Our court date is August 9, but since her country is 11 hours ahead, mark your calendars to pray for us when you go to bed on August 8. While you are sleeping, we will be grilled! Our court experience with DOP was exactly that…we were grilled. It was long and it was hard. We even had to provide additional documents from across the ocean and go back a second time. It was brutal. To be honest, I don’t care to repeat that experience. Well, who in their right mind would?!
God has moved mountains for her and I do not doubt that He will continue, but please do not take your part in prayer lightly. We are relying on you to pray us through. I would love to think that because everything else has been easy-ish that court will be too, but I also realize that we asked for the court to make an exception for us so we could adopt her, despite our family size, and I expect that they will ask us to defend our reasons. They will want to know exactly why we think we are the absolute best family for her. Standing in a foreign court before a foreign judge and prosecutor is no easy feat. It’s intimidating to say the least. Enough to make me quiver in my boots if I didn’t have the God of the universe on my side.
It probably wouldn’t even hurt to start praying now. Pray for the judge and prosecutor. Pray for us. Pray for our translator/coordinator. Pray for her as we visit her briefly, but leave her for another 2 weeks. Pray for our travel to go smoothly. Pray for our health (ours and our kids). And pray for me as I pack a family of seven to go a million different directions.
Back to that packing thing…
I can’t imagine the stress of this kind of experience. God bless you on your journey to bring your daughter home!!!
Thanks! That helps me to get a peek into what it might be like in her city! Hoping it’s a mere formality!
Four our two adoptions from Moscow City we weren’t grilled. It seemed that is was more of a formality. We had a female judge the first time and the male judge the second time. The female judge saw us while we were waiting for our court time and smiled at us when she saw that we had our son with us from our fist adoption. The male judge let our son into the courtroom and he was more focused on him then u s.