Passed!!

Praise the Lord... Last Friday Larissa passed the foreign service oral assessment for the State Department! In case you're wondering what all that means, please let me tell you (with great joy and pride!). Last year she passed the written portion of the assessment, which anyone can take. A very small percent of the people who take that pass and are invited to an extensive oral assessment in Washington DC. So, she left last Thursday and flew to DC. ..... When she got off the plane she was sick as a dog with vomiting, fever, and feeling terrible. The next morning (the day of the exam) she felt worse, but with some encouragement from good ol' Isi she went onward toward Annex 1, which is where the exam was.
On a side note, how fitting is it that this very important evaluation for potential foreign service personnel is held in a place named "annex 1", reminiscent of other government compounds like "area 51" and the like. Anyway, back to he story.
So, the interview itself was all day long and included a cooperative group problem involving the distribution of limited resources, structured interview, and challenging memo writing assignment where she has to piece together lots of information from various sources and briefly communicate it and offer suggestions about taking next steps. Basically she can’t tell anyone the specifics, but it was very thorough and challenging.
Praise be to the Lord because she was feeling terrible physically, very nervous, under-prepared, and intimidated by stories who has failed many, many times, but still passed! Even at this stage many people are cut and out of her group of 11 people, 3 passed, and they were told that three was a lot!
At this point she is on a waiting list which means that sometime within the next 18 months the Federal government may call her to serve in a US embassy anywhere in the world. They gave her a score when she took the assessment and ranking on the list of employment depends on your score. Whether or not she’ll be offered a job depends on how many jobs open up and how many people are ahead of her on the list; both of which are completely out of our control.
Throughout this entire process we have felt that the Lord has been granting Larissa success. It really seems that we’d be able to serve God with joy and pleasure oversees, and it may be that God is answering our prayers through a future opportunity to work for the gov’t oversees!

Below are some pictures from the weekend in DC. She met her parents and sister there and then a good friend from way back, Christina Tam!
fyi, I (Clay) had to support from home because of the middle school science fair. It was hard for me to wait all day Thursday and Friday to hear how things went. I can only imagine the stress of the father expecting his wife to deliver their child. It's hard to have such a critical event happening to your wife and you have absolutely no way to help! Praise to our gracious Lord who works powerfully in our lives and is such a good Heavenly Father!