The Spirit of Adoption

When I was a kid, my sister would sometimes tell me that I was adopted. In retrospect, I think that she was really just expressing that she didn’t want to believe that she and I were blood relatives. After awhile, she may have said it simply because she had learned that the idea horrified me. My parents assured me time and again that I was not adopted.

Looking back, it occurs to me that it shouldn’t really have mattered. I had a loving family, whether that was because they were my blood relatives, or because they had chosen to take me in, it was clear that they loved me. One of my teachers in high school had an adopted daughter. She knew she was, and she had learned to adjust to it. Every so often, somebody would make the mistake of trying to tease her about being adopted. She had a standard response: “Yes, I am adopted. My parents chose me; your parents had to take what they could get.”

That’s actually a powerful statement. The first time I heard that, I actually wished that I had been adopted, even though I probably wouldn’t have ever picked up that little bit of philosophy along the way if I had been. Someone who is adopted may never understand the particulars of their biological family: why they were put up for adoption, what the situation was that their birth parents felt that they didn’t want to raise that child, or whether it was done in the belief that somebody else would be better capable of bringing the child up; there a number of possibilities that the adoptee can never fully appreciate, even if they get a chance to sit down and talk it out with all parties concerned. Yet, no matter what reason the biological parents had for not raising the child, there was a loving family willing to take in a child that was not related by blood and love that person as their own.

Unfortunately, there are some children that never do get adopted. I have a nephew like that; my sister became a foster parent for a while, and, even though the teen-ager that was placed in her home rotated through several foster families before he outgrew the system, he still calls my sister “mom,” and made a point of introducing his fiancé to her before he got married. Whether they live out their childhood in an orphanage, or in a series of foster homes; these people still have worth. Just because the family that they should have had never found them, it doesn’t mean that they are any les valuable than the rest of us. Things happen; there will always be those that seem to get the short end of the stick at every turn.

Even though I was raised by the family I was born into, I know what it is to be adopted into a loving family. In Romans 8:14-17 the Bible tells us that we are the sons (and daughters) of God, and that we have not received the spirit of bondage, but the spirit of adoption. The Spirit itself bears witness that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs. Galatians 4:4-7 is similar, but explains that God sent His Son to redeem us, so that we could be adopted into God’s family.

This adoption is available to all. Whether it is to those of us that grew up with our natural families, or those that have been adopted before, or even those that have never really had a family, God created all of us, and He would love to welcome you into His family.

My Sis

When I was growing up, in a lot of ways my older sister was my mentor. Don't misunderstand me, she picked on me sometimes, and did other things that I didn't agree with, but she helped me to understand some things that would not otherwise have been evident to my young mind.
Some of it I don't really think was intentional. When I was a preschooler, she challenged me with mathematics. Of course, this was done more in the attitude of, "I learned this in school, and since you haven't started school yet, you don't know how to do it. Nyaah, nyaah,” but the end result was that I learned basic mathematics before I started school.
Some things she clearly did out of a sense of watching out for me. I remember walking through a cemetery one time and making a stupid comment. I don't remember exactly what I said, but something along the lines of, "I'm just a kid. I don’t have to worry about dying. I won't die until I'm old." She challenged me to look around at the tombstones and see if I could find any markers of people younger than me. I found several, and it didn't take long, either. Granted, a lot of those were infants that had probably been born with health problems and hadn't lived to their first birthday, but some were kids that had just died for one reason or another. That was a real eye-opener; I started taking my own mortality much more seriously after that.
Another time she became concerned that, when asked to bless the food at dinner, I recited a rote prayer as quickly as I could. She asked me if I could explain the prayer to her. I had never really thought about the meaning of the words before. In retrospect, I'm a little surprised that she was able to keep from laughing at my attempts to explain this little prayer that I had memorized (apparently phonetically). When I tried to break it down, the words that I was trying to explain were, "Goddess great, goddess good, lettuce sankim for our food. Amen." For some reason, it had never registered with me, until she asked me, that I was praying to a goddess instead of to God. I knew I wasn't supposed to be praying to any goddess...
Another time she noticed that, when we went to church, during the time that some of the congregants came into the sanctuary early to pray for the service, I mostly just goofed around. That may have been distracting to some of the people that were doing what they were supposed to be doing; that may even be the real reason why she did what she did. She tried to impress upon me the importance of prayer, but I didn't see the need. Praying for service didn't make sense to me, because service was going to happen whether I prayed for it or not. The idea that I might get more out of it if I prayed for it didn't make sense to me, partially because I wasn't aware that I was getting anything out of service (although perhaps if I had prayed about it, I would have received something from service). I didn't feel like I needed anything from God (boy, I wish I could get that feeling back in my life, but I guess that's really just the bliss that comes from ignorance—I’m still ignorant, just not as ignorant as I was). This was during the cold war, so finally she tried to at least get me to pray for that. Even then, I did not, at first, see the need. The USA and the USSR had been at a standoff for years, with neither one seeming particularly inclined to attack the other, even though people on both sides kept worrying that the other side would. Finally she told me something outrageous: She told me that the Soviets had come over the North Pole, and had captured Detroit. That got my attention. I'll tell you something else, too, that got me praying, and I prayed hard. I was afraid to even look at the news for the next several days, because I knew that most of the coverage would be about the Soviets occupying Detroit. Eventually, though, I looked, if only to find out if my prayers were being answered. Much to my surprise, I found out that the Soviets were no longer in Detroit, and, what's more, nobody else seemed to remember Detroit even being invaded. That taught me an important lesson about the power of prayer.
In retrospect, it also teaches an important lesson about “childlike faith.”