On weekdays during Advent we are posting the daily reflection from our Abundance Advent booklet here on our blog. You can download the booklet in its entirety here.
Tonight was a great night. I went on a hayride at Bellevue Park with my son, Elijah, and a bunch of our neighbors. Eli was loving it. He just kicked back and relaxed as we toured the park with our neighborhood crew. Sometimes I just look at him, see him so happy, and get choked up. I get choked up because I have known him for six months, and yet, he has been on this earth for almost 2 ½ years.
While we aren’t really consistent about it, we enjoy teaching our kids the Children’s Catechism. The other night, Eli started to chime in with our 3-year-old daughter, Grace: “Who made you?” … “God!” … “What else did God make?” … “God made all things!” Stuff like that is just a heavy dose of God’s abundance. I am just blown away by God’s sovereignty when I think of how our little boy, born in Kaifeng, China, gets to praise Jesus with us each week in Wilmington, Delaware, with our City Church family. I get to tell him about our great God, who is a Father to the fatherless, and our Savior King, who gives hope to the hopeless.
I’ve often heard the argument that the primary reason that children grow up to embrace a particular faith is because their parents or family raised them that way. In other words, religion is a culturally conditioned construct, and you are only a Christian because you were raised in America, and Muslims are Muslim because they were raised in Indonesia or Pakistan.
Well, I would certainly say that if Elijah were to grow up in China rather than in the United States with us, things would be different for him. But the God of the Bible, who “in love predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,” knew Elijah before time existed. He knew that Sara and I would be his Christian parents and raise him at City Church of Wilmington because He ordained it. When I shift my focus outside of these past few years to an eternal God, who operates outside of time, that argument falls apart.
I think adoption is often romanticized within the evangelical Christian community. Don’t get me wrong, adoption is biblical and everyone who claims Christ should care for the orphan in some way, but adoption isn’t just what you see on my Facebook page. Adoption is full of grief, pain, and sorrow, most of which we, as adoptive parents, didn’t get to witness. It is such hard work and full of stress and exhaustion. But to see pictures of that tired and confused boy on the day we met him compared to the boy we see now with that incredible smile makes it all worth it.
Even though it is painful to say this now, in a perfect, not-so-broken world, Eli would grow up being raised by his biological mother and father in China. He wouldn’t have to go through what he went through. But God had a different plan for Elijah in this broken world, and a different plan for our family. Is that because God will use our family and whatever covenant community we are a part of to raise him to love and fully embrace the Gospel one day? That is something I hope and pray for often, but ultimately, God is the one who changes hearts and so I put my trust in Him.
So even though it is hard not to stress about whether I am doing this parenting thing right or if I am checking off all the boxes for being a model Dad, I do know and promise this: I know that Eli will hear more about Jesus than he would have in China. I know that he and his sister will hear often about how their imperfect and frequently-failing parents need Jesus every day. They will hear how we need Jesus not just to raise them, but so our family can fully experience God’s abundance in our home, resulting in an overflow of that abundance to our local community. My prayer is that even though our family will have our share of struggles, I pray that we will all walk by faith and put our trust in God’s ultimate abundance, our Lord Jesus Christ.