In Paul’s second letter to Timothy, right at the beginning, Paul says to Timothy (and to us!),
That verse popped into my head yesterday as I started to panic about adoption roadblocks I was facing. Ten years of Christian schooling meant memorizing countless passages of scripture. Even though I can rarely bring to mind the entire verse and reference, enough phrases are there that only require a quick computer search to pull up the rest of it.
I don’t recall if I have blogged about the fact that USCIS (US immigration) rejected a very important application of ours due to a minuscule technicality in our home study. It seems they want more background checks from Pennsylvania, which is a problem because the background check process in PA is EXTREMELY SLOW. No one has been particularly helpful in this setback, which has deadlines and more fees and some risks associated with not getting it done in time.
Additionally it has been more than two weeks since I sent the bulk of our notarized, original dossier documents to Austin for authentication. I hadn’t seen that check clear yet so I called their office for a status update. They have not yet received my envelope full of sixteen original documents that took months of hard work to pull together. They were mailed via regular snail mail from my box to Austin…shouldn’t take that long.
The reason I didn’t FedEx them or hand deliver them was because four other similar envelopes had quickly and successfully made their way to the authentication units in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio via snail mail and were processed and returned to me within a couple weeks. I stupidly trusted the postal service to handle a short jaunt to Austin just as smoothly.
I called the post office and they were not very helpful. I put no tracking number on the envelope so it can’t be traced. I am having nightmares that I didn’t put a return address on it either (though normally I would have). It should have arrived safely in their P.O. Box by now. The post office guy said it’s probably in a mail room somewhere in Austin and it will get to the right person eventually. I immediately had visions of my extremely valuable envelope sitting in a box somewhere, in a corner, lost and forgotten forever. My heart raced.
That’s when the Bible verse popped into my head. God did not give us a spirit of fear. He is completely trustworthy. This is His story, His process, His fingerprints are all over it. He can make the envelope reappear anytime He wants to. He could also be teaching me to trust Him completely again, and that things are really out of my control. The time it takes to get all these documents to Haiti is by His design, not mine. All I can do is obey and complete the next step. All I can do is not give up, not be afraid or anxious or controlling.
Oh and I can pray. A lot. I think I’ll do that. Join me?
