By the grace of God, we have been blessed with the opportunity to grow our family through adoption. We are pursuing a sibling group in Colombia and hope to bring them home soon. For several years, we have anticipated and prayed for this adoption. There have been many twists and turns, but we’re now making some tangible progress. There’s so much uncertainty with international adoption, but we’re so grateful to know that God is our provider. There’s no way we can do this without Him! Never in a million years would we have imagined adoption from Colombia and yet, God knew! For years, He has been preparing us for this moment; we are grateful and humbled to follow His will! We come to you, our family and friends, to join us on this journey.
The long-awaited moment of switching our status to Home Study Completed has finally come! After a very long, very challenging 10 months, we are officially a home study approved family! This week has been a time of reflecting and praying over our adoption. It's such a huge moment of relief and rejoicing to know that we are one humongous step forward.
Simultaneously, our church has been deep diving into challenging times and responding to trials and suffering. Sundays have been a special time to reflect and pray over our adoption journey and everything we've experienced to get us to where we are today. Something that has stuck with me recently is how the Lord seeks us out when we are suffering. How He kneels down, scoops us up, and grieves with us. How God will 100% give us more than we can handle so we can turn to Him and rely on His strength. Thinking back on our journey, filled with so much uncertainty, stress, and pain, we can rejoice in the assurance that God is in control of our adoption. The pain and suffering we've experienced only compels us to rely on the Lord's strength, sovereignty, and wisdom. It also prepares our hearts to parent our children as they process and respond to their lives before, during, and after the adoption.
So, where are we at now? We have an ever growing mountain of paperwork we are working on. We sent everything to our agency to submit our home study to USCIS (immigration) for our Application for Determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Convention Country. This is our national-level approval to adopt from Colombia. Barring any complications or dreaded RFEs (Requests for Evidence), we could have our approval back anywhere between 1-5 months from now. After we get that approval, we bundle up our lives into a box of 25+ documents and send that over to Colombia for dossier approval.
Two weeks ago, we had our final home study visit with our social worker. We’re now waiting for her to write the report, get it reviewed, and send it to us! It would be the biggest, bestest Christmas miracle if we would receive the report in the coming weeks. We greatly appreciate your prayers for a speedy turnaround! As soon as we have the home study, we are able to submit our Letter of Intent for a sibling set we are hoping to pursue.
Home visit 1/3 was just completed on Friday! What a relief to meet our social worker and get to know her in person. Overall, it went much more smoothly than we had over-prepared for! Hallelujah! We're about to start Phase 2 paperwork and then we have two more required home visits before we are on to the next phase. We praise the Lord for His faithfulness to us during this adoption!
It's been a journey, to say the least. When they say adoption is not for the faint of heart, they mean it. After some challenging circumstances a few months ago, we were again on our knees asking the Lord for guidance. As He always does, God provided! Colton accepted his offer from Marshal University, which is right next to Kentucky. Nightlight is also located in KY, so this was a perfect blessing in disguise. After speaking with our adoption coordinator, we got the ok to restart our adoption with them, so we hastily packed up our things and moved to KY. We were blessed to find an amazing home that's close to Colton's school, a wonderful church for our family, and a private Christian school for the boys (which is also at our church). We've been so amazed at how God has aligned everything, once again. We're officially further along in our adoption journey than ever before! Our first home visit is scheduled for next Friday!
After some very discouraging challenges last year, we are back on track and slightly further than before. We have submitted all of our paperwork for the home study, so we are prayerfully anticipating the visits. We are simultaneously working on our dossier paperwork (what gets sent to Colombia) and many other applications. We continue to ask for your prayers as we move closer and closer to bringing our child(ren) home!
