LUISA!!!!!

We received the call on Friday that we had been waiting for, our agency received the official referral paperwork for Luisa with our names on it!!!

 YAY!!!

However, there were a few minor mistakes, so they are fixing them and hopefully we will get the paperwork in our hands sometime next week so we can begin the I-800 process (U.S. government process that makes sure the adoption is legit.) We were a little disappointed to hear that we probably won't travel until January.  The courts in Colombia close down for Christmas from December 17 until January 11!!!  Apparently, last week was the "cut off," so to speak, of getting the paperwork going early enough to be done with the process in Colombia before the Christmas holiday.  That also means we will miss Luisa's 2nd birthday, which is December 18!   We are at peace with that though...at least we know what to expect, however...we are still praying for an earlier departure!

We are super excited that this information came, because Thursday night, when we received the translated version of our approval, I noticed that it said "...approval to adopt a boy in the age range...."  Uh Oh!  So I checked to see if the original Spanish version was written wrong and sure enough it said ... Niño... so I thought maybe that just meant child(not necessarily boy,) but further down it read...hijo...which means son!  I was a tad nervous and sent an email to our agency, of course they were closed by then!  So I was expecting an email or call Friday to let me know what, if anything we needed to do about it.  When our case manager called me Friday afternoon I figured it was about the mix up.  She said that she had emailed Helena in Colombia about it and when Helena called her back she had the official referral!!!  I was so excited, and knew God had answered my prayer!  Thursday night when this all came up I just prayed that God would use the mix up for our good; that they would just give us our referral and it wouldn't be an issue at all!  

God is faithful.

There have been delays, mix ups and several "little" things that God has used during this adoption to teach me big things...

Trust Him!

While "paper chasing" for this adoption we had an issue with our finger print cards.  They spelled my name wrong!  I was so mad.  It takes a lot of time and a lot of flying around to get all of these things done and I had to go back and have them change the name?  Come on people...well, when I got there, the sheriff happened to be the one who was helping me and he noticed that the finger prints were done on the wrong cards!!!!  He ended up saving us WEEKS of delay by noticing that! 

Romans 8:28

 ²⁸And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.