Almost There . . .

*Sigh* Okay. We are almost done with the biggest chunk of paperwork in this process. Believe it or not, we encountered several more setbacks with our dossier in the past week-and-a-half. Our hope was to have our dossier complete and waiting so that as soon as we received our 171H, we could have apostilles affixed to our documents and put it all in the mail immediately. Well, our dossier came this past Wednesday—an enormous answer to prayer in and of itself—and we are praying that we'll be able to mail our dossier on Tuesday. A full half-dozen of the documents we thought were ready for apostilles have had to be re-done, and we are going to track down the last of these tomorrow, Lord willing. It has been a surreal roller coaster ride lately, but God has shown Himself, yet again, to be faithful and sovereign over all of this. Every time that something gets held up for one reason or another, I have to remind myself that the Lord is directing this entire process and that I need to trust Him to work out the timing in a way that will be best for everyone. It seems to us, at first glance, that the very best way for this to play out would be for Mikaela to come home to us as soon as possible, but that does not seem to be God's will for this. If things continue to move at this pace, she will still come home comparatively quickly, and I am in no way trying to overlook that fact. We know a number of families who have labored for years to bring their child home, and we are grateful that God appears to have spared us and Mikaela from such a long, drawn-out process. The setbacks that we've had, though, have meant that she won't be coming home as quickly as she could have. Looking at everyone involved, I can see now that waiting a few more weeks to get Mikaela will probably be better for our bio kids, as they're now that much older and better able to handle all of the things that will be thrown at them in the coming weeks. In some ways, the hardest part of this entire process has been learning to open my heart to God's will, and leaving it so, something that is especially hard knowing that our little girl is waiting for us nearly half-way around the world. Hopefully by the end of the day on Tuesday, we'll be much closer to having her here with us, where she belongs.