Step 1 is almost complete!

I thought I would take minute to update everyone on where we are at in the adoption process.  Yesterday we had our home visit which is where our social worker comes into our home and walks threw it with us making sure we have a safe and positive home environment to bring a child into.  She, Andrea, and her intern, Hillary were here for a little over an hour and we were able to finish up our final paperwork at the same time. 

Now we just need to wait for Andrea to finish writing up all the things that I guess go into a home study so that we can review it and get it ready to be finalized.  We have one final group training meeting that we are required to attend but we have to wait until the end of March since it is only offered every other month.  Once we finish that group meeting our home study will officially be complete! 

We have been praying about which agency the Lord would have us apply to since that is the next step in the process and one we want to get moving on as soon as possible.  Quite honestly this is been the most difficult part so far.  There are hundreds of agencies out there and it is hard to know which ones are good and which ones should be avoided.  Jesse and I realized that we wanted to go with a Christian adoption agency so that did help weed out several of them from the list.  It has been a challenge to try and explain our hearts to Andrea (our caseworker doing our home study) who we fell really does not understand our faith.  We have found an agency out of North Carolina that we are planning on sending a preliminary application to and let me tell you it has been refreshing already answering question for them.  They asked us to start with our testimony and how and when we asked Jesus to come into our lives!  Yeah!  Though we won’t know for a few weeks after we send the first application to them if we can work with them or not, we are still excited to be moving forward towards adopting.

I imagine we still have a long road ahead, paperwork wise as well as just waiting.  We are excited though, realizing that we are actually in this process!  To God be the glory!