Now Faith is the Substance of What We’ve Hoped For

“Gotcha Day“…It was a hard but beautiful day. Our dear little girl from the Fuzhou Orphanage was brought to us in the lobby of our hotel - by the orphanage director, a nanny, and a retired orphanage nanny who had been giving her foster care in her apartment. She was so beautiful and so sweet and so afraid. They stayed for about ten minutes. We took a few pictures and then the orphanage director picked up his briefcase and walked off with the nannies! What in the world must go through a dear little child’s mind at a time like that? It must be a feeling of total abandonment. She cried and I cried.















She cried for about an hour and then she started to come around and started to play ball with the boys and smile. Once she was content, we took her downstairs to dinner. She was absolutely hilarious - a little chatterbox (all in Chinese of course). She would look at us and rattle off these sentences in Chinese, over and over, telling us things and we would look at her and say, “I know.” Then we would look at each other and say, “We really don’t know.”

She chattered with the waitresses and it was hilarious. We figured she must be chatting with them about how dumb we are that we can’t even understand her.




























We just sat and laughed because she was totally self-sufficient – and ate like a horse! She fed herself with this big spoon so neatly. She even held her other little hand underneath the spoon as she brought it to her mouth in case anything fell. Then she wiped the rice that was stuck on her chin with the spoon and put that in her mouth, too. We tried to give her bottled water in a sippie cup - she turned up her nose at it and took the water bottle, held it under her arm, unscrewed the cap, drank, and put the cap back on. Then she sat it back on the table and went back to eating. We laughed so much. “None of that baby stuff for her,” we said.















She was happy as a lark all evening - went right to sleep, and slept from 10:30pm to 9:00 am.
She awoke this morning a little uneasy, but okay. Then, we had to walk to the civil affairs office. (That walk, and those offices, and this city are another story of their own which I will tell later…whoa!!!)
Anyways, she was ok until they made us put her in a chair to get her picture taken. She got afraid,
rubbing her arm back and forth across her eyes like she’s trying to hide.

We got that done and Mitch and the boys took her to a waiting area at the end of the hall while I went into a little room that was completely gray and completely empty except for one man in a chair behind a glass barrier (I cannot describe what this place looked like but I’ll try later). Here I exchanged dollars for yen and paid the orphanage and civil affairs fees. In the waiting area where Mitch and the boys were, there were about 4 other families either meeting their children or coming to do paperwork like we were. Faith was walking around a little and when our orphanage director walked into the room, she ran to Mitch. She started to cry and has not been happy since. She absolutely will not let me put her down and hangs real tightly around my neck. She’s asleep in the crib right now.

And that’s where we are. Please pray that she will quickly understand that we are forever. She’s very sweet.