An End In Sight

God so often provides things that I need, before I even realize that I need them. Last March, Joel's phone contract was up and he decided to upgrade to a Blackberry. That month, Verizon was running a Buy One Blackberry/Get One Free Sale. (Crazy, right?) So we went the next day to get mine. I thought it would be fun to have, but I never dreamed that I would need it.

We learned about Grace early on a Saturday morning through an email on my Blackberry. We were going to have a family day out that day. Without mobile email access, I would not have seen that email until late that night. From the time that I read the email on Saturday morning, I had 18 hours to gather paperwork and get it sent to our agency so that our referral could be locked in. I very well could have missed that opportunity and lost our referral.

Yesterday, on an interstate somewhere below Atlanta, I received the email that informed us that our LOA (Letter of Acceptance) had arrived at our agency. This document had to be overnighted to us, and I had 4 hours to let them know if it should come to an address other than our home. I would have been too late for that one also, and our precious LOA would have been sitting on our front porch in MD until we found someone pick it up and overnight it to us in MS.

Thank you, Lord, for providing a tool for this adoption before we even decided to begin the process.

Oh...and we have our LOA!!! It is the final approval to confirm that she is ours, and a document that we must sign and return to China confirming that we still want her. (It is also called the Letter Seeking Confirmation.) Our agency estimates that we will travel in 10-13 weeks! We will be waiting for two documents now, one from our own USCIS (Customs and Immigration), and the Travel Approval (TA) from China. The USCIS document is the confirmation that her immigration paperwork is in order. The TA is our invitation to come and get her! I have a ton more paperwork to get together over the next couple of days. We have about a day and a half of down time before our mission trip gets into full swing, which is a blessing. So, I am going to try to find a business center in this hotel so that I can get it all printed out and get started!