Change

Friday I posted asking you to pray.  I want to take a little time to share with you why now.  Before I start, its important for you to understand that for our adoption we are working with 2 different agencies.  Our formal adoption agency is FCA, based out of Connecticut.  They are the agency we're seeking placement through.  The second agency is Bethany Christian Services, who prepared our homestudy that was to be sent to Korea.  Our original desire was to adopt from Korea through Bethany because they are a local, Christian agency and we've had friends use them in the past and have a very positive experience.  However, their program is hard to get into as they draw a lot of families but are only allowed to place a certain number of children each year (i.e. they may have 20 families interested in adopting from Korea each year but only be allowed to place 10).  These families get chosen by a ranking system sort of based on need - families with infertility or no children get chosen first, etc - so it meant we were unlikely to get chosen into their program.  That is why we started looking out of state for an agency who didn't work the same way.  We found FCA, who had a long-standing, highly recommended program and chose to go with them, but we still needed a local agency to complete our homestudy.   So that's the background you need to know.

Late Friday afternoon I got a call from the adoption specialist who prepared our homestudy at Bethany.  She was calling with "good and bad news".  The bad news was that they had received word from FCA that the agency they work with in Korea would no longer accept a homestudy that was prepared by Bethany.  Also, because our original homestudy was prepared by Bethany, they would not be comfortable using ANY homestudy prepared for us.  Basically, the agency FCA works with in Korea would not refer us a child because we had worked with Bethany.

However, she also had good news.  The director of the Korea program at Bethany was able to find us a spot in their program.  Not only that, they would use our original homestudy date of June 3 (I think) as our application date, and therefore we wouldn't have to start our waiting all over again.

While this was exciting, it was also scary, since its not at all what we've been planning for months now.  Also, our concerns were: what was the difference in cost?, and what about the money we'd already paid to FCA?  The Bethany program is almost identical in cost to the FCA program, so we are still only going to be needing to trust God for about the same amount.  Also, I spoke with FCA today and they are refunding all of our money!  They are so disappointed and frustrated that they weren't told of this issue earlier (they had worked with Bethany in the past with no issues) and want to do whatever they can to help us complete our adoption.  While we haven't given Bethany our 100% final answer, we believe that this is now the way we're headed.  It is so amazing to see that God has provided not only the passion for our adoption, but he is breaking down all barriers to its happening, and even providing what we first desired and didn't think we could have (working through Bethany)!

Thank you for all your prayers and please keep them coming - we truly believe they are working!  God has clearly been providing for us so far and we continue to trust him with the rest of this process. 

Love to all!