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.