What I'm Learning in the Adoption Process

Dan and I have almost 15 hours of training videos to watch for our home study on top of all the paperwork to complete (insert terrified emoji face here).  Initially I was a little nervous about completing these, and let me assure you, we still have plenty to do!  However, they actually have been very eye opening.  Our child most likely will have been living in an orphanage for most, if not their whole life.  All they will know is the orphanage.  One of the videos discusses how it is common for a child to hide food when they get to your home because where they used to live, food wasn't given to them freely.  They had one chance to eat at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and that was it.  If you didn't eat you didn't get food until the next meal.  So when they arrive at your home, they aren't used to having an abundance of food, so they store it away just in case they don't get their next meal.

Similarly, in a book I'm reading called, "Adopted for Life," by Russell Moore, he mentions how "we must learn to be children, not orphans.  When my sons arrived [ from Russia ], their legal status was not ambiguous at all.  They were our kids.  But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage.  They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad.  They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer.  Life in the cribs alone must have seemed like freedom."

Moore tells his sons that they won't miss that orphanage, but they do.  That is all they know.  In a different way we do the same thing when it comes to our relationship with God.  When we become a Christian, we have a whole new, wonderful and awesome life waiting for us. God doesn't just set us free from the power of sin in our lives and leave, he invites us into His home we become His kids.  We have a spotted past and an uncertain future yet God set out on a mission to rescue us from despair and he signed the papers and took us home.

 However, even after we become Christians we don't always believe that God will be there for us so we hold onto what we know.  When God pushes us to try new things, we resist and say God isn't good to us.  God asks us to trust Him to take care of us and we're scared to give up control so we run back to the old life we are more comfortable with, even if we are offered infinitely more.

What broke my heart in Moore's book is when he said that the the orphanages in Russia were eerily silent because the babies in the orphanage didn't cry - they just rocked themselves back and forth in their beds.  They didn't cry because no one responded to their cries, so they just stopped.  He goes on to say that he knew the moment his boys first received them was when they walked out of the room for the last time on their first trip [they had to make two trips like we will have to].  Their youngest son fell back in his crib and cried, and "that was the first time they heard him do it, because for whatever reason, he seemed to think he'd be heard and, for whatever reason, he no longer liked the prospect of being alone in the dark."  

They had tasted what it was like to have a mother and father who loved them and took care of them and they didn't want them to leave.  You guys, right around this point I was bawling reading this book.  Not just because it breaks my heart to think about orphans around the world in similar situations, but also because this must be how God feels for us.  When He sees us actually get it.  When we finally get that our identity is found in Him and it changes us completely- how we live and how we see ourselves. And we finally taste it and we don't want to ever be without it again.

God is seriously rocking our world with this adoption process.  He's not just preparing us to bring home a child.  He's changing how we view our relationships with Him.  I pray that I can be oh so patient with our little girl or boy.  That God will remind me of myself when I have to remind our child that they are indeed our child.  That we won't leave them.  That we will feed them lunch.  That we will take care of them.  That we will come back for them when we drop them off in the nursery at church.  And in turn I know I will be reminded of the grace that God gives me when I forget Whose I am and Who is taking care of me.  

Oh, friends.  This is only the beginning of such a long journey and we are learning so so much.