Sunday, March 25, 2007
Dear friends and readers, first I want to thank you for all your prayer and support. I know many of you are checking daily to see how we are doing, and you are very anxious for us to be able to bring Sarah home. Juergen and I have made a somewhat bold and maybe foolish decision. We bought our airline tickets and we are going to China April 4-17. I am returning later (God willing April 21). We are dealing with the requirements of China, and the USA but also Germany. Many of you are aware of the fact we must finish this adoption in China (the Germans will not allow us to readopt Sarah in Germany). Juergen and I must be in China together for the adoption to be final. We haven't really got anyone to take care of our kids (especially Jessica our 15 year old autistic daughter) so our children need to travel with us. If we do not travel now, we would be looking at travel in June (our kid’s next vacation). Germany will not allow our children to miss school to travel. We asked our Agency to give us special permission to travel to Guangzhou during the trade fair because we do not believe it is possible to obtain a CA at this late notice. IAAP told us they would try to get us a CA, but they could not guarantee anything. We understand our whole plan is very risky. We were looking at waiting to travel until June, or waiting for our TA to come this week and then buying airline tickets that were expected to raise to $3000 each ($18,000 for our family of 6). We got our tickets for around $800 each. We decided to take the risk, and trust our TA will come in the next two weeks (we signed the letter of acceptance over 2 weeks ago).
as most of you know, we held our breath and God did grant us our TA just a few days before we traveled.. The time in Guangzhou with the trade show was so stressful. I highly recommend waiting. It probably would have been better for us to wait until June. At the time that just seemed unbearable. We had already suffered 6 months of setbacks. I guess I could have said "what's 2 more months?" I just wanted to go get my girl. If I knew it was going to be so stressful, I would have tried harder to get someone to take care of the kids. We made the choice to buy the tickets on faith. Some times it is good for us to step out of the boat and start to walk on the water. The important thing is to hear the voice of Jesus calling you to step out. You do not want to be on your own.
