PHEW!

Man, God is so good. He has answered our prayers and given us clarity in the aftermath of a stressful few weeks!

As you could probably tell by my last post, I was feeling a touch of despair over the idea of having to move and redo our home study before we were able to bring Ren home. I was pretty tearful on Thursday as I considered the possibility of being delayed so long. After our discussion with Tiffany on Thursday morning, Chris and I felt pretty resolved that we needed to buy more time here. We felt that God was closing the door on the option to move to VA before we get Ren, but we still needed Him to open the door for us to remain in our house past June 30th--the date our tenants were meant to move in. So, Chris sent off an email, asking them if they could move in a bit later than planned.

I sat in the bathtub on Thursday night, soaking away my angst and exhaustion, and Chris came in and said that he'd heard back from our tenants about the situation...

Basically, we have the COOLEST tenants EVER. We initially felt like God totally dropped them in our laps--it was almost too good to be true--the rent would cover our mortgage, they wanted to sign a five year lease and eventually buy the house, their teenage daughter is best friends with our neighbor's daughter across the street, and they are already asking permission to make improvements on our home at their own expense! We thought the goodness ended here...until Thursday...when they said they would be totally willing to go month-to-month at their current home until we are ready for them to move in. This buys us more time in CA, which means we won't have to worry about moving out of our CA home before we get Ren, which means we won't have to worry about doing a whole new home study!!!

God has answered this prayer...not in the way we thought...but the end result is the same.  We feel so grateful and humbled at how He continues to provide, day by day, one piece at a time.

So, we are still praying for our LOC to come, but it doesn't feel like a rush anymore. It should come by mid-April regardless, which would probably have us traveling by mid July sometime, which would still get us to VA by mid August...just in time for Chris to start work and Tess to start kindergarden!  It's gonna be craziness and it definitely won't be the "stable" environment one hopes to bring an adopted child home to, but we will have our boy, and hopefully, where chaos reigns, love will abound all the more!

Thanks for your prayers, text messages, comments, and emails! We have been sleeping much better since Thursday night!

On another note, I am also so grateful that we are going to bring Ren home here instead of VA. It will be such a blessing to be greeted home by our close community of friends in CA, who have become invested in this journey with us and who will understand what it means for us to bring our little guy home...finally!  Details like this mean the world to me.

And, final note, I can hear Chris back in his study practicing his Mandarin. It cracks me up.