Adoption, Redemption and Hope

This week, I will be passing on a few popular articles that I have recently enjoyed. You have heard me talk about adoption and so I want to start off with an great inspirational article from lifenews.com.

My parents were at the circus when I was born. I’m sure they were having a great time celebrating my brother’s sixth birthday, but I was at the hospital, being born.
I was adopted at birth.

Everything was arranged before I was born, and when I was just five days old, my brother, Jeremy, carried me out with the caseworker to present me to my parents and bring me home. I had spiky hair and I was delivered with forceps, which temporarily pinched a nerve and made my mouth hang down on one side so I had a crooked smile. But when my brother carried me out in his six year old arms, he presented me to my parents and said, “Isn’t she pretty? Doesn’t she look just like me?!”
 

There are times when God intervenes in our lives in nearly flagrant ways. He interrupts the logical order of things, and turns everything upside down in the best way possible. In my case, He took me from being an unplanned pregnancy, to a pined-after, “chosen child” in a family where I have been inordinately loved.

And there’s the Gospel – things were going along one way, but God intervened, and changed everything, not because of anything I deserved as a crooked faced baby with a dent in my head, but because He’s God and He’s good and He’s sovereign.

As I’ve grown up, I have come to bear a striking physical resemblance to my family, and once again, I see the Gospel on display. It’s exactly what God does when he adopts us into his family.  Christ came to save us and bring us to the Father, and when Jesus, our elder brother, presents us to His Father He says, “Isn’t she pretty, doesn’t she look just like me?”  Our Father who loves and accepts us because of what Christ has done on our behalf, begins to see to it that we grow in His grace to look just like our elder brother.

This theme of adoption has become a part of my daily professional life. Having been adopted, I’ve always assumed I survived a near-miss, in that my biological parents may have considered the choice not to continue with the pregnancy.

As I learned more about the circumstances surrounding many unplanned pregnancies, and the seemingly hopeless nature of many of those situations, I felt called to share with women about hopeful alternatives. God faithfully provided an outlet for me to do just that through my work at Heroic Media.

I was born out of what at times may have felt like a hopeless situation, but because of God’s providence in giving my biological parents the courage to give me life, I have had a life defined by hope. I want other people to have that, to see the picture of redemption and hope that is played out in all of our lives as we are adopted by God in Christ.