my friends jennifer & david have started the process to adopt their first child. they are just salt of the earth people and erin & i love them dearly. they started a blog to give some updates on the process, which i have kept up with. their recent post has my mind just spinning… they have to fill out a form stating their preferences for how they want their child.
personal note: i love folks who adopt. when i was at my youngest years our family was a foster family. i don’t remember the names of the kids who would come and stay at our home (sleep in mine & my bro’s room), but i remember their faces. scratch that, i do remember taylor, but only because his real name was david & my older brother’s name was david so we called him taylor and that had me confused.. where did we come up with that name.. sorry, tangent.
children need a home, and these two will provide a great home. i would also expect that they will provide a great home for a child that might not be ‘ideal’ by some standards. which is where they find themselves in a lot of exploration
for clarification sake: their current struggle is about race. i’ve expanded it by using ‘ideal’ as simple term to encompass a same ethnicity, non-conditioned/special-needs, premature, high risk pregnancy, etc. child. you get the picture. i think their honest thoughts expand more than just race.
And the big thing for us is the question of race? I can hear your
wheels turning?! Here’s the thing….we could choose to accept only
healthy caucasian infants or we can just keep it wide open or anything
in the middle. So we have considered many things:If we are willing to adopt outside of our race…
*how will our friends and family feel/recieve us?
*how will our church family recieve us?
*how would we handle the questions, the stares, the looks?
*what issues would our child have to face because their skin may be different from ours?
*at the end of the day, do the stares, the looks and the comments matter?
you need to go and check out their thoughts. it has me thinking about it all. maybe you have an adoption story to share.
and just for the record: without giving their family history, these folks know what is like to be looked at and talked about. they live in a world & have lived in a world that is not ideal by most standards. which i have always thought makes them especially capable to love those who are not ideal & in ideal situations.
Hey Gav,
Lisa and I found out during our last year of seminary that we would probably never have biological children. We were devastated.
We now have two beautiful boys via adoption and are working on a third – a girl. We like your friends struggled with some of the same questions.
Our first born is Caucasian and our second is African-American. The third we are working on now we have requested an African American as well. We thought it important that our family look balanced, that our youngest [currently] would have someone that he might visually identify with. Of course our goal is to raise color-blind children, but we sadly realize that we don’t live in a color-blind world.
For us, the beauty of adoption is that we have the privilege of building a family that looks like the kingdom. It always seemed quite puzzling to me that people would have little problem spending multiple thousands of dollars to go overseas to china, Korea, Russia, even places like Guatemala, when there are so many children waiting to be adopted here, especially those of African American descent.
To be sure we have faced some questions from outsiders, and we know that our son [and daughter] will too. But it’s our hope that we will have modeled for them what true kingdom love looks like and created sense of security and pride in them.
We’ll be praying for them!
Peace,
E
Hey Gav,
Lisa and I found out during our last year of seminary that we would probably never have biological children. We were devastated.
We now have two beautiful boys via adoption and are working on a third – a girl. We like your friends struggled with some of the same questions.
Our first born is Caucasian and our second is African-American. The third we are working on now we have requested an African American as well. We thought it important that our family look balanced, that our youngest [currently] would have someone that he might visually identify with. Of course our goal is to raise color-blind children, but we sadly realize that we don’t live in a color-blind world.
For us, the beauty of adoption is that we have the privilege of building a family that looks like the kingdom. It always seemed quite puzzling to me that people would have little problem spending multiple thousands of dollars to go overseas to china, Korea, Russia, even places like Guatemala, when there are so many children waiting to be adopted here, especially those of African American descent.
To be sure we have faced some questions from outsiders, and we know that our son [and daughter] will too. But it’s our hope that we will have modeled for them what true kingdom love looks like and created sense of security and pride in them.
We’ll be praying for them!
Peace,
E
i like that idea of family as kingdom. erin & i strongly consider adopting one or two just because we know we can provide a home for some children. but we haven’t soul searched or started any process as of yet.
i like that idea of family as kingdom. erin & i strongly consider adopting one or two just because we know we can provide a home for some children. but we haven’t soul searched or started any process as of yet.
gav,
i have gained some authority on this topic over the past nine months…
this past fall after reading a post on a fellow adoptive mom’s blog, i wrote this post and i think it would be helpful here…
did jennifer tell you that we met at that playgroup and hopefully we can encourage them along in their journey?
gav,
i have gained some authority on this topic over the past nine months…
this past fall after reading a post on a fellow adoptive mom’s blog, i wrote this post and i think it would be helpful here…
did jennifer tell you that we met at that playgroup and hopefully we can encourage them along in their journey?