Many people like to say that life is like a book or a story and each part of your life is just another page or another chapter. I don't know when exactly chapter ONE ends and two begins, etc. So I am not really sure what chapter I've been living recently. But I do know that these 3 little Hysmiths are about to begin a new chapter...
We are moving to Henderson, TN. Home of Bell's hamburgers. some good West TN barbecue, Kid President, my sweet in-laws and the reason for our move-Freed Hardeman University. I am so proud to share that Ryan is taking a job as the instructor of finance at FHU.
We are SUPER sad to leave our really great friends in Nashville. I am really going to miss story time at the downtown library. Whole Foods is a little to far from Henderson and that bums me out just a little because I really LOVE Whole Foods. My family will be a bit further away and an extra 2 hours on the drive is never something you desire.Our church family is beyond loving and supportive to us here in Nashville and it pains us to leave them. Our sweet little house that we literally made into a home with our bare hands is going to be very hard to say good-bye to. But God has blessed us incredibly as we have prayed about and thought about this decision. He opened many doors for us and we would be crazy not to walk through them!! Especially since this is our heart's desire.
A few weeks ago we started getting our house ready to put on the market. We weren't 100% sure about the move but about 90% sure at that point. Someone we went to school with happened to be looking for a house in our area, in our price range. He bought our house. BEFORE we ever had to list it, or show it, or keep it really clean for a long time. This is such an amazing blessing!
How does this affect our adoption?
We really struggled with the idea of moving while we are still in the process of adopting. You see-we filled out approximately one bazillion papers that have THIS address on it. Ryan's employment is on half a zillion papers and our HOME STUDY was done in THIS home. So there are a lot of things that would have to be changed if we moved. Well, during this time of thinking we were still waiting on our I-600A approval-which is just a piece of paper from the Dept of Homeland Security saying that it is okay for us to bring children from another country into the U.S. We were going crazy checking our mailbox every single day waiting for this paper. Before it came we discussed that we were in the "waiting" process right now anyway and that if we were going to move that NOW would be the better time. Once we have a referral (two sweet faces to look at and waiting on a court date) there is NO WAY we would move and slow things down. Since we didn't have the I-600A yet, our paperwork hadn't been sent to Ethiopia. Long story short-after talking to our agency we feel like right now is the best time in this process to make a change. It may slow us down a few months, it may not really make a difference. Also-when we talked to our agency they let us know that they were sort of on "pause" because Ethiopia was sort of dragging their feet renewing some agencies licenses because they were wanting to make a few changes first. While this made us really sad that things may be slowing down and that children were going to have to wait longer to go to their forever families it gave us a little push to "hurry up and move". We still prayed constantly that things would be fixed so that children could join their families. We didn't care about being next in line as much as we just wanted as many children to have parents as possible. ..The day before Ryan's interview we had an e-mail that said the license was renewed and everything was moving along like normal!-Praise God! As soon as we committed to seeing where this opportunity would take us we got our I-600A approval. If it had come sooner we may be in a much more difficult place to move. So..yes our adoption may be slightly delayed while we settle down and get moved but since only God knows the timing of this story, we have comfort in knowing that it's HIS timeline-who knows what it would have been if we stayed here. We feel that God had this planned the whole time and that our family will be complete in His time.
Anyway-we've got a lot of this going on, needless to say. We're doing a lot of this..
.JPG)
Because we close on our house on April 19th. Yikes! Yep-we have about 3 or 4 more weeks left in Nashville.
So here we come small town life. We look forward to walking the paths that Ryan and I walked while we dated and where we fell in love. Ryan looks forward to coaching his children in tee ball where he learned to swing a bat. We are planning on slowing down a little and enjoying the people we love. Freed Hardeman University is a place like no other and we really can't wait to soak it all up again. Though we are leaving a church of God's people that meets here in Nashville we will be joining our brothers and sisters in another really special family.
Soon we will turn the page and be on Chapter Next...Thank you God for giving us a story at all.
We are SUPER sad to leave our really great friends in Nashville. I am really going to miss story time at the downtown library. Whole Foods is a little to far from Henderson and that bums me out just a little because I really LOVE Whole Foods. My family will be a bit further away and an extra 2 hours on the drive is never something you desire.Our church family is beyond loving and supportive to us here in Nashville and it pains us to leave them. Our sweet little house that we literally made into a home with our bare hands is going to be very hard to say good-bye to. But God has blessed us incredibly as we have prayed about and thought about this decision. He opened many doors for us and we would be crazy not to walk through them!! Especially since this is our heart's desire.
A few weeks ago we started getting our house ready to put on the market. We weren't 100% sure about the move but about 90% sure at that point. Someone we went to school with happened to be looking for a house in our area, in our price range. He bought our house. BEFORE we ever had to list it, or show it, or keep it really clean for a long time. This is such an amazing blessing!
How does this affect our adoption?
We really struggled with the idea of moving while we are still in the process of adopting. You see-we filled out approximately one bazillion papers that have THIS address on it. Ryan's employment is on half a zillion papers and our HOME STUDY was done in THIS home. So there are a lot of things that would have to be changed if we moved. Well, during this time of thinking we were still waiting on our I-600A approval-which is just a piece of paper from the Dept of Homeland Security saying that it is okay for us to bring children from another country into the U.S. We were going crazy checking our mailbox every single day waiting for this paper. Before it came we discussed that we were in the "waiting" process right now anyway and that if we were going to move that NOW would be the better time. Once we have a referral (two sweet faces to look at and waiting on a court date) there is NO WAY we would move and slow things down. Since we didn't have the I-600A yet, our paperwork hadn't been sent to Ethiopia. Long story short-after talking to our agency we feel like right now is the best time in this process to make a change. It may slow us down a few months, it may not really make a difference. Also-when we talked to our agency they let us know that they were sort of on "pause" because Ethiopia was sort of dragging their feet renewing some agencies licenses because they were wanting to make a few changes first. While this made us really sad that things may be slowing down and that children were going to have to wait longer to go to their forever families it gave us a little push to "hurry up and move". We still prayed constantly that things would be fixed so that children could join their families. We didn't care about being next in line as much as we just wanted as many children to have parents as possible. ..The day before Ryan's interview we had an e-mail that said the license was renewed and everything was moving along like normal!-Praise God! As soon as we committed to seeing where this opportunity would take us we got our I-600A approval. If it had come sooner we may be in a much more difficult place to move. So..yes our adoption may be slightly delayed while we settle down and get moved but since only God knows the timing of this story, we have comfort in knowing that it's HIS timeline-who knows what it would have been if we stayed here. We feel that God had this planned the whole time and that our family will be complete in His time.
Anyway-we've got a lot of this going on, needless to say. We're doing a lot of this..
.JPG)
Because we close on our house on April 19th. Yikes! Yep-we have about 3 or 4 more weeks left in Nashville.
So here we come small town life. We look forward to walking the paths that Ryan and I walked while we dated and where we fell in love. Ryan looks forward to coaching his children in tee ball where he learned to swing a bat. We are planning on slowing down a little and enjoying the people we love. Freed Hardeman University is a place like no other and we really can't wait to soak it all up again. Though we are leaving a church of God's people that meets here in Nashville we will be joining our brothers and sisters in another really special family.
Soon we will turn the page and be on Chapter Next...Thank you God for giving us a story at all.
.JPG){kind=link}
We will be praying for you guys and let us know if you need anything.
ReplyDelete