November - adoption month

I couldn't let November come and go without a plug for adoption month. Anyone who knows Joel and I know that we've begun to build our family through adoption. Hence, we have become passionate about it and foresee our lives continued to be changed and blessed through our decision to adopt. Following is an excerpt of a great article about adoption that was brought to my attention by a fellow blogger and friend.

Fellow Christians will sometimes ask my wife and me if we know anything about our children's "real parents." We're also sometimes asked, "Do you have any children of your own?" Now we know what people mean when they ask these questions, and we also know that they are well-intentioned. But they are problematic nonetheless.

Russell Moore — dean of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of a forthcoming adoption manifesto — has drawn my attention to a parallel in the New Testament. He has written:

As I read through the Books of Ephesians and Galatians and Romans, it occurred to me that this is precisely the question that was faced by the apostle Paul and the first-century Christian churches.

As pig-flesh eating Gentile believers — formerly goddess-worshippers and Caesar-magnifiers and all the rest — began confessing Jesus as Messiah, some Jewish Christians demanded to know, "Are they circumcised?" The Gentile believers would respond, "Yes, with the circumcision made without hands, the circumcision of Christ." From the heated letters of the New Testament, it is evident that the response was along the lines of, "Yes, but are you really circumcised, and you know what I mean."

This was no peripheral issue. For the apostle Paul, the unity of the church as a household had everything to do with the Gospel itself. And where the tribal fracturing of the church was most threatening, Paul laid out a key insight into the church's union with Christ, the spirit of adoption.

In other words, these well-intended questions reveal that too many of us still accustomed to thinking that biology is more important than legality. The opposite of "real parents" is "fake parents." The opposite of "your own children" is "children not your own." There is something about "adoption" that makes us think that relationships are somehow less real.

The article goes on to talk about how we as believers are also adopted by Christ, something you might have heard your pastor mention before, just like we have, but now it has a more intimate meaning for us.

Anyhow, the questions referenced in the above article are ones that people ask us. While we definitely don't begrudge anyone who does ask those questions (like us before we adopted) we happily and sincerely take each opportunity to educate the inquirer by answering clearly that we ARE the real parents and we DO have a child of our own.

So, our ode to this November's adoption month is that we'll officially (once our profile is completed) be waiting for a placement of a sibling for Emma. We are excited to see what God has in store for us in our next step of this thing called life!