Sunday afternoon I sat down to put together the letter board to share our big news and started placing letters. It went a little something like this:
"aprobado" ... oops, wrong language.
"aproved" ... oh dear, is that spelled correctly?
"approved!" ... and there we have it! Our dossier has been APPROVED!
I've been having more and more moments like this, and I'm actually rather happy about it because I feel like I'm actually learning and some words come to me without as much intentional thought. But anyway, we'll get back to the real reason for this post. Let's talk about just how AWESOME our God is.
We couldn't actually wait until I had time to sit and type this update to share our news about our dossier approval, so the cat is out of the bag on that one. If you haven't heard the details about this, we were told that it could be up to 3-4 months for our dossier to be approved and only ONE WEEK after it was submitted we got word of the approval.
What does this mean? Now, we are officially on the waiting list to matched with a child in Colombia. The window for time frame on this part of the process is rather large in possibilities and I'm not going to try to speculate. We are simply praising God for moving our dossier approval through so quickly and asking him for our hearts' desire that the match will also come quickly. He is proving over and over again how faithful he is to us in carrying through this process and we know that in his perfect time it will happen.
Speaking of his faithfulness in this process, I have to praise him for the strides we have seen in our fundraising this past week. We decided to take advantage of our neighborhood's community-wide yard sale for a fundraiser, and with the help of our community group and some other friends, we were able to collect a great variety of donations. We are in awe looking back over the last few days as we have seen $850 raised through the yard sale and online sales of other donated items, a generous donation of $500, neighbors handing us cash at the yard sale just to support us, and strangers paying double what we were asking for items.
We share all of this with incredible gratitude and an invitation for you to join us in praising Him for the way he is moving in our adoption process. This week has been like a breath of fresh air, bringing us a lot of encouragement and a new wave of excitement.
Oh, do you know what will make your heart melt into a puddle on the floor? Hearing your children pray for "cariño" (their nickname for their new brother/sister) and thanking God for our papers being done. Absolutely precious! We are all four eagerly waiting to put a face to those prayers, and another thing we all agree on is that we can't properly celebrate this milestone without making pan de bonos... so, excuse me while I go place an order for more yuca flour.
Seriously, if you have taken the time to keep up with our story and pray for our family, THANK YOU! We are so thankful to have you supporting us. Always feel free to reach out to us with any questions, we LOVE to share about our heart for adoption, what our process has been like, and answer questions you may have. It is more encouraging than you can imagine to know that others are thinking about and praying for our little colombianito/a along with us!