Full Stop: No Go Pt 2

Well, here we are.
And here we will be.

Despite Coffeedoc's superhuman effort for the past 48 hours {and still he keeps turning things over in his head, stewing, examining, looking for a way}, we now know: we don't go.

We are full of those fruitless useless "what if's": "if only the embassy doc interpreted the protocol more specifically" "if only the embassy doc had her classified properly" "if we had only had a court date a few weeks earlier" "if they didn't have such a lag when our papers hit" etc etc etc.
Recrimination and fretting is ridiculous selfish sad bitter taste.
Those "ifs" are pure torture and pure pity party, but almost impossible to stem {and I'd by lying if I said they didn't flit through our heads}.

Make no mistake, while our pity party has been thrown for us to be sure, it is ever more so iced with the deep worry over our Marta, what this means for her, to her, how she is understanding and dealing with it all and how it might pan out. And that worry is deep and true. She is a child, caught in a bureaucratic machine.
And I can find myself frozen in the fears of that.

But. Here is where we are, on the objective surface of things:
New proposed Embassy date: July 8 (my big brother's bday).
New proposed travel date: July 4

New prayer bleg, even more serious: please please pray for a clear culture (our CDC friend pointed out that cultures in kids are always dicey, easily contaminated, unpredictable..frequent false positives....which would lead to disaster for our girl).
That's it. Just a clear culture, no growth, heck, sterile even!

My unspeakable thanks and gratitude for the support and prayers and emails.
They mean the world and help so much. Thank you.
And I do trust in God's will, even when I cannot fathom it and it's hard to walk through...
I choose to trust it {even when my controlling reflex is to rail at it and cause a scene in Barnes and Noble}.

And, in the meantime, we try to stand back up and catch back our breath from the hollowed out cavity in our chest that is scraped clean and raw but is somehow so much heavier.
And we pray through the hurt and sorrow of it all, pray through the hard.

Because even though, even that, is so hard and our words are gone....
what else do we have to do, or hang on to, but that?