Memorial Box Monday

It's been awhile since I've posted a MBM but over the weekend we had another God moment that needs to be shared. As I prepared the small box of gifts that we are sending to Faith for her birthday I decided it needed at least a note with her name on it and some birthday wishes. So I found the Chinese version of her medical file to get the Chinese characters for her name. Here are the characters for her first name.

福 娣

I started my letter by pasting in the Chinese characters of her name, Then, using Google translator I typed in a brief greeting, pasting the translated results into my letter. Then I pasted the translation into Google translator to see how it would be re-translated back into English. I wasn't saying anything too elaborate (Happy Birthday, we hope you have a nice day, we love you, from Mama and Baba) so it worked just fine.

Once I had completed that, I decided to see what it would do with the characters of her name. So I pasted the three characters of her name in and clicked translate. And the results? 

Only God!  

Her surname in Chinese is exactly the same as our surname in English! Our last name is a common English word, and the surname given her by the orphanage is the Chinese for that word. How cool is that? We'll adopt her, but her last name won't change.

God is so clever!

Care package

We're making slow progress on our adoption.  Our move slowed us down a bit, as we had to have a home study update done for our new residence.  We managed to get that done in just two weeks - which allowed us to receive our USCIS approval at our new address, saving us the hassle of filing an address change.  It worked out wonderfully, but meant we're a few weeks behind where I'd hoped we'd be.  That delay, and the extra five weeks the homestudy took with our California social worker have us very nearly using the entire six months we were given to get the dossier to China after our pre-approval.  But despite the various delays, our dossier (all the paperwork we've been gathering since early January) should finally be ready to go to China this week.  Praise the Lord!  So the rest of the process is a wait for approvals.  We'll wait for China to review the dossier and issue an LOA (Letter of Acceptance), which we sign and return.  Then we wait for China to issue a TA (Travel Approval), at which time we make airline reservations to travel to China for Gotcha Day.  Both of these steps can take up to 90 days...so we could be looking at yet another six months before we can go to China.  Sigh.  We've got lots going on as we settle in to our new community, so we are staying focused on that and trying not to get too anxious about the 'when'.

In the meantime, we've received permission to write a letter and send a little something for her birthday.  I am so excited!!

Faith turns 9 on July 2nd.  I saw this shirt and just had to buy it for her.  The little lamb is wearing a shirt that says 'You are loved' with a small embroidered cross beside that.  We'll add some candy for the other children at the orphanage before we seal up the box.  I am so excited to be sending this to her!

This week we also sent her a letter of introduction.  If she didn't yet know a family was working to adopt her, she will soon. Our agency's facilitator in China will translate it and deliver it to Faith, who might, we are told, write back to us!  We can only hope.  I am so excited to be able to send her the letter and gifts, to know that she finally will know that she has a family working to bring her home.  I wonder if she is excited or simply scared.  I am praying for her well-being during this transition - such a humungous change for her.