So you wanna adopt?

People have called me an advocate for orphan care. Maybe, I am. No. I am. Yet, sometimes I struggle to encourage people to adopt. Adoption is good; it can be God's amazing redemptive plan for a broken situation. But adoption is not easy. It is always, always, always a result of loss, trauma and brokenness. And the result of that brokenness doesn't go away when the adoption decree is finalized.

Best case scenario = birth mom relinquishes a baby she cannot parent to a loving family who raises that child well.

Sub-text = Somebody knocked that girl up, and didn't stick around to help her out. That girl will always wonder, and always have the scars of loss for a child she didn't raise. There is a reason that that mama couldn't parent...it's probably unjust. And that kid, that kid will wonder too. Even in open adoption.

More often than not adoption is far messier than the best case scenario.

Addiction
Abandonment
Poverty
Disease
Birth defects
Mental illness
Despair
Profit

These are woven into the stories of adoption.

Sometimes, love, and family and Jesus redeem the story in miraculous, and virtually painless ways. But sometimes, very often, the effects of a broken world (that made adoption necessary) do not quietly disappear. They linger. Sometimes they are inextricable from the stories of adoption. A lifetime cannot heal brain damage, and emotional damage, and physical damage. And sometimes adoptive parents spend their life trying to extract threads of despair, and addiction from their children's stories only to watch their own life unravel. It happens.

But God says he will place the lonely in families. He says he is the strong defender of the orphaned and widowed - a father to the fatherless. He is calling his church to embrace a culture of adoption. He is about adoption. Because he redeems. He restores. He makes beauty of ashes.

Yet to paint a picture of adoption that looks something like Barbie's Dream House, all neat with a Ken Doll and brown skinned baby is dishonoring to the reality. For just as Jesus laid down his life to bring us into His family the adoptive family must be ready to lay down their life on behalf of a child. That's how it works. So you wanna adopt?

See this great link.