July 2014 Update

These days, my heart totters somewhere in between receiving a phone call that tells me that the orphanage director has given permission for us to continue forward with our adoption and receiving the news that the adoption has failed, no hope of moving forward. It's a hard place to be. Stuck between hope and fear that all is lost in our adoption.

Our agency has been working to enlist the help of the Ethiopian government to leverage their power to make the orphanage director comply. So far, the ET government has agreed to help--but it has been weeks and weeks since their consent--and still, they have not made her cooperate.

Just to give you some perspective...When we were matched with Oliver last December, we were told that we would be traveling by June at the latest and then he would be home by the end of the summer. Likely, we would be home with our boy for much of the summer. We were getting almost weekly pictures of our boy. I had planned to finish up my last few months of work in May, and I would be staying home for the summer with my Oliver.

Well, since the day of our referral--zero progress has been made in our case. Zero. We have not received any needed documents (in fact, he's still frozen at the first needed document--with the woman who's refusing to sign). We have not submitted those needed documents for PAIR. Not submitted to court. Nothing. He is not any closer to coming home today than he was 8 months ago (paper-wise). My 2.5 month old baby is coming up on his first birthday pretty soon. I haven't seen an updated picture or update since January.

So, here we are.

In some respects, I have started to dread blog updates--because they just sound so stinking sad. I know you all are praying and right here with us--I look forward to the day when maybe we will have wonderful news to share. But for now, here we are.

Many of you have asked if there is anything you can do. Trust me, I wish you could do something. I wish I could do something. :) We just simply wait and pray. There may come a time when we may need you to make phone calls and rally behind us. But we're not there yet. We have paused raising the rest of the needed finances, because we honestly don't know if we will even be moving forward at all.

Please wait and pray with us. We need an army of prayer warriors to intercede for our son, asking that he be kept safe and healthy. Pray with us that the ET government would be swift in their help--pray that this week they would force compliance. Pray that, as a result, Oliver would be allowed to be moved to our new agency's care center--out of his current orphanage. There, we would receive regular updates, and he would receive careful attention and medical care.

Thank you for your continued prayers and support.