Tag: orphans

Our love will turn to dust…

4 Comments
lovedust

by Jenna DeMattia Masters

Pride is such an ugly thing.  I don’t know how to talk about our decision to adopt without it sounding like we are doing something out of the kindness of our own hearts; That it is truly ‘our’ idea.  Adoption is God’s idea. Adoption is God’s plan.  We humans, no matter how ‘good’ we think we are, have zero to do with it. ZERO! I feel there is just no way to emphasize accurately the enormity of this truth. It has nothing to do with our goodness, and everything to do with God’s goodness.

You want to know how ‘good’ of a person I am?  I found myself praying through tears on the floor to God that I couldn’t do this, that ‘this will be too hard, I already have 3 kids that I can’t clean up after.  How will I do that much laundry?!’   I was throwing the towel in over this stuff.

God is so patient.

He let me go on and on with questions as to how this would affect  MY life. He was quiet. He let me finish.  Then he whispered firmly, ‘Child, everything you asked was how adopting this child would affect you.  Not one word from your mouth asked how it would affect the child if you didn’t adopt them.’ Smack down.  Seriously. There are times when God speaks so lovingly in his rebuke that it smacks me down on my face in repentance.  This was one of those moments. Yes, there would be more laundry, and more sibling disputes to referee. There would be some sacrifice on my part.  But isn’t sacrificing the cost of redeeming a life?  Jesus endured far more than a few extra socks to wash when he adopted me. This quote by Derek Loux just wrecks me:

“Adoption is redemption.  It is costly, exhausting, expensive and outrageous.  Buying back lives costs so much.  When God set out to redeem us, it killed him.” Continue reading →

Who, Not Why

2 Comments

What are we to do when we feel God is calling us to do something that may appear crazy to others?

For me personally, it is adopting from Ethiopia.

The last couple of months the conversations have gone down like this:

‘Are you done having kids?’

‘Well, we are naturally done having children’

‘What does that mean?

‘We are in the process of adoption right now’…

Silence.  Awkward silence, you know the kind.

The verbal sparring begins after this:  ‘Why don’t you just have another child naturally? Why aren’t you adopting domestically? Do you think this is fair to your current children? Do you really thing GOD is calling you to do this?’.

Why all the push back? There are 153,000,000 orphans in the world.  I assumed when I told people we were adopting, there would be some sort of celebration, some sort of, ‘Hallelujah! God’s people are moving!’…but I have received a lot of silence followed by strained questions; and it hurts.  I feel the need to defend our call to adopt, and it is breaking my heart. I regret to admit, I have allowed it to tear some of the joy out of the process.  Satan must be so pleased.

In the meantime, I feel I am in the ebb and flow of the tides. A tide pushes at me, I push back…

‘No, random mom I just met, we haven’t considered reversing my husband’s vasectomy, Yes, we feel it is GOD calling us to adopt.’ And ‘I have a lot of fears of how it will affect my current children, but God loves them more than me. He knows what he is asking of us.’

In the middle of my ‘pushing back’, this week I heard him say, ‘Why are you down in the water, pushing against these tides, when you could walk on top of the water child?’  

Yes Lord! WHY!? Continue reading →