Do-Overs

At times, we all do self evaluations, particularly about the major events in our lives. Sometimes we are tempted to spend time wondering what we would do if we could go back and re-live past events and do them over. Over the past 19 weeks, with a lot of extra time on my hands, I've thought about major events, both good and not so good.

Last week as I was wrestling with our budget, now that my severance pay has ended, I though about the 3 children that have adopted. As I was having a mini pity party, thinking about raising a second set of kids and all the expenses related to that, I thought about the fact that if we had not adopted our kids, we would have had several years as empty nesters. We could have doubled our retirement account and not be as limited as we look for a new ministry position without having to think about 3 teenagers and their needs. As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of a church service we had when Nicole was about 18 months old. The founders of the Royal Family Kids' Camps were our guests and Wayne Tesch was telling the story of one of the foster children that had attended one of the camps. As he described the horrible living situation this little girl lived in, and all of us were feeling so sad for this situation, the Holy Spirit whispered to me, "you rescued Nicole from a fate worse than this."  This little 18 month old had already taught me so much about adoption and fatherhood, and this was a great confirmation that we had done the right thing.

In a recent blog, Ronnie Floyd said, Adoption is one of the clearest pictures of the gospel we could ever see. In fact, the doctrine of adoption is the heart of the gospel. We were hopeless and lost, but Jesus brought us into God's family. Our adoption story started in 1980 as foster parents. We fostered children for 20 years. Nicole was our first child that had no where to go. None of her relatives could pass a home study and her birth problems were severe enough to scare away potential adoptive parents. Since she had been our foster daughter for over a year when it was determined her family could not adopt her, we decided to. That was 18 years ago. Nicole is now 19 and a wonderful young lady. Later we brought Sam, 17, and Shawn, 16, into our family.Even though we didn't attach a lot of spiritual emphasis to our decision, James said in his New Testament book, Religion that is pure and undefiled, before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction. Even though raising our adoptive children has been more challenging that our birth children, and there may be more challenges in the future, we wouldn't change a thing.

As I finished what I was doing with our budget, I thought about how blessed we are to have been adoptive parents. God will take care of us all, because He loves these children even more than we do. Do-over? Never. Blessed and contented? Yes.