Saturday, October 23, 2010

New Blog Address

We now have a new web address for Our Adoption...His Glory. I was having problems uploading images to blogger, so I created a new blog at:
http://ouradoptionhisglory.wordpress.com/
From now on all new posts will only appear on the new blog. See ya' there!

Friday, October 22, 2010

Travel Plans

From Chris:

We will be flying out of Birmingham on Saturday, October 30th at 8:05 in the morning. We will route through Minneapolis and Amsterdam before arriving in Kiev on Sunday at 4:50 in the evening (Kiev time). Kiev is eight hours ahead of Birmingham, so hopefully we will have some down time on Monday to recover from our jet lag. We will then have our appointment at the SDA on Tuesday. Pray that God will give us favor in the eyes of the government officials, orphanage staff and all who will be involved in the approval of our petition to adopt.
 

We have been quite busy over the last few days making travel plans, etc. We are continuing to see the hand of God at work in providing the financing that we need. I will post more on that next week. He is faithful!


Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Ukraine Bound!

From Chris:

We now have an appointment date with the SDA (State Department of Adoption) in Kiev! We received a call from our social worker yesterday morning informing us that our appointment is on November 2nd! So…I will be booking flights for us later today and we will fly out of Birmingham either on October 29th or 30th. That is less than two weeks from now, so please pray for us!


I would like to catch you all up on all the ways that God has shown His faithfulness to us since our last post. In mid-September we finally received all of the corrected paperwork for our dossier. About that same time, we discovered that we only owed another $192.14 in fees directly to our adoption agency, which is $1570.36 less than we thought we owed! (We thought we owed another $1762.50 in addition to the last payment of $1762.50 mentioned in the August 23rd post.) So that was a HUGE blessing from God. On September 23rd, our dossier was successfully submitted to Ukraine, at which time we had to wire $2500.00 to our facilitator (Sasha) in Ukraine. And wouldn’t you know it…by God’s providence, we had enough money to cover this fee and we still had almost $300.00 left over! Jana (our social worker) told us that we could probably expect to receive a travel date within 2-4 weeks. 

The first week of October, we felt that God was leading us to have a yard sale to raise some of the funds that we still needed. We had been wanting to have a yard sale for awhile, but just kept putting it off (you know how that goes). So we went through all of the JUNK in our garage and realized that we had quite a bit that we could sell. Upon hearing about our yard sale, friends began to donate items to sell also. Our garage began to get more and more crowded as more and more donations began rolling in. We could not believe all the stuff that we had for the sale! We decided that we should have the yard sale on two successive Saturdays, October 9th and 16th. We were blessed to have friends and family that were able to help us on both Saturdays (We could not have done it without you guys). Both sales were extremely successful and we made a grand total of $1553.00 toward our adoption fund! 

Three days later, on October 19th, we received the call from Jana about our travel date. The money from the yard sale plus other funds that we have saved and have had donated toward our adoption will more than cover the cost of our airline tickets (which I will purchase later this morning). EVERY TIME THAT WE HAVE HAD A PAYMENT DUE, WE HAVE HAD THE MONEY THAT WE HAVE NEEDED, always with a little bit left over! We will be wiring $8500.00 to Sasha on Monday, and then we will be taking around $7000.00 with us to Ukraine when we leave that weekend. We don't have the money in hand right now, but I have no reason to doubt that God will provide it. He has shown Himself faithful, over and over! We serve an amazing God! He is real, and He still works miracles!

This blog will be our main avenue of communication while we are in Ukraine, so check back regularly for updates. We love you all very much!