Today's adoption update

These are things as they appear today:

• I spoke with the lawyer. He found out Friday that the judge he was supposed to contact for clarification for our judge is retired. Further, she spent the last several years of her career working on media matters, not family cases. It's unknown why our judge couldn't try to contact her personally. And more, why he would have recommended someone that didn't work with such cases for the last several years.
• The judge has again shown himself to be unaware of the details of our case. He alerted Sylwia that our lawyer hadn't filed an extension for the kids to remain here with us, citing that our current approval expired June 1. Sylwia called our lawyer in a panic asking why he hadn't done it, to which Bogdan responded that it doesn't expire until June 30. Why isn't the judge reading the documents in the file.
• The lawyer has further researched the regulations of the Hague Convention and has concluded that they are only in play when two countries are involved which have both ratified the convention. The U.S. has not done so. For some reason, whether its a question of him just not reading it or not being confident enough to make a decision based on it, the judge does not see this at the moment. Thus, he continues to stall.
• We will be meeting with the "Committee for the Rights of Children" this Wednesday at 5:30pm. Our lawyer will be with us. This feels like the Alamo or something...our last stand (oh, but that wasn't a good outcome was it?!). We pray that this committee can get through to the judge from the kids' perspective.
• Finally, I'm trying to get in touch with some supposedly high power attorneys from Poznan that take on high profile cases...I guess their like the Jani Kokran (that would be Polish for Johnny Cochran) of Poznan or something. I want to pose this single question to them about the adherence to the convention and see what they can do. It would complete our case if they were to right a confident letter to the court stating that the judge is completely able to make the decision based on both Polish law and international regulations as stipulated by the Hague Convention. Coming from such a law firm I think that would be just the thing needed to give the judge the confidence needed to move forward.

"How are we doing?" some will ask. If I say "bad" then some will just tell us to hold on and to keep the faith. We are holding on...and we remain steadfast in our faith that God's hand is guiding our lives. But we are still doing bad. Stress is fierce and does not discriminate when it comes to who and what it attacks. And we have been battling mounting stress for over a year now. We are battle worn, tired, discouraged, homesick, and afraid that we will one day see our children taken from us. If you don't know them...if they are just a bunch of pictures, emails, and blog posts...then that reality is nowhere near as real for you as it is for us.

Is our faith faltering? No! But as I've already said, our faith (ours and yours, generally) is not in a desired outcome. We can't just have some blanket faith that God will give us these kids because it seems the right thing...because we love them. We live in a fallen world where power is often found in the hands of the wicked. And we all experience the consequences of that. Jesus himself experienced the consequences of that. Are we more deserving of equality than our Savior?

I guess that's where the fear comes in...because we know that, while cliche, bad things happen to good people. But that is where the heart of our faith lies...that even when those bad things happen, even when life's storms hammer us with the ferociousness of a F5 tornado, God is there to shepherd us through. It doesn't mean we will come out unscathed. But it means that we will come out. It means that there will be another tomorrow. It means there there is absolutely always hope...both in our todays and in our tomorrows.

The huge challenge we have, though, is orienting ourselves toward God when He is not so easily seen. It's like new pilots that are only able to fly when there are not many clouds...VFR (visual flight rules)...because they are not yet able to use the plane's instruments alone to navigate safely through bad weather. Too often we live on VFR as Christians...things get bad, the clouds roll in. We lose sight of God's hand guiding our lives, and we crash because we have not yet learned to navigate well using the instruments He's given us for such occasions (these might be our heart, mind, experience, and maybe others). We have to learn to use these "instruments" so that we can continue to keep ourselves oriented on Him no matter how bad our personal storms rage.

Well, this has been one of those cathartic posts this morning. Don't know if you stuck through to the end with me...but even if you haven't I feel a little better, having reminded myself that I'm not just flying up here alone in the thick cloud cover. Things here are ugly and tough...but God is here.