Lux et umbra vicissum…

Ok, so those of you going through Ethiopian adoptions right now will understand the full magnitude of this miracle.  Let me try to spell it out for everyone else…

There are two judges who hear all of the adoption cases in Ethiopia.  Because the adoption laws in the country have changed a bit recently (requiring different paperwork than before, etc.), the judges have had to request more paperwork on several of the adoption hearings that have come through, which has increased a backlog in the cases.  In addition, there are now 40 some (?) agencies working in Ethiopia, so there are a lot of court date requests going in.  The wait time for a court date has been steadily increasing since at least last fall.  As of last week, we were informed that court dates were being assigned 10 to 12 weeks out, so whenever we were told of a court date, it would most likely be 10 to 12 weeks from the date we were notified.

It was odd, though.  Back in… oh… January, I think, Joel felt very strongly that the Lord was telling him we’d adopt in March.  I’ll be honest.  I doubted even then.  I thought maybe he just had an optimistic feeling.  But I told people that, as unlikely as it seemed, when he got strong feelings about these sorts of things they tended to pan out.  As the weeks went by, I grew quite certain that the feeling he had was his own and not of the Lord after all.  Joel still held onto that March word until just in the past week or so when he started thinking maybe he was wrong after all.

We got an email today.  With absolutely no known reason, we were assigned a court date of March 25th.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have prayed and prayed and asked others to pray for a miracle in the process to speed it up, but I never really had faith that God would do it.  Oh, I knew He could, but I questioned why I was important enough to warrant this particular intervention when so many other families would like to speed things up as well.  Well, I don’t pretend to understand His reasons and they’re probably more complex and far-reaching than I’ll ever know, but I am humbled and in awe of the way He has consistently moved this particular adoption along and helped us to bring these girls home.  All glory be to Him!

If this court date is successful, we believe travel will be in the beginning of May.  This would be another answer to prayer since Joel would be able to go over and come back before airfare costs go up in June.  Please continue to pray with us that the court date will be successful and that we’ll be able to bring our new daughters home soon!  Oh, and stick in a prayer for the necessary travel funds while you’re at it.  I have absolutely no doubt that God can take care of them just fine. 😉