Adoption is beautiful.
When a family chooses to love a child who grew in their hearts instead of their bellies — to BE the raw and real hands and feet of Jesus, to embrace hard things, to take on new challenges and to learn to love in ways that a child who may or may not have a broken past can receive, clinging to the strength of God because they know they don’t have the wisdom or strength or patience to do it alone — THAT is beautiful.
That is inspiring.
That is the heart of God.
And it paints the most beautiful picture of the Gospel. Of a Father who gave everything to adopt US as His children.
Not when we had it altogether.
Not when we were the picture-perfect models of joy and obedience.
Not when we were cute and little and innocent and adorable.
But when we were just one hot mess in need of a Savior.
Adoption presents this BEAUTIFUL picture of the way our Father God chooses to passionately love US.
But despite the BEAUTY, at the heart of every adoption story is BROKENNESS.
Death.
Abandonment.
Heart-wrenching choices and complicated decisions.
Loss that I will truly never fully understand but that I grieve over every time the two boys who grew in our hearts and not our bellies conquer a new challenge. Hit a new milestone. Celebrate another birthday. Do something the beautiful women who carried them and loved them and delivered them will never be able to see.
Loss that I would give my life to restore to these boys I love so much.
When we first started this journey, it was enticing as an adoptive parent to deceive myself into believing that I was some kind of savior. That I was the one who got to swoop in and save the day. Save a child. Save a life.
And it’s true that we as adoptive parents get the privilege of helping to change one orphan’s story.
But it’s NOT because we’re good.
It’s NOT because we’re heroic.
It’s NOT because we’re ANYBODY’S saviors.
My children have a Savior, and his name is not Michelle.
It’s only because that Savior, in all His grace, allowed US to play a small part in these boys’ stories.
I get the honor of entering the picture not because I’m good, but because I simply said I would GO. Because I asked my God to break my heart for what breaks His, and He showed our family two children who HAD a mother. Who HAD someone who loved them. And whose mothers, because of circumstances or culture or laws in their country, felt the need to place them on a hospital floor and in a hospital garden where they hoped someone could find them and give them the life they wanted for them.
I was not a better choice than the mothers God gave to my children. I was the SECOND choice.
But in the brokenness of what these precious women faced, they made the best decisions they knew how, and instead of leaving their sweet boys in a trash can or under a tree or on a front porch or in so many of the other places where our friends’ children have been found, they left them on a hospital floor and in a hospital garden. In places where they would surely be cared for. In places where they could receive the life-saving surgery one needed immediately.
As an adoptive parent, I can decide that Superman’s mother abandoned him because she didn’t love him. I can decide Superhero 4’s mother left him in a hospital garden because she didn’t care. And I can write that narrative in my head all day long so that I can justify my new role in these boys’ lives. So that I can feel like I’ve really done something “good.”
But as a biological mother of children myself, I know that’s not true.
Superman’s and Superhero 4’s biological mothers valued their lives so much that they put THEIRS at great risk to leave these precious boys in places where they were sure they would receive care.
These mothers valued their lives so much that they chose to carry them for nine months, despite very ready access to abortions in a country that sees more than 13 million per year.
They valued them so much that because of their circumstances, their family, their finances or their access to healthcare, or maybe to protect them from what a traditional family might think about their outward inabilities or deformities, they chose to gingerly wrap them in blankets and place them outside a door to surgery and outside a hospital rotating door. And I can only imagine that both women have clung for eight and five years to the picture of those perfect black-brown eyes I get the honor and privilege of gazing into every morning.
This loss — for my sons, for their biological mothers, for our family who will never get to meet and properly THANK the women who gave us the greatest gifts of all — it’s real. It’s hard. And in our adoption culture, it’s often overlooked.
Because it means we have to stop and acknowledge the fact that these BEAUTIFUL STORIES come FIRST from BROKENNESS.
And brokenness is not SAVED.
It’s REDEEMED.
God comes straight to the heart of these broken stories — straight to the heart of these pain-stricken birth parents, straight to the heart of the children who feel lost in the confusion of their parents’ life-changing decisions. And there, He sends HIS SON to heal and comfort and restore the broken people who live in a broken world and are in need of a life-giving Savior.
And then He gives adoptive families the opportunity to be part of not the SALVATION story but the REDEMPTION story.
To play a part in the REWRITTEN STORY. To help change the ending. To be His hands and feet as He exchanges beauty for ashes and restores the years the moths have stolen.
To stand by in awe as God REDEEMS a broken story … and somehow uses more radically imperfect, completely broken people to do it.
Orphan Warriors, we CAN change the orphan story.
But NOT because we’re good. Not because we’re saviors. Not because we have anything amazing to offer.
We can change the orphan story ONLY because we know the One who is. Who is. And who does.
And in OUR brokenness and our children’s brokenness and the brokenness of the millions of orphans around the world just waiting for their new story to begin, the God who specializes in making all things new can use US to heal. Restore. Redeem. Rewrite.
In our own imperfect, broken states.
We just have to be willing to give Him the pen.