Our former adoption blogger MJ wrote about the relationship between her faith and adoption. I’ve been thinking about some quotes, Scriptural and otherwise, that have a new meaning for me when seen in the light of our family’s experiences with adoption.
Visualizing the Christmas Story can be a bit more intensely real when you think of your child being born in a borrowed house and possibly left there for a day in a cold December. If you have an international family, many of the charity appeals you hear this time of year seem not so far away, but much closer to home. I’ve written before about weeping during a Christmas medley of “What Child is This” and “Child of the Poor”. (You can read that blog here.)
A quote from another Christmas story caught my ear this year in a way it hadn’t before. This story was “A Christmas Carol”, the speaker was Ebenezer Scrooge, and the quote was,
“If they had rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I thought of the population control program in China which has been responsible for despairing parents abandoning so many infant girls, many of whom find their way to the U.S. How many of us now know and love a child who was once considered “surplus population”?
My prayer book for Christmastime/Epiphany has a few quotes that I think would be very beautiful to an adopted child.
The fourth chapter of Galatians reads: “[God sent his Son] so that we might receive our status as adopted children…and the fact that you are a child makes you an heir, by God’s design.”
For anyone who doubts how much an adopted child could be loved, in John 17 Jesus speaks to his Father about the people he is leaving behind. He wants them to know “that you love them as you love me”. My pastor said that as many times as he’s read these words, “as you love me”, it was only after years that it really sank in: God loves us mere humans AS he loves Jesus!
Lastly, I love this phrase from Psalm 110: “From the womb before the dawn I begot you; a royal child from the day of your birth.”