Our Adoption Story--Orphan Sunday

Last Sunday was Orphan Sunday, and Bookguy and I shared our adoption story at church.  I thought to share it with you all. Funny thing is, I typed this out and then on the actual Sunday I strayed quite far from my notes, so I don't really recall what I said on that actual morning ... maybe this was meant to be a blog post from the very beginning?   

Today is Orphan Sunday.  This is a day celebrated by hundreds of thousands of Christians across America, recognized in local churches throughout the United States and now echoing back across the seas to countries as diverse as Ukraine, Guatemala and Kenya. 

It’s exciting that Mission Hope, our new little community in Tustin, can be a part of this moment of Christians wanting to bring hope to the orphan. 

If you or I walked through the Costco parking lot and saw a 3 year old in tattered clothes, filthy, unsupervised, distended belly and gray hair, we’d stop.  We would bend down and say, “Where is your mother?” and we’d search around for his caregiver.  When we realized there was no one, we would pick him up and take him to the police or maybe to our own house. 

But because of where we live, here in Tustin, in one of the richest counties of the riches countries, that kind of need isn’t staring us in the face.  We don’t see children without parents lining the streets, and so we forget that the orphan crisis is real. 

It was 1996 and I was “friends” with Bookguy (who is now my husband).  We discussed generally that we would be open to adoption if either of us, when we were married (not necessarily to each other), could not conceive.  I didn’t know at the time that Bookguy would be my husband, and I didn’t know that God was planting in us a passion for orphan care and adoption. 

Fast forward 7 years and we’re married.  We had one son and one daughter, and my doctor tells me I should not birth any more babies.  We had the safe, picturesque family of 4, one boy, one girl, easy-to-manage.  But in God’s grand orchestration, the seed He planted years ago began to sprout.

I began to read, think, and pray about growing our family through adoption. 

The more I learned about the needs of orphaned and vulnerable children the more my heart ached.  18.3 million children in this world have NO parents—no mother, no father.  No one.  18.3 million.  That’s the population of Florida. They are living, children of God, fending for themselves, without any parent to tuck them in at night, without any parent to help them with homework, to make them dinner, to give them snuggles, to show them the unconditional love of the Heavenly Father.

I began earnestly praying.  Praying every day HARD, and journaling, and reading everything I could on adoption.  I became convinced that He wanted us to pursue growing our family in this way.  His leading was so clear and direct that I began to feel we were actually sinning, rebelling from what He wanted us to do, every day that would pass and we would not pull the trigger.

Bookguy, while open, was much more pragmatic.  He was worried about money and the lifelong expense of raising another child.  He sought to provide for us well.  God began revealing to Him (apart from me) his own need to leap out in faith and trust that God was at work and could take better care of his family than he could.

So we began the research stage, learning about adoption, talking and praying about our fears, listening to God’s direction, telling our families, and then eventually shelling out tons of money, completing a massive amount of paperwork, bracing ourselves for the army of personal, invasive questions we would have to answer, and waiting. 

It was exhausting. And it was exhilarating. 

God used our adoption to bring me into closer relationship with Him.  He used our adoption to bring me to my knees--praying daily for my son, yearning for courage, more faith, and praying for more surrender to His will for my life. 

And of course I would tell everyone and anyone that every ounce of the process was worth it.  Because … in March of 2008, we received “The Call.” 

There was a little boy, who I now affectionately call the Bean, less than a month old, and he had no one.  “Would we pray about becoming his parents?” our social worker asked. 

And when you pray and ask God the Father, the Creator of the Universe, the lover of all people, the most greatest adoption advocate of all, if you should, in fact, embrace and love an orphaned child living 9,000 miles away, I have a hard time believing He will say no. 

We "bonded" with a photo, and eventually, a few months later, we flew to Ethiopia to meet him.

I look at my family, I look at my son, and I think about the 18.3 million other children who are just a statistic to you and me, but to God, they are what He sent His Son to die for. 

I think about our God who takes our brokenness, our horrible tragedies, the evil of the world taking shape in abandoned children, abusive parents, and neglect, and invites us into His family, once and for all. 

God has a special place in His heart for orphaned children.  And I want my heart to reflect God’s own.  Scripture is very clear that caring for orphans and widows is not an option.  It is a requirement. 

 James 1:27 says: “Religion that is pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

Psalm 68: 5 says that God is a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows. 

Matthew 22:39 says that we are to “love our neighbor as ourselves.”

I think about God’s plan, His great love for the Bean, that in 1996 he would plant in the heart of two future spouses a desire for adoption, knowing that an energetic jumping Bean would need a mommy and a daddy. 

I think about my own adoption—how it can be possible that I am a child of the King—that I have been adopted as a co-heir with Christ, and in my new family my Heavenly Father showers me with perfect, unchanging, unconditional love (and discipline). 

I think about the ways I will disappoint my own children—because I am flawed and weak and sinful—and I claim for them their own adoption in Christ.  I point them to the love of their Heavenly Father as the One who will never disappoint.  I look at all of you and I think, if I am adopted unto the Father, and you are adopted unto the Father, we really ARE family—sharing the same Abba, the same Daddy. 

The Bean is now three years old.  He has the loudest laugh!  He hits pitched baseballs and knows his colors and he asks me to sing O Come O Come Emmanual every night before I tuck him into bed.  And some days I look at him and I think about what would have been—what his life would have been like—if God had not spoken and we had not listened.  I cannot imagine our life or our family without him.