Breakthrough

Psalm 146:1-2 "Bless the Lord, bless the Lord O my soul. I will praise the Lord while I live, I will sing praise to my God while I have my being."

This morning God strengthened us again for another morning to end up with all three of my new independent Russian thinkers across town at the US Embassy at 8:00 AM. I'll give you funny details later, but let it suffice to say we hurriedly headed to the medical center(another funny story) after the Embassy visit, and then backagain after a lunch break to wait on the med reports to come out for us. After getting our brown envelopes with health details inside, it was back to the tiny bit of free air above the US Embassy grounds, and we had to wait. Okay- at 4:00 PM our embassy officer behind the blue glass did not have good new for me and another American waiting. We were the last 2 people there and the servers were down...no visa's were happening right now. This was all said to us as the microphone intermittently cut out back and forth, so you hear every other sentence loud and clear. Mr. Nichols, we......,and they are.....,and if you........., so we will.......Then you strain your ears for the other words.

They basically said that they would continue to work on bringing them (the servers) back up, but at that point they thought we would not get them today for travel in the morning. So, David (my new friend from Philadelphia) and I began to pray together for His will to be done, and for us to have grace to endure whatever, but we also asked for good gifts from Him in the form of a total of 4 visas to travel, and tickets for us as well, and that if He needs me to wait another day, then for Him to show me what to do with the waiting time.
5:00 came and our embassy rep said she was leaving but that someone would be in the office until 5:30 and that we could wait if we wanted. God does not need reminding of what He already knows about. We decided to sit for the remainder of the time. I took a walk down the hall of the silent Embassy, and when I returned my friend David smiled and advised he was seeing movement from behind the bulletproof glass.
By 5:20 we all had our walking papers!!!!!!!!
Now our facilitator raced to the center of the city with my new children yipping back and forth excitedly in Russian in the back seat. I climbed out of his black car for the 500th time in this journey to run in and see my friend Lubov at the Delta office. She had graciously agreed to wait for us. As I write this, tickets and documents are now in hand and we prayerfully seek to be on the Kiev to NYC flying in the morning!!!
Thanks be to God for His faithfulness.

Pray for strength, and grace, and swift progress through customs and immigration in NYC and then for arrival into Birmingham at around 10:30 PM tomorrow night...

Blessings,
Chris and Kollin and Kayla and Kory