We accepted a referral!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It has truly been a Merry Christmas for our family! We are pleased to introduce you to our daughter, Victoria Rani. She is 3 years old and is in a foster home in Bangalore.

We did not expect to get a referral of a child until our paperwork had been processed here in the US, but we got "the call" on November 20th. :) When I heard Dean from Holt say her name, my heart just soared!

"Rani" in the Hindi version of the original Sanskrit means "Queen". In its Hebrew form it is derived from an expression meaning "She is singing." And every time we speak her name, Victoria, we will be speaking victory into her life. As broken and fragile as she is now, she will rise up with confidence in her Lord and strong in stature as a queen and will sing songs of victory in the "rain of the Spirit"!!!!

As a result of her life circumstances and malnourishment, Victoria has mild speech and motor skill delays. She is also very small. As of October 28th, she was only about 19#. But she is growing and already playing "catch-up" with her foster family. She has speech and language therapy once a week.

We are amazed at the gift God has given us for Christmas this year. He is soooooo good! She should be home for Christmas next year. We expect to travel to pick up our small package sometime this summer or fall.

We will be able to visit our missionary friends in Mysore, Tim and Karla Shamala. Again, God is so good and simply wants to bless His children. There are two orphanages we could have received a child from. One is in Pune which is far away from Mysore and the other is in Bangalore which is within reasonable driving distance from Mysore. We always believed God would make a way for us to visit with them and He has!

Please begin praying for Victoria and continue to pray for our family. Stay tuned for many more updates!

Fingerprinting's Done!

On December 9th we went to Michigan City to get our fingerprinting done for USCIS. Our appointment was for 8:00am and we had our google maps ready and left in plenty of time. Little to our knowledge the office had recently been moved from Hammond, IN to Michigan City and the "Dunes Plaza" address we googled was the "Dunes Plaza" resort homes along the lake. AAAHHHH!! Not the place we wanted to be!

Horrible thoughts of having to reapply and repay fees started invading my mind. Billy told me to call the number on the USCIS paperwork and I just laughed and said that would be like telephoning the Space Station! We drove around and found a place to stop and ask for directions. Yep, you guessed it, I (Melissa) ran in. The not-so-friendly guy told me to come back in 10 minutes when their offices opened and I firmly told him I HAD to be at this other place at 8:00. I think he noticed my desperation and proceeded to give me quite unclear directions to the "Dunes Plaza" shopping center. The Holy Spirit led us there and when I saw the big blue letters "Application Support Center" on the side of a building, I got all teary-eyed and gave all glory to God. We were in and out of there in about 15 minutes and then went across the street to IHOP and ate a whole day's worth of calories in one sitting.

Fortunately, when go to pick up our daugher in India, Holt will provide us with a knowledgeable driver to take us to the places we need to be. We won't return home without her simply because we couldn't find the place! Like my sister-in-law said, "Google maps may not work the same in India."

Thank you Lord for giving us direction when we need it!

We're #1 on the list!!!!!!!

Well, kind of anyway. I talked with Mary at Holt today and after getting many questions answered I thought I would inquire as to where we are on the waiting list. We are #7 overall, but #1 that's not an NRI couple. NRI means "Non-resident Indian". In other words, there is some preference given to NRI couples. India desires to place as many children as they can with families in India and then they try to place them with Indian families outside of India. So sometimes the wait can be longer for families who are not of Indian descent.

We will be mailing our I-800a paperwork to the US Government this week. It will take 90-120 days to process. I thought we couldn't get a referral of a child until this was approved, but Mary told me today that we could get one at any time! Yeah!!!

We are so excited that "the call" could really come at any time, but also have a great financial need. We still need close to $5000.00 by the time we get a referral. We are applying for a grant, so pray for favor for us ~ and literally for a financial miracle. God's hand has been upon this entire process and we continue to trust in Him and know He's working out every part of this process. Maybe soon this blog will get much more active!

"Every decision shouldn't be a good decision, but a God decision." - Tommy Tenney

We recently received the final copy of our home study in the mail! Two copies were mailed to Holt and a few more remain here as we do paperwork for USCIS and apply for a grant as well. All was going well until I punched in some income numbers for our grant and realized there may be a mistake on our income in the home study!!! AAAHHHHH! Will this ever end??? Hopefully I will be able to talk to Holt today and our social worker as well. I know it's just another "bump in the road".

We KNOW God is faithful. A couple weeks ago, I made the difficult decision not to apply for a temporary 5th grade teaching position. Everything had been lining up perfect for it. I was becoming eager to teach the class and was excited for what we thought was God's financial provision. However, we knew this would greatly affect our boys and the church - and possibly not in a positive way. The night that we made the decision, I had a dream I was driving through a neighborhood and I saw a massive pile of scrap metal - just sitting there waiting to be hauled off. I got so excited and began loading up the van with as much as I could..... I woke up that morning in awe of God's message to me that He will provide - like He told me from the start of this process - in ways I don't expect.

A few days later, I was in the church office and Billy handed me an envelope. It had cash in it and on the outside was the name of one of our parishioners and "scrap metal". This man had taken in some scrap and wanted to give the money towards our adoption. My spirit just rejoiced!

The following weekend, Billy and I were blessed to be able to attend a minister's conference with Tommy Tenney and, amongst many other amazing words from God, our decision was again confirmed through the story of Ruth and Naomi. He said, "Every decision shouldn't be a good decision, but a God decision."

God is good! Prayerfully I'll soon be able to post that we have sent our paperwork to USCIS.

We are taking a child into our laps forever

I have always said that if we were to adopt, God would simply have to drop a child onto my lap. Recently, on Holt's online forum I came across the following:

The verb to adopt in Hindi is Gawdlayna and to say "I am adopting a child" literally translates as "I am taking a child into my lap forever".

And in the Devanagari script: देवनागरी

How beautiful - and very powerful to me! Spiritually, God has truly dropped a child into our hearts. It's just taking a lot of work to physically get her to our laps - forever!

Dossier's (finally) out of my hands!

Our dossier was officially received by Holt. Hallelujah! I'll have to say I was a bit shaky and emotional as I put it all into the Fed Ex envelope and let some stranger drive off with it. But it's now much safer at Holt than sitting in our home.

Just an update

Just a quick or not-so-quick update on our progress. I recently talked with Holt and got a list of questions answered. Let me add that they have been WONDERFUL! in guiding us through this process. We are blessed to be partnering with them. They said there are currently 23 families in the India program and we are #15! So, we've made some small advancements. We were officially put on the waiting list in March when they received a draft of our homestudy. Well, then the Hague Treaty (agreement between various countries on international adoption standards) which was implemented in April added more paperwork which put a halt to submitting the final draft of our homestudy as well as our dossier. Fortunately, that has not affected our spot on "the list". There are many other factors that go into matching children with families such as age, health and if the adopting couple has NRI (non-resident Indian) status, so our standing of 15th place doesn't really tell us a whole lot - just that we're further along than we were before. :)

I told Holt that I had our dossier completed, but that I was waiting to send it because the guidebook says to mail the finalized homestudy with it, but they said I could just mail it anyway. YEAH! I can finally get it out of my hands!! Tomorrow's the big day!

Our homestudy should soon be finally complete as well. One of the new requirements that was implemented is that we have to complete child abuse clearances for each state we've lived in since age 18. That's 10 states between the 2 of us!

Our fundraising continues as well. We have made $1,000.00 doing rummage sales this summer. If I added up the hours put into it, I would suspect I've made maybe $2.00/hour, and I've wondered at times if it's been worth it. But God has provided and has worked in other creative ways through our rummage sales. Will and Logan have enjoyed counting back change and talking with customers, too.

And while I'm on the subject of those two booger boys, they have both learned to swim this summer! It was been so much fun to hang out with them at the pool and I'm so proud of them. Will heads off to 1st grade on Friday and Logan begins preschool in another 2 weeks. They both start soccer this week. This will be Logan's first official sport. He has his first practice this evening. It should be quite entertaining. Say a prayer for the opposing teams he'll be playing. I don't think they have any idea what they're up against!