Lux et umbra vicissum…

A friend from our web board recently received an email that really got me worked up. She and her husband are both on the pastoral staff of their church, and they’ve been trying to keep the church family up to date on adoption happenings. (They’re mid-process right now.) They’ve mentioned their financial need to people, but they haven’t pushed that aspect and they haven’t asked people directly for contributions. She sent out an email to various church friends and family members the other day asking specifically for prayer support. I read the email. It was entirely about prayer support. If it even mentioned finances, it was just a passing mention of one thing to pray about. The email focussed more on the fact that we know many Christian adoptive families who have been undergoing spiritual attacks and her family would really appreciate some prayer coverage right now. The attacks others have had have taken crazy forms sometimes. For some people, they’re attacked on a financial front. One family had renters who suddenly skipped town without paying several months of their rent and they left the rented house in a terrible state requiring a lot of handyman work. Other families have had large ticket items suddenly bite the dust, like appliances or previously reliable vehicles. Still others have had their or their family’s health attacked. In one case, the adoptive father contracted a rare blood disease and, just weeks after bringing home their children, the doctors were saying he probably wouldn’t live. (He got some wonderful prayer coverage and, praise the Lord, made an amazing recovery against all odds.) Another family had two close relatives suddenly diagnosed with cancer. Many families suffer through PAD (see my previous post for more information on that). In any case, there have been enough people who have experienced trouble in the latter stages of their adoption journey that my friend thought it wise to try to increase their prayer base as they move forward.

In response to her email, a woman wrote back saying many troubling things. Among them, she claimed that adoptions were usually something people did privately and others only found out about them afterwards. She also said that people felt like they were being pushed into paying for my friend’s dream.

So I’ll address the first claim first. Quite frankly, I don’t know anyone in the adoptive community who adopted a child in secret. Is adoption something to be ashamed of??? Granted, things may have been done that way in the past. Women didn’t use to share when they were pregnant, either. (That was in the days when women either wore dresses that didn’t really reveal pregnancy – aka tents – or it wasn’t generally noticed that they stopped appearing in public.) Nowadays, in general friends and family like to be kept in the loop. We’re in the information age, here. It’s fairly common for people to have access to far more information about any given friend than they have about, say, themselves. When a woman is pregnant, her friends know her due date, her ob history, possible names for the coming child, how much weight she’s gained, and how many times she has to get up in the night to pee. And I know a lot of people would feel rather affronted if their friend suddenly said, “Hey, look! Here’s my new child!” without having given any lead-up to the event. They’d wonder why they didn’t know this was coming. (I know that’s not true of everyone, but it’s certainly true of some people.) The claim that adoptions are usually private affairs just seems rather ludicrous.

And now on to the comment about people feeling pushed to pay for my friend’s dream. My first comment is that my friend hasn’t been pushy in that area at all. If people feel pressure, maybe it’s their own consciences speaking. Mentioning a need does not constitute pushing.

Now about the whole “dream” bit. This got to me, because just about everyone in the Christian adoptive community would tell you that adoption for them isn’t a dream, it’s a calling. Asking someone to support a dream would be if I told people I’d like them to give me money so I could tour Great Britain. I’ve always wanted to do that. (If anyone wanted to send me there, I wouldn’t really complain, though right now I’d prefer the cash.) 😉 Asking someone if they want to help you to accomplish a calling from the Lord is a rather different matter. For starters, it gives people who maybe haven’t been called to be adoptive parents themselves a chance to take part in the ministry of helping orphans. There are plenty of people in this category, and many of them like knowing that they can do something to help. When they give, they not only bless the adoptive family, they also bring blessings on themselves by fulfilling God’s calling to help the helpless (check out the end of James 1 in the Bible for just one place He talks about it). If we believe that it’s a wonderful thing to help missionaries in their calling, why is it any less wonderful to help adoptive parents in theirs?

Back to one thing I find significant here: my friend’s email, as stated before, was entirely about requesting prayer support! The response she received made it sound like she shouldn’t even be asking for that. Why not??? The Bible also tells us to bear each others burdens and to pray for each other. If one part of the body is in need, should the other parts just ignore it? No. They should try to help it. Banding together in prayer is a wonderful way to do that, and is sometimes the only way a person can help.

Everyone has their own background, their own experiences, from which they’re working. I don’t know why this person found my friend’s email so troublesome, but my prayer is that, maybe through my friend’s adoption experience, God would help her to see that requesting prayer for needs, and even giving to others to accomplish God’s will, are incredibly loving acts worthy of our support.