Distractions

Part of a story from Anne Lamott:

Carolyn Myss, who writes about healing, went to Russia a few years ago to give a series of lectures. Every single aspect of getting to Russia that could go poorly, did. Then in Moscow it turned out that her reserved room at the hotel had been given to someone else. She ended up sleeping on a stranger's floor. Two mornings later, on a train to her conference on healing, she began to whine at the man sitting beside her about how infuriating her journey had been thus far. It turned out that he worked for the Dalai Lama. And he said gently that he believed that when a lot of seemingly meaningless things started going wrong all at once, it was to protect something big and lovely that was trying to get itself born -- that, in other words, perhaps it needed for you to be distracted so it could be born perfect.


Things in Malawi continue to "go wrong." We had been told that Moses' passport would most certainly be ready by Friday. It was not. The lawyer's assistant (who can take more credit for our adoption going through than the lawyer) passed the buck to the lawyer to arrange the getting of the passport. As usual, he is not answering his phone. Dustin did talk to him for a second yesterday when the lawyer called in response to a missed call. When he realized that call was from Dustin he quickly hung up saying, "I'll call you back later." He didn't. It's been over a week since we applied for the passport. When we helped Margaret get one earlier this year, it took only 2-3 days.

Another fun thing we recently learned is that the US Embassy needs some original hard-copies of forms we thought we could email. I had a frantic day of finishing paperwork and sending it off to Malawi via DHL. It costs over a hundred dollars to send an envelope 3-day. Or it was SUPPOSED to be 3-day. Even though the package was left at a DHL location at 11 am yesterday, it somehow missed it's 8:00 pm plane and spent the last 36 hours sitting at the airport NOT going to Malawi. Supposedly it is off and on it's way now, but is not expected to arrive until Wednesday - count one, two, three, four, five, six working days... DHL is very apologetic and said they would refund the money for their delay, but that doesn't help our paperwork get there any sooner.

What all of this means is that there is no way Dustin and Moses are coming home when their ticket says. We will extend once again. Hopefully for the last time. It is hard to understand why everything has to be so... hard. Perhaps it's so we'll be distracted and not get in the way of this great miracle being born. At least that's what I'm going to tell myself.