With a flurry of a pen, adoption begins to change you. A signature launches your family into an adventure and an awakening.
It is a messy and wondrous thing that wrecks and rebuilds, a profound gift and a long haul.
It takes gumption, prayer, and endless discussion to say yes. Walking into such an immense unknown is hard business. Through the marathon dossier process, you feel brave yet fully aware of your need for God’s strength and intervention. You don’t even have a picture yet, but love builds anyway. Then you are matched with a child, and being separated feels intolerable. You finally experience the life-altering moment of your child in your arms, and you realize that God has only just begun your transformation. It’s kind of love that remakes itself over and over.
You don’t know until you know, but these are guarantees:
1. Your Prayer Life Will Deepen
Adoptive families quickly realize that you are utterly unable to control or make sense of the loss of birth parents, trauma, government red tape, and attachment. Prayers for finances, hearts, health, timing, and paperwork hurdles all feel colossal. You need God.
Somewhere along the way, you realize that you’ve grown to recognize His voice and can see His orchestration of details. That the time spent with folded hands was not in vain. He’s heard you, wrecked you, and started the work of rebuilding, your hearts a little more like His.
Every step of the way, God has something to say, if only you can still to listen.
2. Your Worldview Will Expand
Whether a family adopts domestically, internationally, or through a kindred adoption, their world is enlarged. The adoption might also be a transracial adoption or medical needs adoption. Stepping into these new experiences and communities enlarge your thinking. You see what you might have missed or ignored through a lack of exposure. You see the people around you differently, more clearly. When bringing your children into your life, you no longer desire to go on seeing the world as you once did.
You’re awakened to the needs and voices of the marginalized and to those who live differently. You have new hearts for birth parents and those who have experienced trauma.
You can no longer be passive about racism. You allow yourself to wrestle with similarities and differences and how to keep your children connected to their birth culture. You want them to see themselves represented in their world.
Also, whether you get to interact with the birth family, or will never know them at all, they are forever close to your hearts.
3. Your Love Will Widen
The beauty though is that those who adopt learn that when you step beyond the boundaries of your comfort, your heart stretches wide open. That love can come instantly or, with some leading, it can build within ordinary, shared days. No matter the path, your family is very much your OWN, and it’s love you feel.
Adoption throws open heart doors, showing you that your ability to love is wider than you could have imagined. You see, too, that you can lead your hearts toward the love you want to feel.
4. You Will Face More Challenges
It is challenging. The challenges will strengthen your family, deepen faith, teach invaluable lessons, and build courage. But, those entering in need to think and pray about it realistically.
Adoption will take a family far beyond the borders of its comfort zone. Families that adopt face additional challenges, including healing from trauma, medical needs, birth parent relationships, attachment work, financial obstacles, building cultural connections, processing a child’s story of loss, and answering hard questions.
5. Your View of Parenting Will Enlarge
Parenting children who join a family through adoption requires a parenting refresh and an adjustment of your beliefs based on your child’s unique needs. You learn that relationships and attachment are your highest priorities, even over behavior correction. Also, that you must move toward a hurting child rather than away. You understand that outward behaviors represent inner fears and feelings.
Parenting siblings through an adoption process also enlarges your thinking. Many parents fear that adoption will be harmful to their other children, but then see the value in helping them navigate through change and challenge. The experience builds character, heart, and great empathy in siblings.
6. Your Faith Will Grow Bigger
You ask God for the colossal and impossible. Yet distance, finances, loss, and authority over government, time, and space are all His. Though there are obstacles, in His time, you experience God bringing a child into the family, beginning the process of redeeming an impossible loss.
Some assume that those who adopt are more capable, loving, and strong. The truth though is that it is none of those things. You’ve just said yes, claiming front row seats to another story of God healing the hurting. Through the building of your faith, you learn that you don’t have to have it all together.
7. Your Exposure to Trauma Will Increase
Adoption ushers families into grief and suffering, which becomes a hard, sweet refining fire burning away misconceptions, barriers, and haughty opinions of yourself. As you parent hurt and healing kids, you realize that you must release yourself from the savior role. You go to God and the helpers He provides.
“What we didn’t fully grasp was that adoption would be a portal to understanding suffering. Choosing to walk straight into the white-hot pain of our grieving kids was an important entry point to the discovery that some of the best gifts are laced with deep sadness.” – Shannan Martin
Adoption begins with a birth mother, birth father, their baby, and a painful situation requiring an impossible decision. You might have felt empathy for those stories before, but until you stand in the middle of such an unimaginable breaking, you can’t begin to feel the unfathomable loss.
8. You Will Learn to Release Control
You’re left with palms open, praying God will come through. And then, as you see that He does, you ease slowly toward release.
9. You Will Let Go of Any Savior Mentality
Most imagine adoption to be a fairy tale including the flick of a wand, white horses, and a happily ever. In reality, the magic is a child enduring the hardest of losses and then bravely learning to love again. You don’t have to be a noble hero. God covers that role.
It is a hard-learned lesson because you cast yourself as a child’s savior. Somewhere in your well-meant thinking, you consider adoption a good deed.
You realize that you could never have done it in your strength. You simply put yourself into a front-row seat to watch God be mighty. And though you may be weary from the journey you said yes to, you stand in awe.
Read the rest over at iBelieve.