The Lord's Timing is Perfect Timing

Once again I am having to remind myself to surrender to God's perfect timing. He already knows the completed story of my life, and therefore He knows the perfect timing and order of things. I should be better about always trusting in God's timing without even thinking about it, but I have to admit that my "reminder" today is in response to something I just read.

The director of our adoption agency just sent out a message to all the families currently waiting for a "referral" of a baby. That would include us, although there is still a lot of paperwork to be done by the governments before we are technically even on the "waiting list". In a nutshell, the director explained that for a number of reasons, the process has greatly slowed down in recent weeks for referrals. One of the reasons is that the reagent used to test the babies for HIV has not been available for the past month, so the necessary lab work has not been able to be completed.

I have also learned that court dates (after a child has been referred) have been slowed down and delayed a lot lately too. This is partly because there are a lot more families trying to adopt from Ethiopia, so the systems are just bogged down.

Basically the message stated that while in the past it was conceivable for the process to only take a few months, waiting a year (YEAR) is probably more likely now.

I am not even sure how this makes me feel right now, as the whole thing still feels like some far-off dream. I feel a lot for the families who have already seen a picture of their child and even booked their travel dates, and then find out things have been delayed.

Now, I do have a praise report to share as well, and I hate that I have included this at the bottom of this message. Our agency director also shared in her message that they are no longer sending out Dossier packets to families wanting to adopt babies from Ethiopia until the situation settles back down. Thankfully we are not affected by that since we have just submitted our Dossier! See?! The Lord's timing is perfect. We missed that cut off by just a few weeks, and we didn't even know it.