This time, one year ago, we got the phone call that changed our family for the better! Our match day! Our social worker called late that evening (about 10:30pm here but mid-morning in China) to tell us she had locked a file off of the shared list that she thought might be a fit for our family. Earlier in the day, I received an email letting me know the shared list would be released that night and that our social worker would be in touch if there was a potential match. I seriously didn't think anything of it and assumed it was a generic message sent to all waiting families. Our file had only be logged in with China for two weeks and we were expecting a wait of at least a couple of months. I didn't even mention it to Chad because I was that sure that we wouldn't be matched so quickly. When an email came through from our worker saying, "call me ASAP," I knew exactly what it meant! There was no other reason it could be! We reached her on the phone and she gave us a brief description of our potential match and said she would email us her file. Because the file was coming from the shared list, a list of all available children in the whole country of China that is published once a month and open to all agencies, we could lock the file for only 48 hours before needing to file Letter of Intent paperwork claiming our intentions of adopting that specific child or the file would be released for other agencies to pick up. Moments later, a file came through on my email and we saw this:
We stared at her pictures and read over every word of the medical file we had. Needless to say, we didn't go to sleep for quite some time! We did our due diligence of sending her file to medical professionals in the field of international adoption, but Chad and I were convinced she was the one no matter what we discovered. By the next night, we were ready to file our paperwork to make sure she would be ours!
We had prayed all along that the first file we were presented would be "the one" God had for our family. We knew our social worker and amazing adoption agency were praying the same thing. We knew God was sovereign over the two countries, multiple government agencies, and all the details involved in the matching process. He answered our prayers by giving us clarity and assurance that the picture we were looking at was our Lottie Bug!
Here is our sweet thing today, exactly one year after we first saw her face!
Thank you God for the blessing of our Lottie!
