Phillip and Kristen Adopt

Yay!!! Our dossier was finally sent to Colombia. This huge stack of paperwork represents close to a year’s worth of work. Now we are just waiting for approval from the country. This could take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple months. Because we are pursuing the adoption of specific children, our application should be toward the top of the stack though. Hopefully we hear something soon!

The next step will be official matching with the children. We are hoping to be matched with the children we have been pursuing and have already submitted a Letter of Intent for, but sometimes things change those plans. We will just have to wait and see what God has in store. We are trying to hold loosely to our own plans in this season while holding fast to His promises.

Thanks so much for your encouragement and prayers! You better believe I will update you all once we get approval and are moving to the next step!

Here is an update with what is going on in our adoption process right now. 

We had our fingerprinting appointment with USCIS (immigration) on Thursday. This is part of a process called the i800a in which we apply to our government to get permission to adopt a specific number of children from Colombia. Once we receive this approval, our dossier (all of the paperwork we have been working on for the past year) can be sent to Colombia to receive approval to adopt from their country. This fingerprinting appointment was a big step because we now have done everything on our end and just get to wait for this approval. 

It was pretty amazing though because the lady at the courthouse who scanned our fingerprints was actually from Colombia! She was so excited that we were adopting from there and was super encouraging. The Lord knew that we needed a little encouragement in this part of the process and sent us someone from our soon-to-be children’s own culture to give it to us. He is seriously so good! 

We were also able to send our dossier documents on to our adoption agency yesterday so they can begin translating while we wait for approval from immigration. I was definitely a little nervous sending the stack of papers away since they represent a year’s worth of work and a lot of money. On the flip side, it was also freeing to know that this part of the process is almost done and all of this work will pay off soon. 

Here are a few things we would love prayer for as you think of us:

We would receive approval from immigration soon and without complication

Our dossier would be translated and sent to Colombia without issue

The needed funds would come in soon so we don’t have to pause the process due to a lack of money to cover things

That we would rest in God and wait patiently for Him

For other adults to come around these kids to encourage them and share God’s love with them while we are not yet able to

Thank you all so much for praying and encouraging us!! The end is in sight! Then starts the real hard work… parenting!

As many of you know, we ran into some snags (felt more like brick walls) with our home study completion. We had been waiting for months for our home study to be finalized and thought we were finally at the end of the process when we received an email from our social worker saying she was leaving the agency and would not be able to complete our home study. It looked like the earliest it could be completed by another social worker would be sometime in the fall. This was super devasting news and made for a very difficult few days. This would have pushed our adoption further out and also caused several documents to expire and have to be redone. We didn’t know what this meant for the children we had been pursuing to adopt either. 

We knew that the Lord was bigger than any of this and had the power to move mountains. We kept praying for the next week that He would do what only He could do and make this all come together before the social worker left the agency. Well… long story short, 2 weeks after we were told there was no way to get it done, we received our finalized home study! The Lord is so good and has shown Himself faithful and powerful! We know this only came together because of Him and those He used to advocate for us. All glory to God!

As we look forward to the next steps in this adoption, we know that there will be even more highs and lows. He is the same God yesterday, today, and forever which means we can trust Him with those future highs and lows as well. 

“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever.” Psalm 136:1