Dossier

It was a big day, last Friday.  The kids (they didn’t have school) and I hopped in the car and headed to the shipping store with dossier in hand.  When I gave it to the lady in the store I got tears in my eyes knowing that this wasn’t just an envelope full of papers that I was sending.  It was so much more than that.

This envelope contained hours upon hours of work.  I called it our labor of love.  Shad and I spent about 16 hours on the online education and about another 5 or 6 hours each on the personal profiles that were 50 pages long.  After answering very deep and personal questions about ourselves, after being stretched to think about things that we never thought we would need to think about in regards to raising a child that comes from a hard place, after having a social worker in our home to interview our family and inspect our home, after asking people we know to fill out a very in depth reference, after each member of our family was deemed healthy and able to care for another child by our family physician and my dermatologist (darn skin lymphoma!), after filling out applications to adopt from Bulgaria and power of attorney forms, after obtaining letters from our bank and Shad’s employer, after filling out a financial form documenting where all of our income goes, after having all of those documents notarized and authenticated by the Secretary of State, I wrapped all of it up in manila envelope, paid about 8 bucks and handed it to a stranger, apprehensively trusting that it would make it to our agency.

Yesterday, I got the call from our case worker.  She had received our dossier and had reviewed it.  I love our case worker, she is so positive, caring and encouraging.  When she called me yesterday, she said that our dossier was perfect!  Needless to say, our dossier is officially on it’s way to Bulgaria to be translated!  This is very exciting news.  This is what we have been laboring in love for. This is what was really contained in that envelope.  It is us, our family, asking the Bulgarian government to allow us to adopt a beautiful child from their country.  It humbles me to imagine a government official looking over our paperwork and our family photos and considering us worthy of this.  Adopting, for us, has never been about the piles of paperwork.  It has been, and always will be, about obeying God and loving a child. 

We still have about 2 months of waiting for our dossier to be translated and to receive our approval from immigration to adopt before our dossier is actually sent to the Ministry of Justice in Bulgaria, but just the idea of our paperwork actually on it’s way to the country where our child is from and will always be a part of, is overwhelming and exciting.  The theme of our lives in the last couple of years has been to stop minding our own business and start seeing the world the way Jesus does.  To start pouring ourselves into others.  I love this new song by Matthew West. 

 

 

My favorite lyrics:

Well, I just couldn’t bear the

thought of people living

in poverty,

children sold into slavery,

the thought disgusted me

So, I shook my fist

at Heaven

said, “God why don’t You do something?”

He said,

“I did…

I created you!”

Adoption.  This is Shad and I doing something.  We aren’t special or extra holy (or not holy at all!).  We are simply two people, partners in this life, saying yes to God showing us how to love beyond ourselves.  When God was talking to me about adoption, I was driving along by myself, arguing.  My thoughts were all about how saying yes to adopting would affect Shad, me, the kids, our extended families.  After I had gone on and on, I heard, in the recesses of my heart, a voice say, “Yes, but what if you said no.”

If not us, then who?