Hope

Later on the same day of my last post (Friday, May 15), we received an email from the U.S. State Department informing us that the DRC government was requesting adoptive families to turn in our dossiers. This was amazing news! For 20 months, DRC had suspended exit letters for adopted children so there had been no timeline or end in sight for the children being separated from their families in the United States. Now they were asking for paperwork, and we had hope of taking our son home. During these last couple of weeks, we have enjoyed this country more because we have hope. We no longer felt trapped indefinitely. We realized there was hope of getting to return as a complete family to see our other relatives and friends in the United States. It is amazing how our outlook on the world around us changes drastically when we see a light at the end of the tunnel. Now that we saw progress in getting our exit letters, we began to see how beautiful Kinshasa, the Congo River, and the people of DRC were. Our minds can miss the beauty of life if we feel trapped. The truth is Jesus gives us hope. We have eternity in heaven with Him if we believe in what He did for us on the cross. The truth sets us free, and then we can more easily see the beauty of our current world that we live in. If only we could keep from being distracted by all of the transient things so that we could cherish what great things we are blessed with now all around us and look forward to even better things ahead. For the next few days, we are praying fervently that we would be one of the reported 71 families that will be authorized to leave Congo in the coming week. We are thankful for all of the people that have prayed for this to happen! (I'm not sure if I have ever had 286 "likes" on a Facebook post before.)