Yeah, I am not too excited to have to get our fingerprints taken again. This is the second re-do, so this time they aren't free. It's not a huge bill compared to other adoption-related costs, but I sure would rather be spending this $170 on something else rather than just having the government confirm that we are felony-free. Oh well about that.
USCIS is super busy these days with the new immigration executive order, so it took more than a month for my telephone calls to be returned. Our officer took pity on me when my voice mail messages changed from polite mama to frantic mama. Ordinarily, it would not be such a big rush to get refingerprinted. However, we are still hoping that we will be traveling at month's end, and so we absolutely must be refingerprinted and be issued an updated I-171H form from USCIS before we leave. The soonest fingerprint appointment we could get is for November 28th. Again, we are hoping to be in Honduras by then, but the appointments are set by computer, and humans cannot override them. Don't get me started on that. Anyway, we are going to hope (and beg) that our local USCIS office will allow us to walk in on Monday morning and get our fingerprints taken. Because they are so busy with this new executive order thing, some places are allowing walk ins, and some are not. I'm seriously hoping, praying, and begging that ours is one that will allow walk ins, or at least a walk in for a frantic mama and her poor husband.
God is faithful. He has demonstrated His faithfulness time and time again during this adoption story, and it is not in His nature to be unfaithful now. I am reminding myself of this fact constantly these days. It is not that I don't trust Him. I absolutely do. But my fallen nature gets the best of me on days like today when I have to wait all day for the mail to come, and today is the day when the letter carrier absolutely must deliver our USCIS appointment notice so that we can try to get fingerprinted on Monday. And I get frantic inside doing the what if's. What if it's not there? What if? What if? What if? It is hard for me right now to rest in the trusting. I've said it before on this blog: I am a do'er. If one road closes, I look for another. Again, again, again. I have a long history, all through school and being employed, where that part of me was a huge asset. I think the problem comes in when I expend all that energy taking it all on my shoulders and starting to get anxious that it is somehow not going to happen, and then I start to consider superhuman things that maybe I could do if I tried real hard, rather than doing what I can do and concurrently asking for God to be sovereign and do what I cannot do. I need to trust that God is going to come through for us and make it happen when things are so out of my control. For instance, that today's mail would contain the fingerprint appointment notice. And of course don't you just know that it was there. Of course it was there. And I am going to try very hard to trust that God will be sovereign and the nice people at USCIS will take our fingerprints on Monday morning and that we will get our new I-171H just fine. If you could pray for me too, that would really really help.