Dancing in the minefields.

We've had a week of dancing in the minefields over here. A life of it, actually.

Two weeks ago we completed pages upon pages of paperwork for UK visas, made appointments to be fingerprinted, and were left to wait for some final documents from the university before mailing off the applications.

Tedious, but fairly easy, right? Wrong.

Thing is, everything is time sensitive (not to mention expensive) in this process, and the documents had to be here by a certain date. Well they weren't. FedEx didn't follow through with their end of the deal in picking up our package at St. Andrews and overnighting it to Cleveland. Needless to say, things are hectic. Peter's visa application expired in the meantime, and he's since applied for a second time.

Here's to praying that letter is here before my application expires next week!

We got a bite on the car over the weekend, which was bittersweet to say the least. Plans were made for a test drive Tuesday evening. Tuesday morning the check engine light decided to make an appearance. Nonetheless, Peter took care of the light that afternoon, showed the car that evening, and sold it.

God has been gracious. We're leaping hurdles, huge hurdles, but they're things I have to document because in years, we'll look back and laugh. Remember when we had to reapply for visas because the papers didn't arrive in time? Remember running to every Post Office in Cleveland Heights and South Euclid trying to track the letter down? Remember the day we were supposed to show the car and the 'check engine' light came on? How 4 weeks after school started the twins were due? How we lived in your parents' basement for 3 1/2 months to save money so we could move? How none of this was part of our plan? We'll see the hand of God and how none of this was in vain. So, we keep pushing on because it's hard for a reason.

I know this was going around quite a while back, and yes, I did catch it then, but it came to mind again today after our recent chain of events, so I wanted to post it.