St Anthony, Sacred Heart and adoption

Today, my very sick with a bad flu, DH went to our adoption agency to leave the last of the documents that make up our adoption file which must be right now over 100 pages long. Sigh!

He delivered this afternoon our drug testing results, blood work for HIV and other ilnesses, general health report by a doctor, our legal records (its a document that states that we do not have criminal records), etc.

This is the last part of a very long process and we are both very tired, yet today we received a tremendous sign from God. A true God-incidence.

We have arrived to this date after many months of tests (12 hours plus of psychological tests and interviews), tons and tons of paperwork and legal documents, 12 four hour training sessions for adoption over the course of 4 months, some 8 interviews, a 4 hour vist by a social worker and 1.5 years of waiting since we started the adoption process.

Our file was going to be approved by the agency first this week and on May 16th presented to the governement adoption agency to be approved.


After this day we would be legally approved to be adoptive parents and we could any day become parents. A very very important day. The most crucial in all of this and one of the most crucial in our lives.

If approved our baby could arrive the very next day to some 6 months later.

Well the governement moved the date due to Mothers day here and the monthly meeting was one week ago. We did not know about this, nor our agency and we did not have our paperwork ready then so the agency informed my DH that we needed now to wait a month longer to find out the outcome.

So we are back to waiting and now the meeting will be the second Monday in June.

I was at the same time relieved and mad that this happened. Relieved since I will be travelling in a week to Brasil for 2 weeks and I did not want to get the call with either good or bad news 18 hours from home and mad due to more waiting.

All of this is so nerve raking. All seemed like a cruel joke.

I have not blogged a lot about it, but in all of this waiting I have been praying specially to my grandmother, my very devout grandmother who taught me to pray , to have faith and whose name my mom and I both have.

She prayed all the time to St. Anthony of Padua (specially to find lost objects and parking places) and to the Sacred Heart. Daily rosaries to the Sacred Heart, one after the other for each family member. Her rosary, which my mom now has, is so worn from use that you can see clearly in the color of the wood where her fingers touched the beads.

I have told the story before that these 2 devotions are very strong in my family not only because she was very devoted to them, but also due to some God-incidences later.

My parents got married on June 13th, the day of St. Anthony, in June the month of the Sacred Heart. And they did not plan it this way, it was the only date open at the Church that that accepted my newly converted father to marry my mom.

25 years later on their 25th anniversary my grandmother died that same day. All of us saw this as a sign that my grandmother was with God. It gave us tremendous peace. I still remember the staute of the Sacred Heart filled with flowers in the church where I received the news of her passing.

13 years later that very same day my grandfather passed away. We knew she had taken him to Heaven. Also gave us all great peace.

When I heard that our approval date for adoption had moved to June I immediately went to my phone calendar. I hoped that the date would be June 13th... and it was. The second Monday of June.

I almost cried when I saw this. And felt tremendous peace.

I called my mom a few minutes later and she could only laugh and say: "See, trust that your grandma is watching over you. What else do you need to know that she is with you?"

And she is and for sure watching over her great grandchild which we pray will come soon.