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 In The Beginning It Was Broken

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Ideally, you would enter this world with no understanding that the world is broken.  Into a family with two parents who love each other, and you.   A family where poverty, illness, abuse, and other pain-provoking circumstances are absent.  A community where people are not concerned about their rights, because everyone is doing what is right.  That is the ideal.  

 

What we are born into is far from the ideal, for some more than others.  People say that adoption is a beautiful thing, and it is.  But it always begins with brokenness.  It is beautiful in that it allows us to experience the desire God has to adopt us as His own children.  But just as our need for God’s adoption was a result of brokenness,  so too are our earthly adoption stories.  Whether it arises from inability to care or conceive, or a host of other factors, it is clear, adoption begins with brokenness.  There are parts of being an adoptive family that bring us joy we find hard to explain.  Other parts remind us Heaven is the ideal, and we are a long way from home.  Sometimes I try to erase the scars life brings.  I do not like to be reminded of how far from the ideal we live.  My husband reminds me that the scars are beautiful for they are part of what makes us who we are.  Besides, the farther from the ideal we are, the more likely we are to look up instead of out for restoration.  Christ has come to restore all things.  He is present in our journey Home, no matter how far from the ideal we find ourselves.  May His grace be sufficient for all that is not ideal.    

 

But you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘“Abba! Father!”  The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs-heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. 

Romans 8:15

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