Yesterday we received word that the two girls were given to another family. We are thrilled they will go home faster with this family who already has their dossier in the country. Amazingly, we also are very peaceful about this. Remember how I am praying for peace and joy? Well, it's working!! :)
Stacy and I have our psychological exams tomorrow and we already received our appointment to drive to St. Louis to have our fingerprints taken for immigration (I-800a)! Theoretically we could be ready to mail our dossier to the Philippines by mid September! I can't believe we can see the light at the end of the tunnel of paperwork.
That being said, we realized we need to find a whole lot of money to go with our dossier to the Philippines so we held a garage sale last weekend. Can I just say God is amazing?! I know you're not supposed to talk money (especially to strangers) BUT if I don't share you won't get the full effect of what happened. We had received some small donations to put in our garage sale and then we went through our closets and basement. We had a lot of little stuff. I think the biggest ticket item we had for sale was a 15.00 chair (which didn't sell). Our mindset was that if we had 1,000 items that sold at $1.00 we could make $1,000. I know, I'm a math genius....
Well, we had a very slow weekend. We had been told people would give extra money or write a check for $50.00. This was not our experience. We did have 7-8 people pay an extra $5.00, so we can account for $40.00 in gifts. And our new neighbor came over and handed us $20.00 to help because he thought it was so cool what we were doing. Anyhow, the clothes piles went down somewhat and in the end we were left with a lot of things to take to Goodwill.
To our amazement we made $600.00!!!!! What in the world?! We racked our brains to figure out what our largest sale was ($55.00) and how many people gave extra (7-8).....The next day my friend asked how it went. I tried to recount and explain what happened. She said, "So what was your big ticket item?" HA! We didn't have one!! God is AMAZING! That's all we can say. There is no way we can account for the money made, but He can. He provided it for us.
We had too much fun talking to the people about our adoption. People are very encouraging and they get so excited to hear about our story. One of our first customers of the day was a single mom who adopted her daughter from China 12 years ago. She talked, and talked and in the end gave me a HUG and said she'd be praying for us. How cool is that?!
I think the nicest comment came from a lady who has an autistic son. I couldn't help myself but to bring up the GAPS Diet. We got to talking about alternative/complementary care which led to homeschooling. She was such a nice lady. As she paid for her books she said to Stacy and I, "I can tell you two are on the same page together. That's so nice to see. It's taken my husband and I 18 years to get there." I thought to myself what an honor it is to have a marriage that others can see that with one chance meeting.
The garage sale may have been long and full of hard work, but in the end we were not only blessed by God but encouraged by his people.
Candie
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