In a world of injustice, difficulty and diversity, adoption could be one of the most powerful words. All of us have vulnerabilities and corners of loneliness or isolation in our lives. Some of us have huge disadvantages. All of us, though we may hate to admit it, need the embrace of others, the hand pulling us up, the roof over our heads and the chance to be seen and known and loved. All of us have elements of lostness in our lives, a need to be found. There’s something in all of us that needs to be adopted in one way or another. We want to be accepted, included and loved, as we are. We long to belong.
We find this sense of adoption in many people and places: perhaps in our extended families, our friendships, our sports teams and our workplaces. Hopefully, we find it in our churches, as this idea of inclusive family is central to Jesus’ teaching.
For some of us, adoption takes on a very specific meaning. Our families are formed by legal adoption. For us, especially, adoption is a powerful word. In this one word is a world of pain and hope, anger and love, sacrifice and gain.
For those who are adopted, there can be a great weight of loss. There is a ‘primal wound’ in the loss of birth family, and deep feelings of rejection, insecurity and confusion. There can often be long lasting trauma as a result of being poorly treated and hurt and let down by those who were meant to care for us. The word adopted carries with it these sad, hard things. Of course, it also carries hope, acceptance and love. There is power and light in adoption, but it does have to fight the darkness of what has gone before. Being adopted means being vulnerable and brave. It means being empowered to overcome many challenges, and this overcoming requires daily courage, determination, and sometimes setbacks. Being adopted may mean you have experienced rejection and hurt. Ultimately, it means you are chosen and included and loved, but it can take a huge amount of willpower and courage to believe this.
Being an adopter means reaching out and drawing in. It means stepping out of the boundaries of what you have known and embracing someone different. It means being a roof for someone who needs shelter, literally and metaphorically.
Adopting means searching for someone’s heart, even when they may have built walls around it, even when it may be sharp in all its broken pieces. It means getting your hands bloodied as you gently, persistently pick up those broken shards and attempt a kind of mending.
Adopting means loving patiently and sacrificially. It often means taking the blows that the adopted would like to throw at others, who are lost to them. It means being vulnerable enough to keep loving, even if the adopted is not ready to love back. It means living out of fierce love, patient determination, and audacious hope.
Adopting means giving up everything – your ways of life, your independence, your dreams – to put someone else first. You give all this up, but what you gain is immeasurable. You may come to the end of yourself, but your heart will also be filled.
This immeasurable gain eludes any attempts to fully explain or describe it. Perhaps it is futile to try. To put it as simply as possible, adoption is love, in all its messy beauty. There is something of the miraculous about it, the kind of miracles that are so prevalent in the drudgery of ordinary life.
This post so far is awash with ideology and abstract nouns, but I guess the heart of adoption is in the concrete nouns: plates of freezer food arranged like favourite animals; lego blocks put together to make houses and tractors and ice cream vans; a football kicked back and forth; a school cardigan with a heart sewn onto the sleeve. Or four bikes on a cycle path and a rucksack full of biscuits. Or piles of washing in toppling piles, or a lunchbox with a note inside. An indoor swing on a doorframe, a weighted blanket, a box of sensory toys. A handful of sheep food, a white rabbit in a hutch, a rabble of children riding on a tractor trailer. The list could go on, moment by moment.
It is National Adoption Week! Do find out more about adoption and fostering and find ways to encourage adoptive and foster families.
One great organisation is Home for Good, which you can find out about here:
Life Lived 