Category: Family

We recently watched the newest remake of the film Annie.

You know the classic story: the plucky red-haired orphan finds herself a father in the wealthy industrialist, Daddy Warbucks. In return, Daddy Warbucks learns to love the little girl and fills a hole in his heart that, previously, he didn’t know existed.

This latest version of the film foregoes the Depression-era setting for present day New York. Annie trades her scarlet locks and fair complexion for a curly brown Afro, and the Daddy Warbucks character is now Will Stacks, a cell phone service tycoon.

Despite the changes, the plot follows a similar arc with a few new songs added. Of course, the new Annie sings “Tomorrow.”

Eva has been singing that song quite a bit, too, although she’s changed the lyrics a little. She wandered into the kitchen the other day, singing:

When I’m stuck with a day that’s gray and lonely
I just stick up my chin, and win, and say–

So I joined in and we sang together:

The sun will come out tomorrow
So you got to hang on ’til tomorrow, come what may!
Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow
You’re only a day away

And as we sang, I felt an awful lot like Daddy Warbucks. Or Will Stacks.

I’m so grateful for everything this little girl and all our children have brought into our family. But that’s the thing: adoption and orphan care is frequently portrayed as giggles and smiles, love and hugs, happily-ever-after. Like a fairy tale movie.

The families walking this path know that’s not the story.

Suzanne and I are at the CAFO Orphan Summit in Nashville now, and I attended one of Russell Moore’s workshops yesterday. It was cheerily titled, “How the Orphan Care Movement Could Wreck Itself… and What’s Needed to Avoid It.”

He cautioned that the worst thing we can do is sentimentalize orphan care. Adopting a child is not the same thing as “adopting” a dog or a cat or a highway.

Instead, we understand that adoption is at the heart of the Gospel: we adopt because we–all of us who are followers of Jesus–were adopted into God’s family. We love because we were loved first. We share a new spiritual reality: we are truly brothers and sisters.

And because adoption is at the heart of the Gospel, it is opposed by God’s enemies. The enemy hates children, Dr. Moore explained, because they represent newness of life, the promise of the future, and–ultimately–the hope of Christ. The enemy wants to destroy anything that bears God’s fingerprint, so we shouldn’t be surprised that caring for orphans will involve risk and cost and sacrifice.

Children in adoptive families and foster care families don’t want to be there. They want to be in their birth families but sin, loss, and circumstance have intervened.

It’s not an easily resolved fairy tale.

So what does caring for the fatherless really look like?

It’s expensive and it’s paperwork and it’s waiting. A lot of waiting.

It’s loss of culture, home, food, friends, and family–pretty much everything the children have known.

It’s a lot of visits to the doctor and dentist.

It’s late nights and early mornings. It’s uncertainty and frustration. It’s loving kids who have suffered trauma and rejection and loss. It’s loving them when they reject you.

Honestly, it looks like a lot of hard work. Jesus enters into our human experience the same way–why should it be different for us?

Anyone who steps into this journey knows this–or will learn it along the way.

But in the hard work and the sacrifice, in this fight for the fatherless, God meets us, often in ways we could not have expected. And there’s a surprising joy there, too.

Not everyone is called to adopt or take in foster children but we are all called to the fight. How? Bless a family who is fundraising with a financial gift. Words of encouragement go a long way. Or bring a meal. Or childcare for an evening or a weekend. We’ve had folks drop off toilet paper, milk, and paper towels at the house.

What else could you do?

Woven Together, our county’s orphan ministry, has organized volunteers to remodel family waiting rooms at the local DCFS agency and Center for Youth and Family Solutions. They also organized a drive among several churches to collect over 80 journey bags for foster children who might be suddenly uprooted from a home with nothing but the clothes they’d be wearing. The journey bags are backpacks that include a change of clothes, pjs, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a toy or book–essentials and a few special things so the kids would have something to call their own. These are great examples that involve all kinds of people in the work of orphan care.

Caring for orphans will not make your life better or easier or move you to Easy Street. The call to follow Jesus is a call to cross-bearing, an invitation to come and die. But those who are called often find themselves richer for having taken this journey.

In the Summit opening session this morning, Aixa Lopez, an adoptive mom in Guatemala (where adoption is very counter-cultural), commented about her own family’s journey, “Normal Christians do hard things; this shouldn’t be extraordinary.”

Amen.

On Monday, January 12, 2015 we finalized the re-adoption of our most-recent four kids in court. This is basically a formality since our adoption is already legal and binding without this extra step. However, through this process we legally changed their first and middle names, and they will each receive an official US document, similar to a birth certificate, that will help them some day when they want to get a job.

This event being in January got me reflecting on how often a January event was a big part of our timeline throughout our adoption processes. Here is a list:

Jan 2010 – During a prayer with then-7 year old Liam about our two kids that we would be adopting (paperwork not yet finished for two young kids we were not yet matched with at the time), and with a tear in his eye, he asked me, “Mom, aren’t there older kids at the orphanage? What about them? That is not fair, that the younger kids get picked and the bigger kids have to stay there longer!” I agreed with him, and those words haunted me every day after. At some point I KNEW, as crazy as it seemed, that we were supposed to adopt an older boy who was alone and about to age out of the system. I didn’t know how that would play out, and I had many conversations with God and confusion for a while as to what He was doing with that, but my Father was busy teaching me patience and trust.

Jan 2011 – Brought Aidan and Eva, our first two adopted children, home as part of our family. Experienced Ethiopian Christmas (Jan 7) before we left, in which God fulfilled a promise He made to me about spending Christmas with our new kids, just not in the way I expected. As we checked into the guest house in Ethiopia and filled out paperwork, I distinctly remember writing 1-1-11 as the check in date and 1-11-11 as the check out date, and realizing that this was going to be a year of 1st’s.

Jan 2012 – On the 20th of this January, God specifically told me that NOW is the time to start getting ready for “our boy,”so we started our paperwork. Kieran showed up on our agency’s waiting child list two months later and God began a series of several specific ways in which He showed us that this was to be our son. Later in May, we found out that Kieran had arrived at the orphanage on the exact date, Jan 20, 2012, that He told me it was time! We brought Kieran home a few months later in October.

Jan 2013 – Starting making arrangements to look into getting Kieran’s leg fixed. Spent a week in February at Shriners Children’s Hospital in St Louis to do research and determine the issues, and then another week in Oct/Nov for a major leg surgery. It was during that hospital stay that we found out that Kieran’s three younger siblings were now unexpectedly at the orphanage. Finished the year in prayer and fasting as to what to do about that news, and decided just before Christmas that we needed to keep the four siblings together and that we would do what we could to bring them home.

Jan 2014 – Started the paperwork for our third adoption. Against all odds (including our state, who rarely says yes to large families, the true threat–at the time–of Ethiopia closing its doors, and the recently added USCIS PAIR process that adds much wait time to adoptions), God sped us through the process and brought the three new kids home that July!

Eleven years ago, when I was pregnant with Maura, child #3, I distinctly remember sitting in the back of our church at a wedding, and a man from our church warning us, “Now you know, you will now have to change from man-to-man defense to zone….” Little did we know how prophetic his words would be! I so often have told others I wish I was an octopus with eight arms, but now that is not even enough, with nine kids!

So here we are, Jan 2015. Wondering what God will bring this year. Trusting He will do His will in our lives, and praying we will learn more trust in Him and wisdom as we go.

Here’s to New Years!

After 4 airports, nearly 36 hours of travel, and 14,000 miles in the air, Suzanne and I are home. Thanks for all the prayers, encouragement, and support along the way–many of you walk this journey with us and we couldn’t do it without you. Seriously.

Even as tired as we are, though, we’d turn around and do it again tomorrow to get those kids here. Here’s to hoping the wait for our embassy appointment is short.

(UPDATE: For the record, the numbers above are for the one-way trip from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Springfield, IL. Double them for the round trip.)