Flights BOOKED!!!!!!

We are travelling!!!!!!

I know it has been awhile since my last post. 2 months ago Colombia said that they were keeping the country closed and that they were not going to allow adoptive families on humanitarian flights. It was devastating, hard, and a struggle. We continued to be patient trusting the Lord and his goodness in it. Praise God that he does not waiver…that he is always good.

We distracted ourselves with a road trip to Oklahoma, Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, back to Michigan, Tennessee, and then home 😊 It was long and it was some great quality time. We got home and around August 5^th (I started work) and I have lost track of all time. It has been a blur. At one point. Colombia said they would open on Sept 1 and our agency told us to book flights. We did, they were cancelled, we booked another one, it was cancelled. It seemed like they were cancelling because the President was going to delay the opening again. We started to settle for maybe October and kept praying that the Lord would remember us, establish the work of our hands, and that we would witness him be glorified (our church’s summer in the Psalms series has been sooooo good!).

One day, like I said I have lost all track of what happened these August days, Colombia announced that they would ALLOW families to travel on humanitarian flights!!!!! AMAZING! However this jump started another mountain of paperwork. Each individual family has to contact their local Colombian consulate and secure their own visa.

This was hard. I called. I emailed. Got a response. 😊 Had more questions and emailed them back. Matthew filled out the application. We filled it out incorrectly (one per person in the fam not one app for the whole fam…all applications are in Spanish and are for Colombian residents so you can imagine us finagling through them. Submit applications for each member of the family…kids are denied. They do not want kids travelling but Matthew and I can’t imagine travelling without them (at this point in time they are informing us it could be 8+ weeks and we won’t have a flight back). We call and they tell us to write a petition. We petition. It gets approved. I think all of this happened in about a week but it just seems like this crazy blur.*

Finally we have Visas! It seems like such a hard task but the next…getting a flight. Colombia and our agency told us we would probably not get a flight until October because it is too difficult to find 5 seats on a plane. OK…it seemed like such a victory to just be sucker punched. However, we kept praying and so many were praying with us. Then I am sitting in Target on a random day with the kids and I get a call saying we have a flight for you leaving Miami September 5!!!!!* We will be contacting you with details soon. I literally just sat and cried in the middle of the kids section with Aivlynn and Wells looking at me like I was crazy lol I called Matthew and he probably thought I was in a car accident or something because I could barely talk. It seemed so surreal and we still did not believe it until we got the official flight information yesterday!!!

WE ARE LEAVING SEPT 5!!!! I can’t believe it! That is in like 3 days!!!!

Our itinerary:

Sept 4- Leave Waco for Miami spend the night

Sept 5- Leave Miami for Bogota…9pm and arrive at 1 am

– Start a 2 week quarantine

Sept 21 (probably)- United with Mili!!!!!!

After that we are on whatever timetable Bogota Family court creates. It could be 4 weeks or it could be 8 weeks…

NEEDS:

Finances: If you can, please donate to our adoption fund through our church (click here). They are giving us every penny of your donation if you select Bixler Adoption fund as the from the drop down menu. We are needing about $15,000 for this trip. Between flights, rent, food, taxis/rental cars, and other/unexpected expenses for 2 months it is going to add up quickly.

Prayer: Specific ways you can pray-

1. That we would get on our flights without issue
2. That our entire family would survive the overnight flight (our kids do not fly well at night)
3. That our accommodations would be supportive of our family of 6
   1. Matthew and I will still be working all the jobs 😉
   2. The kids will be homeschooling/livestreaming into their school
   3. We will be relatively on lockdown for most of the trip- it will be essential for us to find parks etc
4. That we would be able to meet and spend a lot of time with Mili’s foster family while there. This is very important to us because we want to maintain this relationship and we really love them ❤
5. Praise him for all he has done so far!!!!

*There are some very exciting details to this that I will be able share when we get back from Colombia but just know that the Lord is answering prayers!!