Praise God! He Knows the End from the Beginning

...I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, 'My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure.' Isaiah 46:9-10

I am so thankful that I have a God who knows everything because He brought our attention to something that could caused a major set back in all our paperwork. Thursday, February 17th we sent our dossier to our Secretary of State to be certified. On Monday, February 2oth, Brian called the Secretary of State office to make sure they received our paperwork. The woman he spoke with said that she had received and certified the paperwork on friday and forwarded it to another office that was responsible for mailing it back to us. We were thrilled, except then she said that unfortunately one of the dossier papers was notarized by a Wisconsin notary and we would have to send this one single piece of paper to Wisconsin to be certified.

I couldn't believe it. I kept going over and over in my mind that I was sure all the notaries had been from Iowa... but I thought, "it is what it is" and depending on the the document we would have to send it on to Wisconsin or re-do the document and re-notarize it with an Iowa notary. Since this is our first adoption we weren't exactly sure how that would work so I contacted our adoption agency on Tuesday, February 21st, just to make sure that sending a document to Wisconsin for certification would be ok. She wrote me back that it was perfectly fine. Whew! Glad to hear that and then at the end of the email she wrote that we need to make sure our documents are less than six months old and if they are too old we would have to send them to the Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. instead of the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. She said to contact her if we needed help sending the documents to D.C.

Why in the world would she mention anything about our documents being too old when I had only asked about the Wisconsin certification? Then I started thinking about the fact that we started gathering these documents in August and there may be some that are too old. So I called her to find out how to send the documents to the Chinese Embassy. In order to authenticate documents with the Chinese Consulate you first have to send them to the U.S. State Department to be certified and if you don't get a courier they could sit there for up to six weeks before you get them certified!! And I thought the Wisconsin certification was going to slow down the process! We decided that I could just send the documents that were older than six months. I took a look at the documents and realized that the six month expiration for our two oldest documents was Friday, February 25th!! We had 4 days to get our paperwork back from the Secretary of State and onto the Chinese Consulate in Chicago before the six month expiration.

We were told that the Chinese Consulate in Chicago is very particular about the expiration of the documents and they have been known to send back the whole dossier without authenticating a single thing if you are even close to the expiration date. We decided to go ahead and try to overnight the package to Chicago if we got it back in time from the Secretary of State. We believe we serve a mighty God and He wouldn't have drawn our attention to it if He didn't plan on getting all the documents authenticated. Brian checked the UPS tracking number for our dossier and we were supposed to receive that same day, Tuesday the 21st. Now we just had to hope that the document notarized from Wisconsin was not one of the documents that was too old since we still needed to send that one off to Wisconsin to be certified.

Brian left work at lunch to get a cashier's check from the bank for the Chinese Consulate so that we would have everything ready by the time the documents got here. As he was walking out of work he prayed to God that if He wanted to do a miracle that he would receive a text from me saying that UPS had already delivered the package so he could come home on his lunch break and take it to UPS to over night it. By the time he got to the car he received a text from me "UPS is here."

I opened the package to look over the documents to make sure they were all certified and to get them ready to send them on to the Chinese Consulate. I looked for the document with the Wisconsin notary. There was only one problem...there wasn't one. Every single document we had sent in had been certified!!

Brian got home, grabbed the paperwork, made copies for the consulate, and overnighted it to Chicago. They received it at 9:30 in the morning Wednesday, February 23rd, giving them at least two whole days to review, if not three counting Friday, before it expired. We had no doubt that all of our documents would be authenticated since the Lord went to such great lengths to make us aware of this problem. On Wednesday, March 2nd, we received our package from the consulate with all documents fully authenticated. We sent it on to our adoption agency and they are currently reviewing it before we are DTC (dossier to China).

Somehow the dossier expiration information had slipped through the cracks and we were not aware of it. Yet the Lord brought it to our attention by having the woman at the Secretary of State misinform us about one of our papers having a Wisconsin notarization, thereby causing me to email our adoption agency to check into that situation and the woman at our adoption agency was led by God to tell us to check our dossier documents expiration dates. If all of that hadn't happened, once receiving our dossier back from the Secretary of State, instead of sending it overnight on Tuesday we would have sent our paperwork ground to Chicago on Wednesday and it more than likely would have gotten to the consulate after the expiration date on Friday. I am so thankful that I serve a God who sees the end from the beginning and loves me enough not to keep it to Himself.