Married to an adoptee, adoption has always been on the table. One sunny warm afternoon on a business trip to San Diego many years ago, we took a day visit to Tijuana. I was holding my bright blonde three year-old’s hand, and carrying my four month-old in a baby carrier safely against my chest. I was content in my suburban American bubble. We rounded the corner and the beautiful Mexican women on the street ran to me and begged me to buy, for one dollar, artfully woven bracelets from them. I was unprepared for the intensity of the emotion that flooded my heart. The dark beautiful eyes and dirty cheeks of the young mama wearing a gorgeous dark-eyed dark-skinned baby wrapped up like a papoose on her chest, while she begged for money and desperately asked me to give her an American dollar. She looked exactly like me. She was my age, although I could tell life had aged her much more quickly than it had me. I wanted to hug her and hold her baby and give her everything in my purse. My eyes filled with tears, and I was angry with myself for crying. I was afraid of offending her with my tears. Why does she have to fight to survive and feed her babies? I was ruined that day, and came home desperate to understand my feelings and what I could do to make change.
Weeks after that, I was attending an Ohio MOPS group with my girlfriends where we had an invited guest speaker. She walked right up to the front and started to tell us passionately about the plight of orphans and single mothers in Tijuana, and offered us an opportunity that caused my ears to catch on fire and my heart to race. I sped home to our tiny brick ranch to Dan, and we agreed that God was asking me to go, and we would figure out how to afford it.
Taking in a cinder-blocked, lovingly-painted orphanage room clear full of small dark-haired children in mismatched shoes and inappropriately-sized clothing, eating beans and smiling, was a lot. The image of them overtly loving on those sacrificial adults who were giving up their lives to take care of them stamped the back of my eyes. They have so little, but the thing they desire most is a mother and a father, and the identity that comes with a last name. Names are a big deal.
I’ve watched my foster son grapple with the desire to be called by our name, while he is forced to wait at school until the judge declares it so. He is already our son, but we, too, know the power that comes with the day his name changes. It is the day he is heir to everything that is ours. It is the day he and his new earthly father are connected by something greater than blood could dictate, sonship. We will be with him until we leave the earth, and for our tiny little boy, I can see daily how the fear that this won’t be true teases his desire to give himself to us with reckless abandon.
I went on that trip … and then I led three more trips. I became close to the Mexican family that runs the abuse shelter and orphanage. My dear friend in the trenches, Sara, has an uncanny way of taking me up to a fifty-thousand foot view when my heart is on fire and grasping to make sense of the disparity between my life and theirs. She told me one day on my way to the airport just after customs at the Mexican border,
Kim, Your job isn’t to save all of Tijuana.
Your job is to go home and reach your city where God put you.
Many, many miles into the journey later, learning to obey God in things big and small: We adopted our first son. And then now we have two more. It almost becomes a thing where you say to yourself,
“How many is too many?”
“Which orphan’s eyes can I look into and say no?”
“I will not give up. His is a life worth saving.”
I held him as he tantrumed and screamed, trying to break the lamp near our time-out chair. He pushed against my arms and screamed for me to let him go. Even as I held him there, determined to keep him, the lamp, and his siblings safe, hot heavy tears streamed down my face and ran over my quivering lip. I won’t let go. So much pain in such a small little body. The effects of rejection, abandonment, drug abuse, no one to trust and count on, and failure to thrive. The effects of sin he didn’t commit. The strong façade, the stiff lip, sore from how he has picked small pieces of skin off of it in frustration.
Having been given the gift of rest recently by a dear friend, and the treasure of spending five whole days in the Caribbean with the one I love more than all others for our 20th anniversary, God did not disappoint. At the point of complete and total exhaustion, Dan sick like crazy with bronchitis, we sprawled out into that all-inclusive week and took advantage of EVERY SINGLE moment. And in the early morning, when my middle-aged body woke up way too early, knowing my five kids were getting ready for school, I took to reading His word and asking him to give me MY word. I’m looking for the kind that I can sink my hands into and hold on for dear life….similar to the way I held the straps of Dan’s life jacket later that day as I screamed and he laughed with the jet-ski blasting across the bright blue waves. (He slowed down only long enough to hear me crying and telling him I was apparently broken since I was terrified.) Letting go and holding on at the time same time. HE showed up.
He gave me Galatians 6 (MSG):
1-3 Live creatively, friends. If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself. You might be needing forgiveness before the day’s out. Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law. If you think you are too good for that, you are badly deceived.
-5 Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don’t be impressed with yourself. Don’t compare yourself with others. Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.
6 Be very sure now, you who have been trained to a self-sufficient maturity, that you enter into a generous common life with those who have trained you, sharing all the good things that you have and experience.
9-10 So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit. Right now, therefore, every time we get the chance, let us work for the benefit of all, starting with the people closest to us in the community of faith.
He is so faithful. My sweet Jesus, I could never have imagined the vastness of this deep pain and mountain top of joy, and the knowing that He is in the things….all the things that I feel and struggle through….because this is HIS idea. As a believer, we do not have the luxury of thinking that our life in this world will be rainbows and butterflies. This is quite against the grain of our self-satisfying society. In fact, it’s quite something different. We are here to take part in the suffering and bring the light and life of a risen Savior to it. This is the hardest thing I have ever done, this foster care thing, but it is HIS thing. I feel His strength picking me up off of the bathroom floor, where I have been sobbing while wiping urine off of the floor again, myself scared of this pain, and then calling out to Him…HE SHOWS UP. He surrounded me with my tribe. My people who get it. The ones I intentionally put in my circle of influence. The ones who know why we do what we do. They bring His words to me again and push me to keep moving. They remind me that I said this life was worth saving. They remind me that the day will come when this boy will stand before others redeemed and changed: a living, breathing example of what a gift we all have been given.
Being in a position to advocate for one too small, weak and helpless to advocate for himself…this is the very heart of the story in which we anchor our faith. Jesus became our advocate. As a completely sinless, perfect man and God, he laid down his life in the court of our accuser. He stood between the Judge, God eternal, and the impending death that we deserve for our sin. One sin, the Bible tells us, makes us guilty of the entire law, and the penalty for just ONE SIN is death. Jesus lovingly and willingly stood in front of me, with no doubt, tears in his eyes after watching the foolish heart-breaking actions of a sinful selfish girl, and said,
“Let me speak on her behalf. She is unable to do anything about her plight. She is powerless to change her fate. I want to change it for her. Don’t give her what she deserves. I want to pay her debt. Let my perfect blood on that cross change her future and erase her past. Give her a future…filled with purpose, dignity, and salvation.”
People whom I respect have asked me about this connection between our faith and our adoption of these. This is the lifeline. I love because He first loved me. I rescue because I am rescued. I lay down my life, and my comforts, wishes and plans, to be a tiny part of a plan beyond anything I could imagine….the redemption of a life. We agree that no matter how hard and how painful this journey is, my boys are lives worth saving. Their future will forever be changed. We will advocate for them. They can’t change the past or the lineage to which they have been born, but we can. We will give them a new name, and we will change who they will become. The love of Jesus will cover that past they cannot change and will lead them to a life of redemption. And they will, as mature followers of Jesus, advocate for others.
I held him for two or three minutes and then I started to pray for him. His small wounded grieving heart, and his loss. I am saddened by the clinging to an image of a lost imaginary character who he had once called Daddy. I wept. The waste of lives to sin, heroin and ugliness seems an unbelievable price to pay for little bit of short-lived self-satisfaction. I called out to His Redeemer to rescue him, and heal him and bring him peace. And security. And comfort. And the confidence that he is loved and cared for. And to settle it in his heart that we will choose to be his mommy and daddy and love him forever, too. When I opened my wet eyes, my teenager was on her knees praying and crying next to us. His screams gave way to sobs, and he laid his head against my chest. His arm slipped out and reached around my back to hug me. He just cried. He was sweating, and moist from tears and he squeezed me. I held him for several more minutes and then he told me his body was done. It was calm and he was okay.
The price is high to live this life. Foster care and adoption are not for the faint at heart. The super cute pictures in my newsfeed are largely the best of a thousand shots where crazy unpredictable/un-fancy/unpolished things are going on in the background. It is usually totally ridiculous. We don’t eat out a lot. We don’t go out in public a lot right now. These changes last for seasons, not forever. We have a support system, and that is critical to survival. We have other foster and adoptive parents, our life group couples, our families, our church home, an amazing school system, and my Bible study girls.
This thing will take us all. We will love the unlovable. We will love each other. We will stop “comparing ourselves to others” and their perfect families, and get down to the real business of doing the work of Jesus. Just like Paul said, “I bear in my body the scars from my service to Jesus.” I gain weight. I run like a freak at the gym, crying while He speaks comfort to me on the treadmill. This is a thing…treadmill comfort. I cut my hair shorter (timesaver). I buy the beauty creams that come from further down the aisle (the wrinkles are getting so deep). I spend more on hair color (I WILL not give in). We order non-organic GMO filled pizza weekly. I have a Starbucks addiction. I can shave my legs and wash my hair in 120 seconds before a catastrophe can happen. I’m not proud of it, but we have skipped bath night. We are a big hot mess. I have told my tribe that we literally explode everywhere we go. We are not pretty. My neat house is now often a disaster, with diapers, toys, broken things, and smashed food scattered everywhere. We find poop in places it shouldn’t be. I am potty-training and I am teaching a kid to drive. We are making college plans and paying for daycare. I will confess that since August we haven’t eaten a meal on an actual plate.
The thing is, none of it matters. Hardness isn’t the standard by which we judge the rightness of our paths. Sometimes we get a week in Cancun and we bask in the joy and lightness of His presence, but that is a season of restoring and now it’s time to get to work. In the light of eternity and the sacrifice that was made for me, this is what He asked me to do. Looking into the light in the eyes of my boys, this is what I choose to do. We are doing hard work here, but God is pleased and everyone who knows my babies will see that God will use them to change the world. My big birth kids, in the words of Paul Taylor, will learn to obey God by watching us obey God. They are right in this trench with us, and we have determined to not allow them to be bystanders. We have involved them in the hard messy business of loving the least of these. They are not hidden from our pain and our grief, but they share in our joy and the depth of the sweetness of Sunday morning worship when Jesus meets us all right where we are.
1 Peter 4:7-11The Message (MSG)
7-11Everything in the world is about to be wrapped up, so take nothing for granted. Stay wide-awake in prayer. Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it. Love makes up for practically anything. Be quick to give a meal to the hungry, a bed to the homeless—cheerfully. Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it: if words, let it be God’s words; if help, let it be God’s hearty help. That way, God’s bright presence will be evident in everything through Jesus, and he’ll get all the credit as the One mighty in everything—encores to the end of time. Oh, yes!