Three more months

As some of you know, we are petitioning for custody of Dave’s six-year-old cousin. His parents are divorced, the mother had custody of him and has lost it do to drug abuse. The father (Dave’s uncle) is voluntarily giving us custody. If we don’t take him (and he is removed permanently from the mother) he will go to foster care forever and loose his extended family.

Dave attended court on Wednesday (in Ohio) and what we hoped would be the end, isn’t. The judge gave the mother three more months to show improvement in a residential drug treatment program. It’s very frustrating. She has been given a year to get off drugs and lost custody of her son in June. Isn’t that enough? I don’t really understand what three more months will do. So on December 14th she will go to court again. This time, if she hasn’t shown “improvement” the mother will loose permanent custody and our lawyer will (again) state that we are willing to take him. Showing how much faith the judge has in this mother; she has set a temporary date in February for a custody hearing.

Is it horrible to pray that if the mother were going to fail, she would do it sooner than later? I don’t want her to do just what she needs to do to slide by and get the kid back only to go through this again in another year. The older this kids gets that harder it will be on everyone. It would also be nice to get the child before we go to Iceland.

Please pray. I do have peace about this and know that it’s all in God’s timing.