hurry up and wait - USCIS

Adoption seems to be a lot of hurry up and wait. So what are we waiting for now?

Right now we're are waiting for our fingerprinting appointment from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office. The USCIS is a part of Homeland Security - a branch of the US government that approves adoptions and child immigration status. This process for us included filling out application I-800A "Application for Determination of Suitability to Adopt a Child from a Convention Country," and mailing it in along with our finalized, notarized home study, a check, and proof of U.S. citizenship... maybe about 32 pages in all. It is essentially used to determine that Adam and I and our family are suitable to adopt a child from a Hague Adoption Convention country. Confused yet?

The Hague is an international agreement made in 1993 (in The Hague, Netherlands) to help safeguard intercountry adoptions and to establish international standards of practice for adoptions between these countries. In order to adopt from a convention country (a country that signed this agreement) - such as China - families must follow Hague guidelines and use a Hague accredited home study case worker and a Hague accredited adoption agency. This basically acts as a safeguard to make sure that adoptions are in the best interest of the child involved, and to protect against abduction, sale of, or trafficking of children. Not all countries are part of the Hague agreement but China is and thus there are just certain i's we have to dot and t's we have to cross to make sure everything is perfectly in order.

After our application packet, mailed via UPS on 3/3/16, arrives at the offices of the USCIS in the Department of Homeland Security (somewhere in Missouri) - by way of a lockbox in Texas (our application arrived at the lockbox on 3/7/16), we will be assigned and sent a fingerprinting date. We've already been fingerprinted once in the state of North Carolina for our criminal background checks, and now we will need to be fingerprinted at the Charlotte office of the Department of Homeland Security. These fingerprints will be run through a national system - the FBI database. This is what we're waiting for now - the appointment date and time that we will be assigned to walk into the Department of Homeland Security in Charlotte. In recent months the wait time for a fingerprinting date has been about 2 weeks and then 2 weeks for an officer to review your case and send you an approval. However, currently there is a big slowdown at the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services offices and wait times are closer to 60 days total (legally they have 90 days to complete). This is unfortunate and we are praying the process is quicker than we expect. We are also praying that we don't get an RFE - a request for evidence - meaning that the officer assigned to your case wants more documentation before proceeding with the approval. After our officer at the USCIS determines that we are good candidates for adoption from China, we will receive something called a I-797 approval in the mail. This little piece of paper will be the last thing we need before we can send our dossier to China!

We've done the hurry up, now we're doing the wait... In the midst of waiting, we fix our eyes not on our circumstances so that our mood changes like the rise and fall of waves, but instead we fix our eyes on Jesus. We stay our mind on the Lord because we trust in Him and we have this promise from Him when we do that -

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. 

~Isaiah 26:3-4

Stay my mind on you Lord Jesus as I wait for Your will to be done.