Adoption? Really?
4 Mar
We spent an amazing weekend with great friends in Louisville, Kentucky learning about orphan care, adoption, and God’s heart for children. Though we both expected to walk away with tons of practical information and resources, I’m not sure either of us was ready for the ways God challenged our motives and our understanding of Him. We left with lots to process and think through before we’ll be ready to adopt.
I wanted to adopt kids in order to have a picture of the Gospel right here in our family. One of the things God challenged me with this weekend is that there ought to be pictures of the Gospel evidenced in every piece of the way we live and do family already. If I am solely relying on adopting a child to paint the picture of the Gospel for us, we’re not living in the realities of it now. If I want to add a child who doesn’t look like us or talk like us, if I want to rescue an orphan just as a bridge into Gospel conversation, I am failing right now in talking about the truth of Jesus in the ways He asks us to. Adopting is a powerful way to show a tangible picture of the God who loves the hurting, the outcast, and the weak. But God has given us untold opportunities to love like He does each day.
In one of the main sessions, Russell Moore spoke about how we use things like adoption to make ourselves feel better before God and better than others as a means of self-justification. I know that part of my prideful, selfish heart wanted to use adoption as one more way to prove my spiritual superiority to others, as if to say, “We really get God’s heart. Look at these little orphans we’ve taken in. If you were as spiritual as we, you would adopt or foster too.” The truth of the Gospel obliterates such pride. It reminds me that I was bad enough that Jesus HAD to die, yet he loved me enough to do it willingly. The only reason we have any desire to adopt is because He has first adopted us. If he had not made us his children, I would commit atrocities FAR worse than those folks who abandon children.
Jedd Medefind’s talk was really helpful in causing us to count the cost. He spoke about how the kingdom of God’s invades the darkness of the world. In that collision, lots of mess is created: “Every adoption begins with tragedy.” This journey will not be easy, but it will be filled with countless moments of beauty and joy.
More than anything else, I was struck again with the depth of God’s love, both for orphans of the world and for former spiritual orphans like me. I realized the fear I live in, a fear that Andrew Peterson articulates so well, “It’s the fear that I’ll fall one too many times. It’s the fear that His love is no better than mine.”
But it is better that mine. There is no failing, no falling that can keep it from us. And that love compels us toward adoption and to proclaim the message of spiritual adoption. The only valid reason and motivation for adoption is the glory of the One who took us in when we were abandoned, hopeless, helpless, and dead. The only well from which we can draw the patience, power, and love we need to sustain us through the pain of adoption is the love of the One who loves us first and loves us best. The only hope we have for being the kind of people who can further then kingdom of God through adoption is to crucify our agendas, our egos, and even our ideas of ministry on the cross of the One who paid the price for our adoption.
