...and if not, HE IS STILL GOOD.

So, it's Sunday night again. I may have mentioned this here before, but Sundays took on a whole new meaning to me during this adoption process. All of the emails, all of the phone calls (good and bad), and all of the news in an adoption process happen between Monday and Friday (it's a business after all...), so the weekdays are the ones met with the most anticipation, the most anxiety, and the most expectation. 

This week and this Sunday night is no different.

This Sunday night is big because at the conclusion of this week, we should know, with at least SOME certainty, our official travel dates.

 We received our Article 5 pick-up notification early Thursday morning from the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, so the only approval that's left in our 15-month adoption process is the travel approval (TA). Our agency says that those have typically been coming within about a week of Article 5, and if that's truly the case and TA comes this week, our agency will be able to send us to China in early November. If it doesn't happen, we will most likely be pushed to early December. 

If I'm being brutally honest, I will be pretty dang crushed if our TA doesn't come and we have to wait an additional month to get Brooks home. But my hope and prayer is that EITHER WAY, I can trust His hand in it all and know that His plans are far better than mine. 

If you've been following our adoption story here, I would COVET your prayers for peace and wisdom this week as our travel plans become more concrete. Either way, we trust Him and we trust that He wrote this story in a certain way in a certain time that will all make perfect sense one day...even if we can't see it now. 

We would also covet your prayers that Brooks's heart is being prepared for us. We received our first video of him this week, and it was VERY obvious that he was well-loved (A HUGE ANSWERED PRAYER!) and very attached to his "mama." At one point in the video, she tried to put him down in his crib to show us how he could stand and walk with support (ALSO HUGE!), but he cried and reached for her because he wanted her to hold him instead of perform. His whole world is about to be turned upside-down, and he doesn't have a CLUE it's coming. His heart will be broken for a while, and that's going to be hard for all of us. That's the part of adoption no one really wants to hear, but it's the truth. Adoption is born out of brokenness, so to deny it's tragedy would be unfair. We pray that his caregivers are showing him our photo book every now and then and preparing him for mama and baba...but even more than that, we pray that God's hand will be all over this transition and that he'll learn we are safe quickly.   

Thanks for following our journey...and you'd better believe that I'll be back with bells on when we have travel news to share!