An altar moment

Throughout the Old Testament, whenever God did something wonderful, he asked the Israelites to make an altar to commemorate His faithfulness. That is basically what I want this blog to be for my children. Many times they will question God and His involvement in our daily lives and I want them to have a record of the times God has shown himself so clearly to us. I'll be posting these as I go along in the coming days.
But, today, I want to start with the way God has moved through the past week. When we got our LOA, we figured that we would travel in the beginning of Oct. That was shot down by our agency's policy of no travel to China in Oct. They did not give us any hope of traveling in Sept. at all. I pushed and made sure that I did all I could to get things through in a timely fashion. Finally, we got LOA and began the TA wait. You can go back a few posts to read how God spoke and moved so that we got our TA at the last possible moment to travel in Sept. Then we begin the wait for a consulate appointment, which no one, that I've ever heard of, has had any trouble with. It was supposed to be: our agency requests a CA and it is confirmed 2 days later. Well, that wasn't the case with all of the 8/31 TA's. Read back and you can see the details of the problems. So, we get to yesterday. Again, we knew that in order to travel in Sept., we would have to have a CA today. Yesterday, no news. All over the internet adoption groups, people were telling horror stories of not getting CA's, and they had applied a day before us. So, last night (really early, early today) I was discouraged, distraught, and down right grumpy! I was so upset, I couldn't go to bed. I had to spend some time with the Lord. I got my Bible, sat in the den and had a heart to heart with God. I told Him that I really needed a word from Him. I needed comforting some how. After praying, I began reading. I've been reading I Kings just to read about Elijah's namesake. Then I always read a few verses in Psalm. I read Psalm 29 and 30. Verse 3b really struck me, "weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. " I then kept reading to verse 11, "You turned my wailing into dancing, you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy," There it was again. Then I noticed that I had written a note beside it with the date of 4/8/07. I wrote that it had refreshed me when I was weary from the wait for Abbey.(We got her referral on 5/2/07). My eyes kept going back to "rejoicing in the morning". I had learned this verse as, "...joy comes in the morning" I asked God, "Is this meant for me?" Will I rejoice in the morning? I then decided that I was going to rejoice in the morning, no matter what the CA answer was. I asked God to help me be joyful. All during my shower before I went to bed, I kept hearing, "Joy comes in the morning". As I went to sleep, this phrase was going over and over through my brain. When I woke up, it was the first thing in my mind. And... I was happy! I really felt that God was saying I would be joyful because of the CA news. But, I was afraid I was just reading into it what I wanted to. John called me and said, "I don't know the mind of God, but I think He is telling me we are going next week." He then told me that he felt an intense, will do anything to get him home, longing for Elijah that wasn't that strong before this week. He felt that was part of God's plan. When he told me that, I shared my story. We really felt that God was saying we would get good news. Then, at about 11:30, we got the call from our agency. We've experienced God in such an apparent way this past two weeks. We have no choice but to fall to our knees and proclaim, "My Lord and my God, there is no one like you!"

We have plane tickets! We leave our hometown airport at 8:10 and fly to Chicago, then to Beijing. We arrive in Beijing around 3 pm on the 11th. We will return to our hometown about 10:30 pm on Sat. the 26th.

The planes are really crowded, in fact, we don't have a seat on a couple of them. On one, we are seated apart. Please pray for comfortable seats. I really would rather not be stuck in the middle. But, if I am, I'll not complain, I'm going to get my boy and that's all that matters! But, we can still ask God for traveling mercies. Especially traveling with a 3 yr old for 15 hours!