Before I Blow Out The Candles...
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August is arguably my favorite month of the year. It's culmination of summer. It's our anniversary (9 years on the 5th!!). And it's my birthday (31 years young on the 9th). I love this month. All of it. After 9+ months on the wait list, maybe it'll be the month that holds our referral, too!
Which leads me to a prayer request...if I'm doing my math correctly and time lines proceed as predicted (nearly a laughable sentence to write), these next couple weeks are the 11th hour for us. If we'd get our referral in the next 2 weeks, we'd probably have our first Ethiopian court date at the end of October. Then, we'd travel again for our Embassy date 6-8 weeks later to bring them home. Putting all those time frames together, we'd barely make it to bring them home by the end of 2010. If you've been following our journey for more than a few posts, you know this would be a huge deal - emotionally and spiritually - for us. The other factor, is financial. The U.S. government gives a great adoption tax credit for the year you complete your adoption. But if we don't complete our adoption in 2010, we'll have to wait an additional year for a substantial and very helpful tax refund for our expenses. This would be huge and hard to wait for with the expenses involved in adoption and (oh yeah!) parenting!
I've been spending a lot of time meditating these days in Psalm 40. I'm continuing to practice waiting patiently (verse 1), but verse 13 hit me today as a call for help to my God...
Please, Lord, rescue me!
Come quickly, Lord, and help me.
A few other psalms have resonated deeply:
"You are my refuge and my shield; I have put my hope in your word." Psalm 119:114
"Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him." Psalm 62:5
Yet at the end of August, my hope is in God. I wait for him, not for a referral. Still, God invites us to make our requests known to him because he cares. As Psalm 40 says, he turns his ear to hear our cry.
We could bring home our babies
by the end of 2010.
