Headed to Thailand

After months of waiting our family recieved our first approval to travel to get Grace on Christmas Eve. Here is the e-mail I sent that day to our family and friends...

We wanted to send a message to let our family and friends know that we got our approval to travel, today Christmas Eve. It was a sweet surprise. This morning I was telling Nathan how thankful I have been for all the people who are praying for us. I was prepared for this Christmas to be hard and I have felt a great sense of peace and joy. I know that is because there are people praying for us. I have been so encouraged by our family. Almost daily we have gotten a phone call or a word of encouragement from our family. This morning my grandmother (some of you know her as "Granny") called me and told me that she prayed for me throughout the day yesterday. At one point in the day she felt the Lord saying "Look up, joy comes in the morning". She called to tell me yesterday but I missed her call. This morning she said that she felt like she just had to tell me this. She did not know what it meant but felt like she had to tell me. I thanked her and told her about my comments to Nathan and the fact that the Lord has really just covered us with his blessing in the past couple of weeks. About half an hour later we were on our way to the Cooks for Christmas and we got a phone call from Holt. I was shocked and started crying on the phone (made our social worker cry too!). It was kind of overwhelming because we had resigned ourselves to the fact it would be mid-January before we heard something about our travel. Anyways I hung up the phone and was sobbing. Caleb kept saying "Oh Mommy please stop crying!" I said but God is just so good…he has been so good to us. We had a great day of celebrating with family and rejoicing over the fact that even though we sometimes feel forgotten by God…he is so good and his gifts are better than what we could even imagine.

So we are traveling to Thailand sometime around January 21st and should be home around February 3rd. We will actually meet Grace on the 25th and get to keep her with us on the 27th!

I think what Granny heard from the Lord is true for all of us this night as we prepare for Christmas tomorrow…look up…joy comes in the morning!

So here we are on January 5th preparing to leave for Thailand in just a little over two weeks. We will be traveling to Bangkok on Wednesday January 21st and will return home as of now on February 3rd. Due to the time it takes to process Grace's visa we may be home a couple days earlier. We will do our best to post pictures and information on our blog while we are in Thailand to keep our family (especially Caleb) and our friends updated. Thanks to those of you who have been a part of praying us through this journey...please continue to pray for us!!!