Adoption is a choice to love. 

To love forever. -  To love even though. - To love in spite of. - To love because of.  You choose to love a child, with their history and their future, even though you don’t know either.  But isn’t that what we do with children we carry, tucked within the warmth of our own womb?  We may feel connected to the short history they are born with, (nine months of kicking and turning, being nurtured inside us), but their own particular DNA and the intricacies of God’s crafting each aspect of this tiny human being, really just gifts us with a stranger.  In our care.  That we fall in love with.  Immediately.  

If you have adopted, maybe you felt that same love.  Immediately.  Maybe not.  But in truth, whether you adopt or birth, there is a curious mix of choosing to love that person and being compelled to love that person without any thought or decision, it just happens.  

You cannot help yourself.

ALL love is really a choice, at some point.  

I’ve done both.  Carried the child and adopted the child and with all of my girls I’ve experienced both sides of this cocktail of love.  In this tension of effortless love and choosing love, I have learned.  And grown.   God uses all our children to teach us and WE end up growing as we “raise” them.   How much more that has happened to me in my own adoption journey!  Goodness!  I’ve had to look in a mirror that I did not like.  I saw selfishness.  I saw impatience.  I saw tepid-love and I saw guilt for the times I didn't feel the love as deeply as I wanted to. 

Adoption is about rescue

David Platt said,  “We care for orphans NOT because we are rescuers, but because we are the rescued”

I love that.  First we get rescued and adopted by God, then there’s this overflow of love inside us that compels some of us to rescue and adopt others.  Truly WE have been rescued and adopted first!

Jesus said, “I will not leave you as orphans.  I will come to you.”  John 14:18

Galatians 4:5-7 NLT,  “God sent him, (Jesus), to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.  And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, “Abba, Father.”  Now you are no longer a slave but God’s own child.”

God has rescued us!  God has adopted us!  He CHOSE us!  If we could just let that beautiful truth sink in!  Deep.  Every spot that feels empty and needy would be filled.  Every ache to be loved and chosen - healed.  

Meet Vladik, a rescued, rescuer.  Our friends, Jed and Kim Johnson minister to boys with special needs in an orphanage in Ukraine, with WIDE AWAKE. They are choosing to love in conditions many of us would shrink from and fear, yet they have chosen to drink this cocktail.  They have made the choice to love and that love has over-taken them.  Taken control.  They've just recently adopted Vladik, a boy from this orphanage.  They're all here in the U.S. for medical assessments and treatments. I hope you'll read on about what that rescue, that choice to love looks like for some very real, regular people.