Wonderful Update -- Delayed Post -- Postponed Joy

Five days ago, an Ethiopian specialist confirmed that we have been assigned a TRAVEL DATE. We immediately booked seats on a flight to Ethiopia leaving August 27th and arriving in Addis Ababa on Thursday night, the 28th. On Friday, we will meet our children. In spite of the new mom muddle of anxiety and joy that I should have been wallowing in these past five days, I have been wandering around this desert, nostalgic for Egypt, bemoaning the banality of manna from Heaven!

During our conversation, the specialist described the "series of impossible things" that came together in making our family. "So few people are open to three siblings," she said, "and even if a couple requesting two siblings were to open their hearts to triplets, the revision of paperwork that would have to follow could take so much time. So when the triplets' file came up...and your names came up at the exact same time...and you had already completed all of the provisional paperwork for three siblings...well, I don't know what you'd call that. So many impossible things, things that just never happen, happened when we called with your referral."

You don't know what to call that?

It's a MIRACLE! I am living in the middle of a miracle.

Without clobbering this dead horse, let me just recap a handful of the truly IMPOSSIBLE things happening in Indiana during the months when God was building this family.

1. The choice. [Wow! I just searched through my archives, and I couldn't find ONE post about how we came to the decision to adopt...and then adopt internationally.....and then, specifically to adopt from Ethiopia! Let me check one more time. Okay.....I found it.....see the link for "the deliberation"....I elaborated both together.]
2. The deliberation.
3. The transportation. [I don't think I've ever actually shared this crazy turn of events. Last December, we were approaching the first of the "We could get the call any day now" months, and panic about the logistics of adding another child to our family (yep, child...this was before the sibling revolution and well before the triplet explosion....just imagine....!:) seeped into many of our conversations. Specifically, we were beginning to wonder how we were going to get our family home from the airport. The fairly compact back seat of our family car would likely not accommodate three car seats, and our already extended budget was set to be stretched to the finest fiber of its limits with adoption expenses alone. Then, early, out of the blue, Josh got a promotion at work. No raise, just one very....impossible....perk. He got his choice of a company car to be used and driven by his family -- so, we picked the minivan, and HE filled the seats:).]
4. The revolution.
5. The inundation.
6. The consumationn.
ETC.

And yet somehow, when the travel date we were assigned seemed a week later than the one I had hoped for in my heart, I got some kind of spiritual OCD.....like surely MY timing...the timing that I had planned for and expected was infinitely more RIGHT than this late travel date. Here's a woman being carried in the palm of God's hand toward an unspeakably beautiful life trying to shout directions with her back turned toward the future! The Red Sea just split clean down the middle, I've had water from a rock and food from the sky, and all I can do is whine about the lack of menu variety on this road to the promised land!!!

Incidentally, I've been through this very same lesson a time or two before. Why can't I just LEARN!

No more. This sweet manna is more than enough!