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Thursday, February 09, 2006

Adopting and Rearing Children is Painful

We have discovered that it is not easy to adopt a child, nor to rear children, biological or adopted. Not only in helping our daughter Emmie adjust to us (which she has done ably) but in our adjusting to her!

So why do it? And how to do it? To exalt and exult in the suffiency of God's grace.

To quote John Piper, who with his wife Noël, has adopted a girl in addition to their four biological sons, from a sermon on adoption:
We dare only adopt children if we have a firm faith in the all-sufficiency of God’s future grace.

The pain of adopting and rearing children is sure. It will come in one form or the other. Should that stop us from having children or adopting children? No. The self-centered world “cuts their losses” by having few or no children. (And there is way too much of that thinking in the church.) In one sense we may be very glad that such people don’t tend to have children or at least not many children. Because it means that breed of selfish person will die out more quickly since they don’t replace themselves. But on the other hand, we grieve, hoping that they will see that the grace of God is sufficient for every new day no matter how difficult, and that there is more true joy in walking with God through fire, than walking on beaches without him.
What a wonderfully poetic way of putting it, that "there is more true joy in walking with God through fire, than walking on beaches without him."