She turned thirteen this week.
That’s ten birthdays together. . . thousands of days and experiences since the day my oldest daughter moved into my home.
On her birthdays, when I look through her baby pictures and reminisce, there is this gap. We’ve got just six pictures of her life from birth to 2 1/2 years. In those moments, the reality of loss, special needs and adoption feels so acute.
Most of us don’t think of adoption as its own special need, but it is. You who raise a child (or many!) birthed both in your heart and in the heart and belly of another know what I mean.
The Bible says this:
God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. —Ephesians 1:5
God decided in advance to adopt us. . .
Having sat across a fluorescent lit table from a social worker, listening to the story of my future daughters, I faced that choice too. Would I decide in advance to adopt—whatever that would mean—two girls whose history hid in questions, shadows?
I said yes. Before I met them. Before I knew how hard it would be to raise children with mood, mental health, medical or developmental disabilities. I decided.
And so did God, with us.
Except he wasn’t sitting there wondering who we’d be, what we’d struggle with. . . if we’d run off with his heart and wreck it in our wretchedness. He knew.
. . . into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.
He knew us and he decided anyway. He chose you and me in ways so much more profoundly loving than I could ever have mustered in that cubicle the day I chose my girls. And he knew his choice would cost him his firstborn child.
I didn’t know that when I chose. Some days, when my oldest’s Bipolar or Attachment Disorder rips through our home or hurts one of her younger siblings, I try to stand for all my kids, but my heart aches for those I birthed who never asked for this.
Then I think of Jesus. Father God didn’t protect him or say, as I so often do with my younger girls, “Go read for a bit while I help your sister find her words. . . her coping skills. . . some peace.”
God looked at his firstborn and said, “Son, they need you to give your life for them. And we’re going to choose that together.”
In those hard adoptive moments, when shards of what happened before I met my daughters fling into my living room, sometimes clarity comes and I see it:
I am my adopted kids.
So are you.
Foster-adopted out of death, into love. Our former foster life constantly crashing into today’s circumstances and relationships. Our spirits belong in God’s family, but our souls remember what it was to live hungry, abused, neglected. Sometimes we still crave it and fight God to get it back, because it’s all we knew.
You see, God is not just Father; he is adoptive Father.
He has an entire family of foster-adopted kids, and one firstborn Son who gave everything for us. We have all the special needs our adopted kids have in this life, times a thousand. And he chose us anyway.
. . .This is what God wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.
——————————
{Happy birthday to my oldest girl. I’d choose you again in a heartbeat, fierce one. Thank you for what you’ve showed me about life, about God, about what it is to love beyond what is comfortable. You are a treasure and I hope that, whatever your teen years bring, you will leave them remembering: you were worth it.}
Latest posts by Laurie Wallin (see all)
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