His mercies are new every morning

I am back from Ukraine and have nearly recovered from my 22 hour layover spent in the London air port. I am full of hope and potential and opportunity and I pray that it is contagious. There are many beautiful children who need families and I believe some of those families are yours.
While I will be writing more about those children in the up coming weeks, I wanted to share a bit with you about Nastia.
As you know, Nastia is the girl we were unable to bring home last year. She is seen in a group picture a couple of posts ago. You know that we love her.
while in Slavyansk, I was invited to visit the social worker responsible for the children in her town. She was still very disgusted with what transpired last year and shared with me that Nastia was still in the national adoption registry and was available for international adoption. She equipped me with some pertinent paperwork and with her blessing, I filed a request at the SDA to verify Nastia's status and ask for permission to immediately file paperwork. Lest you think I took this one in myself, Scott was aware of and approved of me taking these actions. I was told that I would receive word in about a week.
I can't tell you how excited I was to be doing this. This was not the purpose of my trip and just the ability to see her was a blessing. To find out that she was still available for adoption and that we would have the chance to try again was an awesome and unexpected gift, indeed!
I spent the last few days in Kiev meeting with other adoptive families, giving them encouragement and support. I got to spend time with the Houser family, adopting a little girl named Sveta, and I got to have a lunch with a woman named Natalie, who had just received paperwork for a blind referral to meet a little girl who was HIV+. She and her husband had not initially intended to adopt a child with HIV, so our meeting was especially opportune. I also spent Tuesday evening with a large crowd of families just arriving in Kiev as well as preparing to depart with their new children. It was so exciting.
We finally made it home Thursday night, I told my husband more about the paperwork filed for Nastia, and went to sleep dreaming about the good news I would hear the next week.
On Friday, when I finally got around to checking my email, I was excited to open an email from my new friend, Natalie. She had included a photo of her with the little girl who would be her daughter.

IT WAS NASTIA!

I was not expecting that. I had already begun to construct the God story that was happening. How glorious to share with you that we would bring home Nastia a year later. I had faced and understood that God had plans for her, reconciled that I may never know what her future was, but look, God was planning this all along!

God has other, grander, more perfect plans than mine.

He was not planning for me to be her mother, but He did let me have lunch with her mom.

I learned last year that with God, I am all in. I trust Him completely and know he loves me unconditionally. These again were not the plans I would have chosen, but I know that His ways are perfect. She will not grow up in an institution. She will not be transferred to internat when she is eight years old. She will have a mom and a dad who, to quote her new father, "will love her to pieces!" She will grow up learning how much Jesus loves her, because her parents will teach her this. She will have an older brother who is also from Ukraine.

She will know that SHE IS LOVED.

Jeremiah 29:11
'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans for welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope.

I knew this promise to be true, even when I thought I would never know specifically His plan for her. God, in His mercy, pulled back the veil and let me see a glimpse of this promise to her.