Provisional Approval

There is a story behind this.

On March 3rd, we received a pink paper from immigration.  This made me nervous because to date, no approval notices had been on pink paper.  Sure enough, I opened it to find that it was a request for more information regarding our case. :(  I was frustrated by this, feeling like this was going to be another delay in the adoption process.  I emailed our agency and patiently impatiently waited for a response.

Back track to earlier in my day... 

Something which really stuck out to me in my morning devotions that day (March 3rd) was that I needed to trust God in all areas.  Faith/ trust is necessary for pleasing Him.   When I received the "pink slip" from immigration, I could hear the echo of my devotions with the question, "Do you trust me?"  I confess that I struggled with this and argued with God about why having the approval now is how this should work.  After several minutes, I let go and chose to trust Him with the timing of this approval.

One hour later...

To my surprise, the email I received back said that it was already taken care of : Jana had been in communication with the immigration officer during the previous week to clarify some confusion regarding some of the referral information, and we were told to disregard the notice.  She was not even sure why they bothered to mail it.  Yay! (There is a big "thank you" to Jana who was working for us behind the scenes before we even knew there was a need for it.)  It is interesting, isn't it?  It is  like God knew already how it would turn out and only had that "request for information" sent to us to test me and show me that I needed to remember Who is in control here.

Six days later...

I am happy to say that we have our provisional approval!  It came in the mail today, and guess what the approval date was.  March 3rd!! Really?!  While I was stressing out over getting a seeming delay with the information request, God knew that was the very date the approval was given.  Again...maybe He wanted to see if I would trust Him?  We were told to expect this to take four to six weeks, and we received it in four weeks.  

With the exception of the week we received our official referral and worked on I-800 forms, we have spent the last three months waiting for approvals from immigration.  Now we can move on to the Article 5, which we are told we should have next week.


An update on our prayer requests from this post...

The rest of this process goes as follows:  we get the Article 5, then the final approval from the Polish government, then everything goes to the local court.   We mentioned last month that the judges may or may not issue travel dates quickly, and we were told today that it seems that lately the judges have really not been in any hurry to move forward.  Once our information gets to the local judge, we could be given travel dates in a couple weeks...or six months.  We are praying specifically for early May travel dates, and we would appreciate you joining us in specific prayer concerning this. (Our original desire was to travel by our daughter's birthday which is is a few weeks.  As often happens in the adoption process, things took longer than we hoped, so that is unlikely.) We do not have control over the timing, but we know Someone Who does! :-)