I’ve been challenged recently to share a story a day for the next forty days. It’s an ambitious undertaking given all that life is full of and all that claims a portion of my time, but this is important. Your see, over the next forty days I’ll share something each day that reveals God’s work. It could be from that very day. It could be something from years past. It doesn’t really matter; He is moving every day, moment by moment. We have a front row seat if we’re looking. Lately I’m learning to be a little more balanced, get a little more rest, reflect, and see. I hope you’re inspired to do the same.
Today’s story is dear to me. I believe in stones of remembrance. You know – the stones that the Lord commanded each of the tribes of Israel to pick up from the riverbed during the crossing into the Promised Land. They were to place the stones and use them as reminders to themselves. They were to be used as reminders of what the Lord had done…reminders of His faithfulness…reminders to the people to share accounts of that faithfulness with their children so that their children would know the goodness of God. This story is a stone of remembrance for our family.
One challenge of intercountry adoption is that sovereign nations reserve the right to change their adoption laws at any time. When we embarked on our adoption from Haiti, the Haitian government (like much of the time) was preparing to change its adoption laws. The new laws would negate our eligibility to adopt from Haiti. They would go into effect on December 22nd of that year. We were just weeks away from that. We had months’ worth of dossier paperwork to gather in just a few short weeks. In addition, we had to get the dossier in country before the deadline, and that alone would eat up several days.
We got after the paperwork with utter voracity. We put together ALL that paperwork in two weeks. We were ten days away from the deadline for having our paperwork in country and it didn’t look good. We had it together, but it all still had to be copied and notarized. One more thing: a portion of it had to be stamped by the Haitian consulate in Chicago before it could be added to the package and sent. This meant we had to FedEx that section to Chicago, respectfully request their approval of it, and get it back. This particular part of the process normally took seven to ten days. Clearly, we wouldn’t make the deadline. We did what we did throughout our whole adoption journey: we prayed. We committed to the Lord that we would keep going, day by day, and follow the process. If He meant for us to adopt from Haiti, He would somehow get our paperwork in country under the deadline. Impossible…outside of a miracle. We couldn’t imagine it would happen, but we kept our commitment to the Lord.
We pulled out the chunk of paperwork that needed to go to the consulate in Chicago. We signed the one hundred sixty seven (give or take a few) places that we had to sign. We included the FedEx return envelope and made our petition to the consular officers to stamp our paperwork so that we could send it off to their beautiful homeland. We figured a day for transit, a week at the consulate, and another day in transit. Maybe – just maybe – we would be able to overnight it and have it in country by the deadline. Unlikely, but we were keeping our commitment.
Now, I’ll break in here to tell you a little something about me. I LOVE that I can track packages online. I. love. It. It fascinates me that I can know within just a couple of hours exactly where my package is. I track packages almost neurotically when I’m expecting something. (We all have our neuroses, don’t we? It could certainly be worse, and there are much more destructive things that I could do for fun, right?)
So, I tracked the sent package the day after we sent it. I just wanted to be sure it arrived, and it surely did. Just for kicks (like I said, we all have our little neuroses), I decided to track the return package. Surely it wouldn’t be there, I thought. After all, the consulate would need several days to process our paperwork before they could send it back. Lo and behold…there was the package, in the system, and it was on its way back! My heart skipped a beat, and not in a good way. There was no way the consulate could turn that paperwork around the same day it came in. I called my husband immediately. “Hon, pray. Please just pray. I am so sorry, but I must have missed a place where our signatures were needed. The package is already on its way back. I can’t believe this…I thought I was so thorough. Somewhere, we missed a signature.”
Ever the level-headed one, he responded, “That’s okay. We’ll get the package back within a day, find the missing signature, and send it back. If God wants this to go, it’ll go. We’ll get it back again in time to get it to Haiti.”
The next 24 hours we went on with life. There was nothing we could do about the missing signatures until we got the paperwork back, so there was no use fretting about it. The following day, I worked from home to be sure I was there to receive the package and take care of it immediately. With a heavy heart I met the delivery person at the door, signed for the package, and stepped back inside. I opened it up and looked for the missing signature so that as soon as my husband got home we could sign it and then drive it to the nearest FedEx truck. With providence, it would be on the next morning’s truck and be delivered back to Chicago that day. We would have lost two precious days in the short race toward the deadline, but we would still try.
I couldn’t find the missing signature anywhere. What I found instead was page after page of Haitian consular seals. For months the Haitian consulate had taken a week or more to turn this paperwork around for adoptive families. Ours was received, sealed, repackaged, and back on a FedEx truck to us in less than four hours. What we thought was a mistake on our part was actually miraculously fast and thorough work on the part of Haiti’s team in Chicago. God delivered His miracle. He moved in a way only He could. We had put out our fleece, and the Lord answered (Judges 6:37-40).
I spent that evening at the office of our agency working together with their team to get our dossier copied and notarized. The following morning our package was in a DHL envelope bound for Haiti. That was December 21st. DHL would have to get it into Haiti in less than 24 hours. Impossible? Well, ask my six year old Haitian son what he thinks about what God can do. He’ll tell you. He knows this story. We have set it up as a stone of remembrance for our family. That is God moving in might and power and grace and love. I cannot guarantee that all of my stories of His work will be so dramatic, but that, dear friends, is day one of this forty day challenge.
Won’t you take a moment and share your stone of remembrance?
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