Padens in the Philippines

Dear Everyone, We have some really exciting news! Thank you all for your prayers for us concerning Gilmer's papers to get back to the States. We said in the last email that we hoped somehow God would be glorified by our situation and we believe that He was today. Let me try and recap what happened at the Embassy this morning... We went early and waited in line at the Homeland Security window, after talking to the man there he referred us to the US Border Safety (or something like that) since they are the ones that control the transportation Letter we were told to get. The security guard there said to wait outside, and when they came into office they would call us by who came first (there was a big stack of papers). Since we also needed to get Josiah's SSS number (Social Security) we did that while we waited. After that was taken care of, we were waiting outside and I went to check to see if there were seeing people yet, which they weren't. Gilmer, by then, had made friend...

Dear Praying Friends, We have a urgent prayer request that we would like to share with you. If you have been reading our updates you know of the problems that we have been having with Gilmer's paperwork to get back to the States. Things right now continue to look grim. We spoke to an Immigration Officer last Friday and, according to her, there is no hope that the re-entry permit will be reissued. This comes as a shock to us considering we have spoken to 3 other Immigration Officers that said to just wait. They did not say that there was no chance. She also told us that the only thing we could do is ask the Embassy to give us a Transportation Letter. We had not heard about this letter before even though we asked them repeatedly to let us know if there was anything else we could do. So feeling like we need to exhaust all our options, and at least find out if there is anything the Embassy can do, we are headed for Manila in the morning. We could not send this out earlier due to a t...