The Fireside Cafe

When Love Brings You Home

I wrote this sermon for our adoption agency, Buckner International Adoption, as part of a package of resources for National Adoption Month last November.  

When Love Brings You Home

In his 2001 song inspired by his adopted daughter, When Love Takes You In, Steven Curtis Chapman writes:

I know you've heard the stories

But they all sound too good to be true

You've heard about a place called home

But there doesn't seem to be one for you

So one more night you cry yourself to sleep

And drift off to a distant dream

Where love takes you in and everything changes

A miracle starts with the beat of a heart

When love takes you home and says you belong here

The loneliness ends and a new life begins

When love takes you in.

For children living in an orphanage, the concepts of home and family are only the substance of hopes and dreams.  Even in the midst of other children, institutional life always reminds orphans that rejection and abandonment have been driving forces in their lives.

But for adopted children, everything changes in an instant.  In one moment they move from rejection to acceptance, from loneliness to being part of a family, from hopelessness to hope, from abandonment to home.  Their physical journey is not so different from our own spiritual journey when Jesus Christ saves us.  Perhaps that is why James 1:27 says, “…to visit orphans and widows in their distress” is a sign of “pure and undefiled religion.”  By caring for those who are least able to take care of themselves, we walk in stride with God.

As a pastor and student of the Bible, I knew these things and believed them in my mind, but when I became the parent of an adopted child I began to see God’s love for me from an entirely new perspective.

The language of adoption is used in the New Testament to describe our own relationship with God.  In John 14:2-3, Jesus tells his disciples that although he is going away, “I will prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”  In verse 18, Jesus continues, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”  In other words, Jesus assures his disciples that they will not be abandoned; they have a home and a family to go with it.

In the fall of 2010 my wife and I completed our second adoption in Russia and prepared to bring our 5-year old son back to the United States.  We picked up our son in Krasnodar, Russia and in the evening we boarded a plane for Moscow where we would spend a few days finalizing the documents that would allow him to enter the United State.  We were apprehensive about how he would respond to being alone with us, especially since we did not speak much of his language and he spoke none of ours.  He had never been on an airplane, and had rarely been outside of the small village where he lived in an orphanage.

Immediately upon arrival in Moscow he started asking about his brother and we had to explain that we would be going to his permanent home in a few days.  After arriving at the apartment where we would stay, we put him in bed for the night and started to relax from our long journey.  A few minutes later he snuck out of bed and rummaged through his backpack until he pulled out the photo album that we had given him five months earlier.  The album contained our pictures along with those of his new sister and brother, the family dog, his new bedroom, school, and other parts of his new life.  He looked through the pages reciting the name on each picture in Russian.  When we examined the worn pages we realized that this must have been his nightly ritual.  He was not satisfied at all with this interim living situation in Moscow.  He was ready to be taken home.

That longing for home is a powerful force in both our physical and spiritual lives.  For an orphan, coming home means a place of safety free from the fear of abandonment or neglect, much like what God has done for us in Christ.

Adoption not only provides the language of salvation, it also provides a picture for me regarding my ongoing relationship with God.  We seem tempted to view our relationship with God as one where we are in the position of “owing” him for rescuing us from sin.  Without question, he has rescued us but Scripture teaches that God wants more from our relationship than that.  He brings us into his family and offers the rewarding relationship of Father and child.

Romans 8:15-18 says, “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ…”

When my wife and I adopted our first son in 2004, I quickly realized that I did not want him to grow up feeling as if he owed me for rescuing him from some bleak or hopeless future.  He was immediately part of our family, and since that time he has never been less than our own son.  The same is true for our second son.   They bring joy to our hearts and the relationship that we share enriches my life.  They should never feel as though they do not belong, or that they owe me something for rescuing them.

Adopting any child, especially an international child, creates a lot of challenges.  Issues of language, behavior, and emotional needs can test the strongest of wills.  Children do not automatically shed the baggage that accompanies them, but becoming part of a family allows them to learn to keep the best of who they are and let go of the things that hold them back.  When love brings them home they find a place to safely deal with issues of abandonment and neglect, and they discover a family that will not abandon them to the challenges and will also draw them forward to a better future.  Every family experiences both victories and disappointments, but adopted children learn that families will not give up on them.

While I believe without question that my relationship with God is the result of him reaching out to me and rescuing me from the consequences of sin, I also believe that he finds joy in something deeper.  He adopted me, brought me into his family, and I believe that he finds joy in walking through life with me.

When God’s love brings us home, we do not automatically shed the baggage that weighed us down.  The consequences may have been erased but the power remains.  We find quickly, however, that God does not abandon us to those struggles.  He works within us to bring out the best that he created us to be while removing the baggage that holds us back.  Plenty of challenges exist, but God never gives up on us, and I believe that he finds joy and satisfaction in that journey.

Adoption provides both a language and a visual aid to understanding our own salvation in Christ, and we know that to care for orphans is to live in the testimony of that salvation.  So, how do we exercise this call to walk in stride with God by reaching out to the hundreds of thousands of orphans in our world who cannot provide for themselves?  Here are some ideas:

1.  Become an advocate for orphan children.  Children become orphans because of choices made by someone else.  They need someone to step forward to remind them that they have value and that someone cares for them.  Families who advocate for orphans can host children in their homes on holidays or weekends, remember their birthdays, and are a spokesman for these children for potential adopting families.  Most of all, advocates will pray for families to open up and receive these children.

For international orphans, advocates participate in programs such as Buckner’s Angels Abroad ministry.  Advocates host adoptable Russian children for two weeks and continue to pray for them after they return to Russia.

If adoption is not part of God’s plan for your family, becoming an advocate for orphan children can still allow you to be part of adoption ministry.

2.  Minister to some of the thousands of children who may never be adopted.  Church groups minister to orphanages, both domestic and international, by improving facilities, providing for physical needs, leading camps and Bible schools, and just giving love to children.  Ministry to orphans prepares the way for others to adopt and offers a witness of love and hope to those who have known little of either one.

When my wife and I adopted our first son from Tambov, Russia in 2004, a woman in the church I served at the time asked me how many children were in the baby home where he had lived.  I estimated about 100 children.  She began making quilts, and six years later we sent off to Russia the 100^th quilt made by Laura Chester to a Russian orphanage.  That was her own personal, God-given vision to care for those who could not care for themselves and to walk in stride with God.

3.  Ask your church to develop a ministry of adoption by creating an environment where more families will consider adoption, answers can be found to their questions, assistance can be provided for the challenging journey through the adoption process, and a church can assist families with the financial cost of adopting.  Within the setting of a local church, families can find support before, during, and after the adoption process has been completed.

4.  Consider adoption.  Quite simply, more families should consider whether God would lead them to welcome an orphan child home.  Fewer adoptions exist because fewer people consider adoption a possibility.  We tend to maximize the challenges and minimize the rewards.  Only God can clearly direct you on whether adoption is the right step for your family, but he cannot direct you unless you are willing to trust him with the possibility.  Do you have the means and the opportunity to adopt a child?  Can you consider the possibility that God may lead you to a child that needs for love to bring him or her home?

Few things in life can be more challenging or more rewarding than giving hope to a child by bringing him or her into a family.  When we do so, we walk in stride with God by imitating his own actions toward us and by providing for those who can least provide for themselves.

Together as advocates, churches on mission, and as adoptive families we can bring children home and help them find the love, acceptance, and nurture that God desires for them.

 

A Disappointing Delay

My wife and I had everything prepared for our final trip to Russia went we went to bed on Tuesday night.   The itinerary had us picking up Nikolai's passport on Friday in Krasnodar.  On Saturday we would throw a going away party for him at the orphanage and take him with us back to the hotel.  On Sunday we would fly to Moscow and go through the 3-day process of obtaining his U.S. visa.  Then on Thursday the 29th we would finally bring him home.

Lottie had meticulously arranged every detail related to taking care of Kelcie and Sean, the house, the dog, gifts for the orphanage workers, gifts for Nikolai's friends, and clothes for Nikolai (Those of you who know her are not the least bit surprised by this).  I had our finances ready, printed out our boarding passes, and made sure we knew how to make all of our airport connections.

At 4:30am on Wednesday we received a call from our agency that the State Prosecutor in our case had filed an appeal of our court decision with the Russian Supreme Court requesting that our adoption be delayed pending a bilateral adoption agreement between Russia and the U.S.  Our contact told us that we should not travel because we would only have to return home once we arrived.

So, instead of flying over the Atlantic Ocean, Wednesday turned into a flurry of canceling airline tickets and all of the arrangements that we had made over the past week.  We are deeply disappointed, not only for ourselves, but for Nikolai.  He has already experienced much rejection and disappointment in his brief life, and I hate to think that he might question whether we will really come for him at all.

I don't want to say very much in writing about the case.  I do know that the case of the Tennessee woman who returned her son to Russia earlier this year has received much publicity there and has had an impact on how many Russians view international adoption.  I do not know all of the Prosecutor's motives, or even what is specifically contained in the appeal.  Our agency believes that our adoption will eventually go through, but we may have to wait another one or two months.  As for the bilateral agreement, officials from both countries are meeting in Moscow this week in a fourth round of discussions.  Russian law, however, requires no such agreement to be in place prior to adoptions and the Russian legislature declined in May to consider a motion suspending adoptions until such an agreement was signed.

Now that a full day has passed and we have dismantled everything that we had set in place, the reality of what has occurred seems to weigh more heavily on our hearts.  I still believe that our adoption will be completed, but I also admit that we face a lot of uncertainty about the next few months.

Since we began this process last summer, we have trusted that we were following a path that God wanted us to follow.  I still hold to that faith.  While I would like to control the future, I must admit that the future is much safer in His hands.  This morning, the words of a song by Babbie Mason came to mind:

God is too wise to be mistaken
God is too good to be unkind
So when you don't understand
When don't see his plan
When you can't trace his hand
Trust His Heart.

Today we go back to taking care of our routine responsibilities and wait for the next phone call trusting in the goodness and grace of God to guide us down an unfamiliar path.

Taking the next step

An international adoption journey is long and exhausting.  If you don't keep your eyes focused on the outcome then small things can wear you down.  Last week we found out that our date in Russian adoption court is Monday, July 12.  So we have been working through a flurry of preparations including flight arrangements, more paperwork, and visa applications.

Our schedule is as follows:  leave DFW on Friday night July 9 and arrive in London on the 10th.  After a 12-hour layover in London we fly to Moscow and then connect to Krasnodar, arriving on Sunday morning.  We go before the court on Monday morning.  If all goes well, then we get to visit Nikolai before we leave Krasnodar on Tuesday night and arrive back at DFW on Wednesday afternoon.

After a week at home, we leave again on July 21 going through Atlanta this time.  We will arrive on the 22nd, pick up Nikolai from the orphanage and get his Russian passport.  Then we go back to Moscow on Sunday the 25th, spending a few days there getting his visa for entrance into the U.S.  Finally, we leave Moscow on July 29th and arrive home with Nikolai at 8:15 that night.

Makes your head spin doesn't it?

Last week I left Weatherford at 3am for the drive down the Houston to apply for entry visas at the Russian Consulate.  The photos that we attached to our application were too large and the court papers were not scanned straight so I had to trim down the photos and accept double-entry tourist visas (30 days) rather than double-entry business visas (60 days).  At least she didn't make me get out of line!

Then I handed her a completed FedEx envelope so they could mail our passports back to us.  She said, "We don't mail them any more."  Apparently, this changes on a daily basis.

So, Tuesday I was back in Houston to pick up our passports with double-entry visas affixed.

Cost for 2 double-entry Russian visas:    $500

Round-trip to Houston including rush hour traffic:  12 hours

Time that it took to pick up the visas:    5 minutes

Knowing that we are one step closer to bringing Nikolai home:    Priceless.

Our Russian Adventure

I intended to blog about our trip to Russia while we were taking it, but I could not get the blog to update for some mysterious technological reason.  I'll try again to make it work on the next trip.  So, I will skip the anecdotes about our flight delays and how the Russian domestic airline was exponentially better than the U.S. domestic airline, the frustrating hours that I spend at the airline service counter, and our unexpected stay in New York City.

To summarize, the Russia part of our trip was outstanding.  Krasnodar is a beautiful city of a million residents that we easily navigated on foot and enjoyed exploring.  Krasnodar gets its name from Catherine the Great, who founded the city.  A statue stands in the city center where it was once pushed aside for a statue of Lenin.  The Lenin statue is now gone.

Krasnodar is not quite as modern as Moscow.  Still, the entire area is gearing up to host the world for the 2014 Olympics in nearby Sochi.  We found beautiful parks, a vibrant city center, and a lot of culture in the city.  The weather in this part of the Black Sea region is similar to Texas so we were right at home with heat, humidity, and afternoon thunderstorms.  That just made the ice cream (made with real cream) that we bought from the street vendors taste better.

Nikolai's orphanage is 120 miles from Krasnodar in the village of Archangelskai.  A driver from the orphanage picked us up at our hotel for the 2 1/2 hour trip.  We met with the orphanage director, psychologist, and a government official who explained his background and medical information.  When we were finally able to meet him he greeted us and then went into a bout of 5-year old shyness.  I have no doubt that our speaking to one another in English only added to his anxiety.  The orphanage officials were baffled because he had been excited all morning about our visit.

 We tried again after his afternoon nap.  Kelcie, our 16-year old daughter, broke the ice with him and he began to warm up to us.  We played cars with him, gave him a small stuffed lion to sleep with, and he took us on a tour of the well-maintained orphanage.  He has a quick smile and a good personality.  I did manage to get a hug out of him before we left, and we left him with a photo album with pictures of our family and our house.  The orphanage director has also allowed us to send him weekly e-mails.

The government officials with whom we met responded well to our request to adopt.  Having Kelcie with us was a plus in addition to the fact that we have already adopted from Russia and Sean is doing so well.  We were able to provide proof of how we would treat Nikolai, as well as the importance that we would place on his heritage.

Now we are in the process of completing all of the documents required for an adoption hearing in the Russian family court.  Once those are completed, notarized, and apost  illed (a document from the the state that authenticates the notary) then we send them to Russia for translation and the judge sets a date for our hearing.  Right now, we hope to return to Krasnodar in late June or early July for court and then bring Nikolai home with us in mid-July. 

The adventure will continue.

Visas - not the credit card kind

I once wrote about adoption that it is "not for the fainthearted."  I describe the process as knocking down a row of dominoes one at a time.  We are at that point in the process where we do what we need to do at the moment whether it makes sense or not.  Papers have to be signed and notarized.  Then another paper, called an apostille, has to be obtained from the State to authenticate the notary.

Yesterday I drove to Houston to apply for our entry visas.  For those unfamiliar with visas, this is a document placed inside your passport that gives you permission to enter a country for a specific purpose (tourism, work, etc.) for a specific period of time.  American citizens can enter many countries in Europe without a visa, but Russia requires you to obtain permission to enter.  The process allows them to control who can enter, how long you stay, and keep track of you while you are there.  Staying in the country after your visa expires leads to legal consequences.  To be fair, Russian citizens go through a similar procedure to enter the U.S.

Countries can be fussy about who crosses their borders.  I remember that when I lived in Africa, Tanzania and Kenya would not let visitors from one country enter the other.  Because of apartheid, some African nations would not allow someone with a South African entry stamp in their passport enter their county.  So, South Africa would give us "loose-leaf" visas to stamp, otherwise we would have to obtain a duplicate passport just for traveling to South Africa.  But I digress.

The Russian consulate conducts this application process daily between 9am and noon, so I left Weatherford at 3am.  I allowed enough time for a couple of stops and Houston's morning traffic, so I managed to arrive right on time thanks to Iris, the voice on my GPS unit.  A polite Russian gentleman pointed me toward a chair in front of the window where visa  business is conducted.  The window was closed.  Others who arrived after me were pointed toward the waiting room chairs with the simple explanation of, "Line."

After about 45 minutes the window opened and a helpful Russian woman assisted me with the application.  She explained that the expedited visa process takes 3 business days not counting the day of application.  Since Monday is a Russian national holiday, our visas will not be ready until Tuesday afternoon at 4:00.  If we wanted them returned to us by FedEx then they would not be picked up until Wednesday morning to be delivered on Thursday before we leave on Friday.  She was uncomfortable with that slim margin of error.  With all due respect to the Federal Express Corporation, I agreed with her, took back my FedEx envelope and made plans to return on Tuesday to pick up our passports with visas affixed.  Everything else was in order; applications printed on two sides rather than two sheets of paper, black ink with block letters and one letter per block, every question completed, photos affixed, blank pages available in the passports, and a money order for the processing fee attached.

I was out of the consulate at 10:15 with another domino knocked down.  The adoption process is wearying, but temporary.  The real goal is the relationship with our son that will last for a lifetime.

In my younger days I imagined entrance to heaven in a similar manner.  I would wait in a line in a lobby before being called to a window to present my application that I would nervously hope was correctly completed.  Somewhere in the process a giant video of my life would be played for everyone to see with appropriate emphasis given to the embarrassing moments.  For some reason, I envisioned that a certain measure of shame for my mistakes was required before my heavenly passport could be stamped and I could slide with relief through the pearly gates.

I have, I think, a more healthy understanding of grace these days.  The blood of Christ covers my shame and stamps me as his own.  I don't know all the details of what will take place.  I just know that I won't be worried about FedEx, filling out the application in black ink with block letters, putting the photo in just the right spot the right way, having a money order rather than a check or credit card, or sitting in front of a window waiting for somebody to help me.

I stopped long ago of thinking about heaven, and discipleship, as a fill-in-the-blank process of seemingly endless checklists that knocks down a series of dominoes.  I see it now as a relationship with Jesus Christ who has welcomed me, shame and all, into his presence for eternity.  No visa required.

Nikolai

Last summer my wife and I began to discuss adopting a second child from Russia.  We adopted our son Sean in 2004 when he was 9 months old.  Now that he is 6, we thought about having a little brother for him.  Of course, having two little boys in the house at my age will present quite a challenge, especially when you add a teenage daughter to the mix!  Eventually, we decided that we have the means, the opportunity, and the desire so we should proceed.  Sean has been a blessing to us (as is Kelcie) and we simply feel that God has put this desire in our hearts.

Ultimately, my heart is touched by these facts gleaned from the website of  Buckner International Adoption:

A recent UNICEF report states that there are more than 750,000 children and teenagers living in institutions in Russia. The annual number of children left without parental care has more than doubled over the last 10 years, despite falling birth rates.

Some 10,000 young people graduate from the state-run orphanages every year. And at least 40 percent of these graduates eventually end up in prisons, while one in ten will commit suicide.

Last week, Lottie and I accepted a match with a 5-year old boy named Nikolai who lives in Krasnodar, Russia.  Krasnodar is located in the Black Sea region near the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics.  We have been granted some limited information about his background and health, and we have consulted with a pediatrician who specializes in international adoption.

After accepting the match, we were invited to visit Nikolai's orphanage on May 17-19.  Lottie, Kelcie, and I will leave on May 14 to travel from DFW through New York and Moscow to arrive in Krasnodar on the 15th.  We'll have a day to rest and explore Krasnodar before we meet Nikolai on Monday.  We'll get to see him a couple of times each day for three days while also meeting with orphanage and government officials about our formal request to adopt him.

The procedure will call for us to return home, submit more paperwork, and wait for a court date to appear before a judge in Krasnodar requesting adoption.  A lot of things could happen before then, most notably another Russian family requesting to adopt him.  We want what is best for Nikolai, and pray that God will grant that for him whether that is to live in our home or that of someone else.  At this point we want to be faithful to what is right in front of us, which is to proceed with the next step.

Friends have stepped forward to take care of Sean while we are away.  I don't think he could manage the long trip.  At the same time, this will be his first time to be away from both parents since his adoption.  He is excited about the possibility of being a big brother (at least in as much as he understands it at the moment), and has Nikolai's picture over his bed to look at before he goes to sleep.

The final detail for our trip is securing our Russian visas.  We are sending off for them today and will hopefully have them in plenty of time.  I'll post more information as the trip gets closer.