When my wife and I got married and came back from our Hawaiian honeymoon in 2010, she told me there were two things we were definitely never going to do.
Actually there were three things but one of them involved some expletives about the World Cup. There were only two that were important.
The first was that we would never become missionaries to another country. It was a non-starter. Not on the table. Not happening.
The second … was that we would never adopt.
The first one, to this point, hasn’t happened. On Wednesday, we checked the second one off the list and laughed at our then-plans of five years ago.
I don’t know who all will read this post and that’s ok. If nobody reads it, that’s also ok. My purpose in writing it is so that, if somebody does read it, their eyes are cast upon a couple of things I’m trying to point at.
Late in 2012, Jennifer (aforementioned World Cup hater) and I wrote our names down on several dozen pieces of paper (some call these “signatures”) and said “foster care, yeah that sounds good, we’ll do that.”
At the time, I was about to start a new job as a sportswriter and Jen wasn’t working. In other words, we were free to go out for margaritas at lunch and not really come back until we wanted to go to bed.
So of course we thought “this is a terrible way to live, let’s take in some kids that we won’t get to keep and who can’t clean their own feces. That will be way better.”
I’m kidding, but our motives weren’t what I would consider world class. Jen didn’t want to work and we had too much house for just the two of us. We also wanted people around to us to think we were doing something with our lives.
In retrospect, there are more cost-effective ways to accomplish that last piece.
Those were the less-than-pure motives we had that we don’t often like to talk about. The parallel reality was that we also felt the Lord pressing on each of our hearts (in different ways) that fostering kids would be a good, right thing.
We hadn’t tried to have our own kids yet, but we thought this fostering thing might be a good test run for reasons that are kind of clear but not totally translucent to the point that I’m sort of wondering if I’m backfilling motives that I think I thought back then.
The point is, we’re always down to do something a little off the rails.
So we jumped in.
At the beginning of 2013, we received our first placement. A two-year-old boy that took my heart and still hasn’t relinquished parts of it. His year-long stint in our home was equal parts sanctifying, challenging and crushing.
The end was especially painful.
In the year that he was with us, we took in another foster child — a three-month-old girl — and had our own biological son. Three kids under 33 months. It was like Hunger Games in our house every day.
Our first placement left in February 2014. It was a good thing. He’s back with his mom and doing well. We still talk to him. Still pray for him.
He’ll always be our first child.
Having kids is a sobering thing. Watching them leave, even more so.
Him leaving was also a logistically-freeing thing. We now had our biological son (who was two months old) and our foster daughter, who was about to turn one.
“We can do this,” we thought. Like visiting the Districts by train after triumph in the arena. Difficult (because they’re children) but certainly doable.
Last summer, we were told that the girl (who by that time was 15 months) was going back to be with her family. Losing two kids in six months wasn’t something I was prepared for.
My lasting memory of that summer is telling my brother (talented podcaster, by the way) over July 4th to make sure and tell her goodbye because he would likely never see her again.
Things in the foster care system happen not at all and then all at once. From zero to tidal wave in three days. Nothing happens and then eight converging, differing things happen and you’re still spinning a week later.
We found out later in the summer that our foster daughter would actually be staying with us a while longer for various reasons. This was the most emotional time for me. I’m not sure why but a sense of joy (that we would keep her) melded with a pain for her parents (that wouldn’t get her back) and produced some of the most gut-wrenching moments of her stint as a foster child with us.
So she stayed through the fall and then it was Halloween and then it was Thanksgiving and whoa, are we hiring a lawyer so we can potentially adopt her later in the spring of 2015?
Wait, we didn’t get in this game to adopt. That’s on the list of things we were never going to do.
Here’s the thing, and anyone who’s been a foster parent (or just a parent, I suppose) of somebody from the age of three months on understands this, there comes a point at which you can’t not adopt.
Unless you are a human whose emotional capacity is outstripped only by the crab bisque robot, then you will be adopting the daughter you’ve essentially raised from birth. Another non-starter.
We went to our lawyer’s office. He told us how much it would cost to hire him and adopt her (billable hours FTW — always) and we didn’t even have a conversation about what to do.
In January, we found out for certain that we would be adopting the little lady. My brother will have fistfuls of July 4ths left with her. I pre-ordered her a library card of her very own.
It would take four more months to scan and email the necessary paperwork to the right people and, as frustrating as that can be, I’m grateful for the people who operate the process.
That was a strange time. The girl who’s staying with you isn’t technically your daughter, nor is she anyone else’s daughter either. After a placement hearing, the child is, by law, an orphan. She belongs to the state for 90+ days after the hearing. That doesn’t change the day-to-day, but it’s still odd.
Anyway, we ticked off the weeks leading up to May 20 with the anticipation of a homeschool kid on “take your kid to the weird commune farm where they make soap” day.
Finally on Wednesday May 20, one day shy of four months after it was decided by a court that we would adopt, we did.
Our family of four became … a family of four.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there are over 400,000 children in the foster care system in our country alone. Four-hundred thousand!
That’s AT&T Stadium filled up nearly five times with kids whose parents are, for one reason or another, unable to take care of them. We have fostered two of them and adopted one. That leaves 399,998.
I throw all of those stats at you so I can say the following.
Get involved.
This is one of the things I want to point to, and I want to do so with the recognition that so often people (myself included) think that their own story should be everybody’s story.
If more people just lived like me, the world would be a much better place.
I hope it’s not taken like that here. I’m pointing at 399,998 kids right now, not myself.
And hey, I’ve already confessed at the beginning of this post that our motives were not humbly laid down before the Lord when we started this. God has a way of dispensing humility along the way (especially when children are involved).
I don’t really care why you get involved, just that you do. I actually don’t even care if you get involved in fostering or adopting (I don’t want to make it the ultimate social justice issue because it’s our social justice issue — though there’s clearly a need).
My only hope is that our story is an encouragement for you to do something.
Matt Chandler says it like this.
That means, men, you have not been created for comfort or the couch. When I said early on, “The frequency men give themselves over to comfort and couch,” I’m trying to help you process and understand that God has created you for war, not comfort.
If it is fostering and adopting you’re considering though, I understand the pushback. You have a million other things to do. You wouldn’t be able to watch the kids go back to their families if you fostered (a posited notion that tests the state of my pride). You aren’t talented enough or smart enough or spiritual enough or capable enough to handle it all.
(An aside on capability: I write about sports for a living. And not even a complex team sport! I write about golf for a living. A good day for me is nailing the Oxford comma in two consecutive paragraphs.
Also to confirm, we do not as a family memorize the minor prophets before bedtime or posses a magic set where daddy tries to turn water into wine on his days off. We just bend our selfish souls a little and try to stay one day ahead of the kids).
All of those excuses I mentioned above are justifiable.
But fostering is, as our burlesque vice president is fond of saying, a big ******* deal. Adoption, even bigger. They are worthy endeavors if, at the end of your days on this pale blue dot, you don’t want to look back and say “I wish my existence had meant something more.”
You can’t foster or adopt even a single child and say those words.
(I’ll make it easy for you to get involved. I presume most of you reading this live in either Oklahoma or Texas. If you live in Oklahoma, click here. If you live in Texas, click here.)
I know that the fostering and adopting experience is not always an enjoyable one. Ours have been. I’m grateful for that. We have friends who haven’t had great experiences. I know that foster parenting can be immensely difficult and should be folded into a spirit of long-suffering.
But it is worth the war. It must be.
It wouldn’t be commanded by the brother of Jesus if it wasn’t.
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. -James 1:27 (ESV)
It goes much further than who we are and how we respond, though.
Someone I consider a mentor of sorts recently pointed me towards a sermon by C.J. Mahaney in which he discusses the doctrine of adoption.
In the sermon Mahaney quotes J.I. Packer from his magnificent work, Knowing God. What Packer said (I haven’t read the book) sort of shocked me.
Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.
Then he said something that shocked me even more.
To be right with God the Judge [justification] is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father [adoption] is a greater.
We so often remember what we are saved from. We rarely remember what we are saved to. But a greater picture of love than a father choosing his children, I cannot fathom.
John Piper calls it “greater than the universe.”
There has been no thing in my life that has given me a richer understanding of my salvation and my adoption by God into the kingdom than fostering (and now adopting).
Not having a biological kid, not marriage, nothing, none of it.
Fostering and adoption isn’t for everyone, I know that. But I’m confident that if you do take it on your knowledge of God and your relationship to him will be transformed in a way you’re not prepared for.
In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. -Ephesians 1:5–10 (ESV)
The rub for me, and a thing that I’ll always have to preach to myself, is that we didn’t save our newly-adopted daughter. We will love her and nurture her soul like her life depends on it (it does).
But we didn’t save her because we can’t.
But what a joy the transition from fostering to adoption is. The purgatorial portion of the process has ended and now we get to celebrate. I’ve thought about this day innumerable times in the last six months. What I will feel, what I will remember and what others will think.
As I said above, I hope you see only the things I’m pointing at. The call to action and the great and glorious thing we have been saved to by Jesus which is adoption as sons and daughters into eternity with the greatest wonder the world has ever known.
What a joy!
The rest of adoption to me is unadulterated bliss. I get a new daughter on Wednesday. One I hope to hold as open-handed as I’ve strived for in the last 22 months with her. One who has helped me write emails and clean the yard and who demands books to be thrown in her crib so she can fall asleep with them.
Hers is a treasured life, but they all are. That’s one thing foster care and now adoption has taught me. My biological son is equivalent in God’s eyes to my adopted daughter. To slowly see that myth of partiality towards one’s own offspring unravel is the toothpaste coming out of the tube for me.
I can’t ever go back.
On a day of celebration, though, there are others who have shone more brightly than we have in this journey. Our motives have so often been selfish and prideful. Our friends, on the other hand, have overwhelmed. Our families, too.
Our gratitude of words will never be enough, but I’ll certainly give it a go.
To our friends and family: your unrelenting support of our choices (that don’t always benefit you) has stirred us to press forward. This route would be bottled up and sealed off without your graciousness.
To Jen: I love you dearly and I love to write, but I can’t possibly say it better than John Piper who once said the following to his wife about their adoption (a paragraph I’ve read 10,000 times in the last year).
With this common conviction, we will, God willing, embrace our new daughter and give ourselves, with all the might that God inspires in us, to love her into the kingdom. May the Lord establish the plans of our hearts, and bring her (and the future husband God already knows) into deep and lasting fellowship with Christ. May she be an ebony broach of beauty around your neck and a crown of purity and joy on your head.
Finally, to Hannah Paige. The one who has been chosen and loved and cherished deeply and cried over more times than I care to admit. Whenever you’re grown someday and inevitably find this post from your father on the Internet (if the Internet still exists), I want you to know something.
I love you and can think of no better way to show you than by this act which thousands or millions of other men would have undoubtedly performed. I’m not special because we’re choosing you. Nor are you special because you’ve been chosen. You are, however, special and have been chosen.
And I hope your heart is always warmed and filled up when you remember that I consider it the great thrill of my adult life to be given something (your life) I would have done so much more to obtain.
It’s a thought I can’t quit and never will. You will be with us for the rest of your formative years, Lord willing.
And very best of all, I get to be … your dad.