Unified in celebrating adoption.
Unified in raising funds to bring babies home.
Unified in advocating for children who wait.
Unified in cheering on travelling families and holding signs at airports.
Unified in praying for newly home little people facing surgery, therapy and emotional challenges.
Unified in our deep appreciation for the Peoples Republic of China.
Unified in our heartbreak for, and desire to serve, the waiting children we left behind.
Together, we’ve shed tears, encouraged, penned blog posts, donated and prayed.
And when our time came to walk into orphanages, we all realized that adoption falls on the redeeming side of loss and trauma. We stood close to the fire, and felt the heat of searing hurt. The sparks lit fires in our hearts, burdening us to consider how we might extinguish some of the flames for the fatherless.
We had to leave China though, and got to start moving toward the happy redemption side of our children’s adoption stories. But, if you are like me, you still feel the heat.
For us, the fiery trauma started with three sets of parents somewhere in China who carried the weight of our children before we did. We try not to conjure romanticized versions of stories that we’ll never know, but we do know that children are abandoned daily due to the cost of medical care. Three of our children have special needs that might have resulted in their abandonment, and this grieves me. Two of them were with their first parents for several months. They were fed, bathed, dressed, held and nursed by them until they no longer could, until the smoldering fire of loss was lit.
The ugly truth is that we might possibly get to parent these three precious souls because our fallen world is turned upside down, and we’re blessed with really good medical insurance. We are deeply grateful that part of God’s redemption plan included them forever calling us mommy and daddy, but we can’t ignore the story’s beginning.
Though I’d like to, I can’t believe that our adopted children were “meant for us”. God placed our babies in the wombs of other women, and I don’t believe He makes mistakes. I presume that when those families deemed it necessary to abandon their babies, it crushed God’s heart. As those mothers wept, I trust He grieved alongside them.
Parents having to give up a lifetime with their child is unjust. I can no longer walk humbly with my God on the adoption journey, and not be burdened by what He has opened my eyes to. I can’t do orphan care well without pondering why orphans enter orphanages.
Read the rest over at No Hands But Ours.
This sweet one has a father in China who loved her so desperately that he wrote to Love Without Boundaries, begging them for help with his daughter's medical care.
