Why Adopt? Part 1

I just took over our adoption board at church.  In the process I needed to update the family profiles.  One question I asked them (which I stole from their original profiles) is "Why Adopt?".  I LOVED the answers I got.  Let me tell you, the people at Grace have a deep passion for the least of these.

Adoption is messy.  It doesn't matter what country you adopt from,what age the child is, how healthy the child is, or how stable and loving their environment is, you are going to have issues.  Every adopted child faces doubts and fears.  Even the smallest of baby will one day come face to face with the question "why didn't my birth family love me enough to keep me?".  Some children come from awful, horrible situations that you have to deal with one a daily biases.  You face food battles, unexplained tantrums, stealing, disrespect, doubts, fears, and even mental issues.  The list of the issues adoptive families face is huge.

I think there is a false perception that Tony and I are only adopting to 1) have more children, 2) make Addilece a big sister.  These things are true, very true.  However, if those where the only reasons to adopt, we would NEVER make it.  We couldn't survive the stuff above.  These kids would destroy our marriage at its very core and tear apart our family because we aren't strong enough or have enough love to do this on  our own.  The easy thing would be to stay a family of three, after all we already have one very precious daughter, why do we need more?

So why do we adopt?  Well, there are two core reasons why Tony and I will wade through the muck and adopt.  The first reason is that God mandates it.  Plain and simple, God calls us as believers to help widows and orphans in their time of need.  The second reason is adoption is a beautiful picture of how we are adopted into God's forever family and we want to share his love with others. 

I'll be going more into these two areas and what they mean to us over the next few blog posts.  I hope it will help others to understand why this crazy process is SO important to us.