clarification, grace, and something pretty exciting

I realized, after my last post, that some of you may be wondering how Stephen (Kaikai) fits into all of this. Well, let me tell you, that little boy has been grace upon grace upon grace upon grace in our lives. What a precious gift from God he already is to our family!

When we were told that we couldn't adopt R. (which was two months before we made the final decision to withdraw from India's adoption program), we began to consider what we should do. Just one day prior to our second denial, Lily and I had almost identical dreams on the same night. At that point, I already understood the dreams to mean that we would switch to China and adopt a little boy. But, with all that God had done leading up to R.'s adoption, we needed much more confirmation that China was where He was leading us. Our faithful Father did indeed give the confirmation that we had been seeking, and we had peace that we should switch to China and try to adopt Kaikai.

Let me just stop here to say that our God has not abandoned R. There are beautiful, beautiful things happening in R.'s life. I wish that I could share all of these things, but at this point you can know that our amazing Father is taking good care of His precious daughter.

But, back to Kaikai:

He is our son. No doubt about it, he is our son. Though God has me in a place of waiting when it comes to ministry (and many other things), we are at absolute peace with our adoption of Kaikai. I know that it is the Lord who has given us this peace, because after all that happened with R., it would be natural to have some anxiety or worry. I have none. I love that boy with all that is in me. He is amazing, precious, beautiful grace to us.

And just because our God likes to show off a bit, a few hours after writing this post, I got an email saying that we received our LID (log-in-date) for China!!! Our agency said that it could take up to 3 weeks to get our LID, but China logged in our dossier on the same day that they received it, just one business day after it was sent from the U.S.!! Thank You, thank You, thank You Jesus! Now that's exciting!!!