Woohoo!

Well, this is a small celebration, but a celebration nonetheless! Our homestudy is finished!! Our social worker emailed our homestudy to our adoption agency today. We will wait about 2 weeks to have it approved from our adoption agency. We are really hoping it is sooner than 2 weeks, but that's what I am planning on. Anyways, this is great news because we are finally moving on to the next step! Thanks for all the prayers!

Fun Weekend

What a fun weekend we had. My hubby surprised me with an unexpected date night! Best of all he took care of all the details...the sitter...the reservations...all I had to do was get all dressed up by 6:00! What fun! So incredibly grateful for a loving husband and a date night! Moving on to an adoption update...I talked to our social worker and she is thinking she will have our homestudy completed by the end of the week. Please pray that it actually does get done. We are soooo ready to move on to the next step. It will be such a relief to be done with the homestudy. We are hoping to get an update from the orphanage on Sophia, but that request was made over 2 weeks ago and we haven't heard anything back yet. It is so strange to be adopting a child and have zero say in what is going on with them. But, we will survive. Well, the next time I give an update I sure do hope it's about how our homestudy is complete!!

Making (some) Progress

Well, we are still waiting for our homestudy to be completed. Hopefully, by the end of this week our social worker will have been able to finish writing it. Then we can move on to the next step of the long adoption journey. That next step is simply getting all our documents notarized, authorized, and authenticated! Sheesh...that's a whole lot of "verifying" going on! After all of that we need to send out our I800 application. We will then wait up to 8 weeks for our I800 approval. Basically, the I800 approval is just approval from the United States saying we can adopt a child from China. We need this document before we can send our paperwork to China. I can not wait to get our paperwork to China. Of course, once it's in China we will still need to wait 4 to 5 months before we travel!! This is absolutely a lesson in patience! We would appreciate any and all your prayers. We would love for this paperwork process to move quickly and smoothly. And of course, our number one prayer is for Sophia...that she is doing well and is very much loved where she is at!

Great Video!

Faith Like a Mustard Seed

A verse that seems to be popping up wherever I turn is found in Matthew 17:20 "He replied, "Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." If you haven't ever looked at a mustard seed...it is very, very tiny. This verse is encouraging yet convicting all at the same time. It reminds me that all I need is a tiny amount of faith to see God do great things. However, it reminds me at the same time that maybe I am not seeing all the great things God can do because my faith isn't even the size of a mustard seed! With the adoption of Sophia I feel we have certainly placed our faith in God to direct our steps. There are many things we have to work at not worrying about with her...her health, her "unknowns", if she is being loved and cared for well, her present, past and future, our lack of parenting skills for her, etc. But, I don't want to live a life of worry. It's wasted energy and it shows major lack of faith. These opportunities to worry are actually an invitation to come to the Lord in prayer and make my requests known to Him...and to leave it at that. Let God be God and let Jami be Jami. Our church is in the process of finding a new Senior Pastor. We are very fortunate to have a candidate right now. He came to speak today and it was very, very encouraging and convicting, much like the Scripture verse I wrote earlier. His message was thought provoking and his question to us was simple...If your life was a movie...would you watch it? It was an interesting way to lead into how many, including myself, try to cushion ourselves from any real discomfort or uncertainty...or (gasp) risk. But, just like a great movie...a great life must involve risk. Because if we never risk anything then when will we ever be able to grow our faith or allow God to work a miracle? So, with that said...I find encouragement in knowing that we are stepping out in faith, taking a risk with our adoption. But, that's okay, because I am in the mood to watch a really great movie about our life and who better to direct that movie than God Himself!

Being Reminded...

First let me start of by saying...we are so incredibly thrilled to be adopting Sophia...we can not wait to bring her home! I have to say though that the enormity sometimes hits me when I least expect it. Normally, I would expect that I would become overwhelmed with adding another child to the household when things were chaotic with the three little ones already in the house! Instead, I find that it happens when things are going very smoothly, all are getting along, and I am just sort of admiring the peacefulness of the moment. That's when a thought can hit me that says..."What in the world are we doing?" "Why rock the boat?" and so on. This is where I need to be careful to shift my focus off of myself and remember that God has a purpose for each of us and a lot of the time people will have a God given desire (ours being adoption) and instead of moving boldly forward with it...will get stuck in complacency or content with being too comfortable. We start to doubt the same God who was, is and will always be the One who directs our steps. I can remember being pregnant with all 3 of my children whom are all only 17 months apart from the other. I remember being overwhelmed almost the entire pregnancy with all of them because I was soooo nervous about "how I would be able to handle one child, two children, then 3 children under the age of 3!" And of course, God gave me all I ever needed in the exact moment I needed it...never before and never too late. I can certainly look back now and say that with confidence. So, with that said...I am trying not to do what I did before. Unfortunately, I showed a huge lack of faith in the God who gave me those pregnancies/children in the first place. Now, more than ever I know He will certainly never give me more than I can shoulder...and if He does...He will be there to carry me through! Thanks to a dear friend...stacy, who reminded me of all this over some tea and dark chocolate!