It's been awhile...

Well, it's been awhile since we last posted any news but there hasn't been a lot to report until now.

We submitted our home study to the state office in August 2013.  At the same time, there was some turnover and turmoil and our file was lost.  Our file was lost three times.

Finally, in January, it was assigned to a caseworker and we received our approval on February 24.  It means that we are able to locate and adopt a child again.

Sometime during December or January, we both started looking at Heart Gallery just to look.  Each month they feature a child and the child that month was an older boy, age 15.  Kerri showed his profile to Mike and he dismissed it out of hand because we were looking for a little brother for Sean, not an older brother for Zach.  This was a big, fundamental difference,

A few days later Mike took a look at the profile Kerri had shown him and it really connected.  After a few days he told Kerri that he could just not get him off his mind and that, maybe, this is the child we are supposed to adopt, despite what common sense, in-depth planning and sage advice said to do.  Maybe, just maybe, our God is bigger than all that and an older child is what God wants us to have.

So, before being approved, we notified our social worker that there was this  child we were interested in looking at for a possible adoption.  Until we were approved we were not allowed to know anything more in detail about him than what we saw on Heart Gallery.

After our approval, we received a case summary and it was rough, pretty much a worst case scenario.  We spent time reading and discussing its contents and whether or not we could proceed.  Mike kept asking how we could have gotten it so wrong, that everything in Mike said this was the child but everything they were reading about him said NO!

Kerri guessed right and it turns out, we were sent the wrong summary (Praise God!) and when we met with our social worker on March 4 we were given the correct summary.

When we read the correct case summary there was nothing that jumped out and said it couldn't work.  We asked more than a few questions and asked that his case summary be updated with the answers. 

While we have not yet received the updated case summary we have gotten the answers and it continues to look good.  The next step is to set up a time to visit with him and see how Zach and Sean get along.

The big concern is that he was put into foster care and later successfully adopted and then that family broke apart and he was made to go back to foster care and look for another family.  So, he not only lost his birth family but he also lost what was supposed to be his forever family.  This is a situation that is NEVER supposed to happen but, in this case, did.  He lost everything he had not just once, but twice.

Please pray with us for clarity and discernment.  Neither of us feel there is anything we can't work with but we know, for a variety of reasons, it will not be an easy path we take.  That said, our God is bigger than any of these problems and we fully rely on Him to guide us, and protect us, and provide for our every need.