answered prayers

I've had so many amazing answers to prayer so I wanted to share them with you:

1) we have sold all our furniture and appliances except for our living room set (we'll have a go at tomorrow's yard sale)

2) Mama Elize (Sam's babysitter and our cleaner) found another job today!!!!! That makes me so happy! It's full-time as a cleaner and though it is a bit farther from her place than we are, it's still walking distance. She starts the day we fly. I am so so so glad about this.

3) We've been able to contribute at BREAD a bit during this last month. When we decided to leave, we still wanted to help as we were able (rather than just spinning our wheels).

4) every detail of where we're going, staying, how we're getting around, etc. from when we leave until we are settled in our new house in August in Chiang Mai has been settled. The most recent joy is that we've found a sublet in Chiang Mai for our first six weeks there (I wrote about that already, right?). Anyway, it makes it a ton easier to enjoy the journey(s) that we'll be taking knowing that we don't have to plan as we go.

Well those are the ones that I can think of off-hand, but I know there are more. Even within each category there have been so many little answers. Like today we heard from the guy that bought one of our single beds that he wasn't interested in the 2nd. Just then, we got a call from a lady interested in one bed and she came out and bought it right away!

We still need to sell our car, find car seats before we get to the US (we're looking for 2 used Britax Marathons... anyone?), and to get out of Congo without a problem.

John and I are particularly anxious about this last one. We just have had so many bad experiences with customs/police/immigration, etc. And as John's passport expired last month (I got a new one too), we now have two new passports and two expired passports which contain our still-valid visas for Congo. We just have this nightmare of immigration coming up with some excuse to keep us or threaten us for loads of cash or something. They seem to like irregularities :-) So we'll do what we can to circumvent the problem, but it rests a concern. I just read this girl's blog about her trip to Congo last year. She and her friend were held up in our airport for 7 hours upon arrival without anybody telling them what was the problem. Eventually they paid 100 bucks each even though they already had valid one-month visas they'd gotten in the US. And then their one-month visas were taken and they were given just a 72 hour visa in which time they had to get to Gabon by road. Anyway, that sort of story just seems altogether too common. I'm not really worried overall- just look at all these answered prayers above, but I would like it not to be a stressful last-minute problem once we're checked in and ready to fly.