graciously orchestrating all of the details for us. We have not been without our speed bumps here and there, but God's greatness has been revealed each step of the way. The last couple of days, Romans 8 has kept coming to mind as I have marveled at how quickly things have proceeded to this point.  "If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels or demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" Romans 8:31-32, 37-39 

We are so thankful for all of you who have been interceding in prayer on our behalf. Please don't stop!! We know that your prayers are carrying us through, and we see your prayers being answered!! Our prayer is that as we sit here in amazement at God's work in our family, that other people will also see that all of the things happening in our life is credited all to Him!! 

Next step...sending off our approval to Ukraine to join our dossier that is already there being translated. Once they receive this letter, we will be ready to formally submit our dossier to the SDA in Ukraine! Woohoo!!!