God Redeems Tragedy Through Adoption
By Jonathan Kuciemba A
doption is a beautiful reminder of God’s love for us, His children. God takes us, struggling and alone, without a spiritual home or a loving com- munity that has our best interests at heart, and He brings us into His fam-
ily, makes Himself our Father, and loves, provides, protects, and does everything a Father should do perfectly for us, not based on anything in us, but because of His great love. It truly is a miracle, the way our adoption in Christ showcases God’s amazing love for spiritual orphans whom He makes His children. This theology of our adoption in Christ is part of the reason why evangelical Christians are more than twice as likely to adopt a child than the general Ameri- can population, along with a desire to take seriously the Biblical commands to care for orphans, to show compassion, and to promote life. Adopting a child is, in many ways, a smaller picture of the love that God shows to us as His children. adopted. All of these truths are wonderful and ought to be celebrated. But there is another side of adoption that doesn’t always get discussed -- a tragic side -- and there is both a spiritual and a practical danger to us in not acknowledging the tragedy of adoption. Adoption is amazing! But it is always born out of tragedy, and not only in the ways you think. Our own family’s story involves both biological and adopted children, loss, and the help of God’s people who showed us the hope of Christ in so many ways. Kat and I were both excited about the idea of adoption individually, even before we met each other. We discussed the possibility of growing our family through adoption as we were dating and evaluating our compatibility for mar- riage. We were both excited about the possibility of welcoming children into our family who, for one reason or another, were not able to remain with their biological parents. Our shared love for the ministry and beauty of adoption is one small part of what ultimately led us to believe the Lord was calling us to marry each other. Even then we knew that adoption is a beautiful picture of how we have been loved and welcomed into the family of God through Christ, rescued from having no family, or from the broken families that our sin offers possibility of following God’s leading to adopt children. Fast forward a few years into our marriage, and we began to have serious discussions about having children. While adoption was always on the table for us as a married couple, that didn’t push having biological children off the table. A month after deciding we would wait another year before pursuing children, regardless of the means, we discovered that Kat was pregnant. God has a sense of humor. For a number of reasons, it was not an easy pregnancy on Kat, but in the end, we got to meet our son. Despite attempting to wait before having more children again, ten months after our son was born, we discovered that Kat was pregnant again. At this point we weren’t really talking about adopting in the near term. The Lord seemed in- tent on sending us babies before we were ready for them! (Obviously, His timing much from those two years. Did I mention all this took place during my last That pregnancy gave us a daughter, a welcome and joyous addition to our
6
family. About a year later, we began to discuss again whether we felt the Lord calling us to grow as a fam- ily. We both felt that He was indeed leading us to add a third child to the family, but that led to the question of timing. After all, we had two very young children in the house already. We learned of our third pregnancy in the midst of these discussions about whether or not we were ready to pur- sue adding a third child to our family. I was beginning to see a pattern. It was an exciting time as we dreamed about how close our children would be to each other, growing up so close in age.
Tragedy
We lost that baby around week 16 of Kat’s pregnancy, in the second tri- mester. We were heartbroken. Devas- tated. We had so many unanswered questions. In addition to grieving the loss of our child, with whom we had already begun to form attachments – brainstorming names, dusting off baby accessories, trying to provide healthy food and rest, talking/sing- ing to the baby, looking up prices on larger vehicles – we had to wrestle with new doubts. Our hopes for our family were now in question. That’s one of the reasons losing a child at any age hurts so much. You don’t just mourn the loss of the person, but you mourn the loss of all the hopes you had for your child, and in our case, for our other children, too, who were all going to be so close in age. While pregnancy had been hard
The Associate Reformed Presbyterian
Feature
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32
