Waiting for Miracles

This is Thom, Jill’s husband, and I wanted to add a quick status update and request for prayer.  It seems that we are always waiting.  It was a year ago two weeks from today that I first started thinking about “special needs” adoption.  We had literally never considered it before.  Pictures speak so eloquently.

Anyway, from the beginning this process seems to have been fraught with setbacks – God teaching us to be content with His timing – and we had another one Wednesday.  Three weeks after we submitted our acceptance paperwork and immigration forms we got an email that a signature had been missed on the i864 form!  AARRGGHH!  I remember the excitement and confusion of that day – I was so scattered trying to get all the forms properly filled out and the “i”s dotted and the “t”s crossed, wanting to avoid any further delays, I must have overlooked a single signature.  Preventable mistakes are the most frustrating.  Why wasn’t I more careful?  Why did it take three weeks for it to be discovered?  Why are all the powers of the universe arrayed against us as we endeavour to provide a home for a single orphan?

But God.

Please pray for our family.  We still have a lot of money to raise in order to travel, and a lot of preparation to complete around our home to get things just right for  Peter’s homecoming.

Please pray for Peter.  He is being introduced to our family through pictures and a video, and the people at the orphanage are starting to call him Peter.  He doesn’t even know what a family is, and doesn’t know what he is lacking, but now he is being told he has a father and a mother and two sisters and a brother.

Please pray that God continues to meet us in the midst of our waiting.  Many of you know even more poignantly than we do the frustration of setbacks and roadblocks.  Thank you for walking this road with us.

Finally, I was reminded of God’s purpose for waiting by a “friend” named Paul David Tripp in his book “A Shelter in the Time of Storm”:

“Waiting on God isn’t about the suspension of meaning and purpose. It’s part of the meaning and purpose that God has brought into my life.  Waiting on God isn’t to be viewed as an obstruction in the way of the plan.  Waiting is an essential part of the plan.”

The “AARRGGHH”s finally give way to joy, and the amount of time from one to the other is securely in the hands of God.  He is infinitely trustworthy.