By Barbara Rainey
First posted on EverThineHome.com
When our six children entered middle school and the teen years my prayers for them increased in focus and intensity. In fact, I started two prayer groups of moms which met weekly during the school years on Monday mornings. In the first group we prayed for teachers, tests, and friendships. We prayed that our kids would be protected from harmful influences that surrounded our budding young adults.
The second prayer group was with mothers of adopted children. Dennis and I had the great joy and privilege to adopt; the events that God orchestrated for this unborn baby to become ours were clearly divine and a wonder to behold. I’ve never forgotten any of them.
There were several families in our church in those years who also adopted. As these children reached middle school and early high school we began noticing traits and tendencies that were different than our biological kids. Adopted children deal with a wide range of challenges that result from the trauma of being removed from their birth moms or from the birth mom’s poor choices like using drugs or alcohol during the pregnancy. Reactive attachment disorder, ADD, and compulsive behaviors are just a few. When they reach adolescence there is the added challenge of identity. They ask questions like, “Who am I in this family that isn’t really mine? Why wasn’t I wanted?”
All teens experience the crisis of “Who am I?” but for adopted teens it is doubly difficult.
By the time these adopted children of ours reached 18 we moms were exhausted. We’d watched them collectively experiment with entry-level drugs, alcohol, and sex. They had chosen friends we feared were bad influences. Two or three of the kids dropped out of high school before graduation. Two were pregnant before twenty. And all of them dealt with depression or anger issues.
We moms prayed and prayed against all these harmful choices. For a year I fasted once a week for our daughter. We parents tried various solutions for our children we loved so much—medications, counseling and different theories and ideas we’d read in books. I still have an entire shelf in my study filled with books I read and underlined in my attempt to understand and to give her what we could.
In the end these adopted children had to find their own way, as do all of us, for we all host the desires of self in our hearts. Their decisions were their own, and the consequences were as well. In the end, from our limited human perspective the prayers and fasting we offered to God for our kids seemed to do little to impact the trajectory of their lives.
The hardest part for me was the disappointment with and confusion about God and His ways. Why had He not prevented this as I had prayed? My desire was only for my child’s good. Jean Fleming wrote, “A child is a piece of a mother’s heart walking around outside her body.” I’ve never forgotten those words as I suffered repeated grief over all my beloved children. None of my six is perfect. None of my six avoided hardship. I felt it all. Deeply.
And yet ... just imagine how our Perfect Father feels over His billions of God-resistant lost children! The wonder is He knew we’d all go our own way and He still chose us as His own. Adoption is God’s idea!
In the early lines of Ephesians we find the word adoption: “he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:5). The concept is also repeated in five other verses in the New Testament. God saw the plight of his lost children and responded with the concept of adoption, which means being chosen by Him and grafted into His family. Adoption has been practiced by Christians since the first century when the infant church began adopting children thrown away in Rome.
The whole story of the Bible is one of God pursuing humanity to rescue us from the destructive behaviors and addictions we run to for comfort instead of running to Him. God is always working to bring us back Home.
· God woos and we reject.
· God delivers and we aren’t grateful.
· God provides blessings and we abuse them.
· God seeks us and we resist.
· He offers forgiveness and grace and we refuse to offer the same to others.
· God tells us we are trusting ourselves or other things but we don’t believe Him.
· God shows us we are building our own belief system, not His, by letting us get lost.
Early in our daughter’s teen journey we had a memorable encounter in our kitchen. She had come downstairs because she had to. Her preference would have been to stay in her room and not join the family for dinner or do her part to set the table. A very typical teenage position. (Her siblings often had the same attitude.)
On this evening Dennis looked her in the eye and said, “There are two ways we can go through this season of your teen years. One is together with your mom and me helping and encouraging you. The other is for you to go through it alone, refusing our presence. But regardless of what you choose, we want you to know …” and at this moment he paused for emphasis and made sure she was paying attention. “We want you to hear this clearly … no matter what you choose your mom and I love you and we would choose you again a thousand times out of a thousand …” another pause … “A thousand times out of a thousand. Did you hear that?”
As I listened intently to this conversation I realized this is how God feels about me. He has chosen me. He wants me to choose Him back.
There was a little twinkle in her eye and a sweet little smile. She heard and she knew we loved her and always would. In the decade that followed that little exchange we repeated “1000 out of 1000” to her dozens and dozens of times. It’s still true today.
God chooses you!
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