Five Takeaways From Summit

This weekend I attended the Christian Alliance for Orphans’ Summit conference. I went to the conference last year when it was in Minneapolis and was very encouraged, so I went back this year in Louisville, Kentucky. Here are a few thoughts I came home with:

1. Compassion, mercy, and zeal for the cause will not last. Only a gospel-infused love for orphans will remain: a deep realization that we have been adopted, have received compassion, are objects of mercy, and love because He first loved us. This is the only appropriate motive in adoption.

2. Fear can be a great hindrance to adoption. In John 21, Jesus told Peter that he would go where he did not want to go, that his worst fears would come to pass. Then He said, “Follow me.” Russell Moore, a great adoption advocate, proclaimed to us, “Your worst fear in this process is going to be realized. Follow Him.”

3. “In moving forward in this process, we must rest in the realization that after we have fed His lambs, at the end is a table, a home, a kingdom for all of us ex-orphans.” This is something the Lord has been teaching my heart lately. He has shown me that though the journey will be difficult and my fears will be realized, I was not made for ease and comfort on this earth. We weep now, for joy comes in the morning. We die now, because we will be resurrected. There is a banquet waiting for us. We can wait.

4. Sometimes in our attempts to help orphans and those in poverty, we can actually do harm. Good intentions are not enough. Keep giving, and give more, but give differently. Brian Fikkert explains how: http://www.chalmers.org/when-helping-hurts/index.php

5. Though the teaching at Summit is life changing, the worship powerful, and the cause inspiring, I was most encouraged last year and this year by the people in attendance. The worship center was filled with 1,500 saints who have no status, wealth, or fame, but who have been powerfully transformed by their own adoption in the gospel. They humbly and tirelessly serve the least of these and imitate the adoptive heart of God, without recognition. I pray to be like these men and women.

Summit, see you next year in Cali.

Hope

Here's the deal. I have started this post at least 100 times, and I can't finish it for a number of reasons. The post is supposed to be about our adoption process. Most days, however, I cannot find the words to communicate what is going on behind the scenes. This is probably due to the fact that most days are ended without any more of a clue as to what is going on than the day before.

Days and months go by without an email, a phone call, or any update at all. This is The Great Unknown I live in most days. I find myself looking at my missed phone calls and emails several times a day, hoping my caseworker's name will show up in one of them. One in a hundred days provides some hint of knowledge that leaves me only wanting more answers. Answers that God alone truly possesses.

He knows where our next child is now. He knows if his or her heart is beating, or if the baby has even yet to be conceived. He knows if this child will ever even come, or if it is merely an idea that will not come true. He knows the mother who will bear and birth our child. He knows our baby's gender, race, background, and face. He knows him or her well.

Now, if only I can rest in the fact that HE KNOWS. God's knowledge of our future, of whether He has more children for us or even another day for our own hearts to beat, should leave me with a sense of comfort. Of rest. Of joy.

Some days it does. Other days I am dizzy in a sea of confusion and unknowns. This is different from pregnancy. In pregnancy, you know how many days (approximately) are left, the gender (if you want), his or her health background, and a hundred other things. You feel a bit more "in control", even if it is a false sense of control.

I am not complaining. I am very aware that every child is a gracious, divine gift of God. I am so grateful for the one that I have. I am entitled to none but have been given one gift, and am on a journey to see if God would find it best to grant us another.

The journey is one of hope. Hope that at the end, there will be a child who will need a mother to nurture, teach, and love him. Though we do not like the spiritual disease that leads to a need for orphan care or adoption at all, God has seen it fit to redeem the system in a myriad of ways.

However, it has become clearer to me that hope, not placed in Christ alone, is in vain. The end is not a wonderful addition to our family or even an orphan finding a home. The end, praise God, is Him. He is my blessed reward. My prize. My crown. This, sweet friends and family, is sustaining me. For if all that is waiting for me, though it is beautiful, is our next child, I have hoped in vain. If Christ is not in care of orphans, I can let the dream go. But if He is in their care, in their little faces, in their smiles, in their tears, in their pleas for a home, and I believe strongly that He is, I want in! Completely, totally, and utterly in!

I would ask that as the Lord brings our family to mind over the next, few or several, days, weeks, or months, that you would please pray for us. Most of all, that you would pray for our hope to be in Christ alone. He alone is worthy. The only end worth hoping for.

Restoration

On the Internet today, I stumbled upon a page of “waiting children” in the state of Texas. The waiting children are ones who have been, in one form or another, abandoned by their parents. They have been in and out of foster homes and orphanages for years and are still waiting, still holding out hope that a family might choose them to be apart of their family, choose them to love, choose them to call “son” or “daughter”.

The photos I gazed at today, page after devastating page, were of children of all different ages, skin colors, backgrounds, some having as many as five siblings in a photo; and yet they all have one thing in common. None of them have a person in their lives that they can call “mommy” or “daddy”.

I smiled with tears in my eyes as I looked at a few of the photos of adorable little girls with pig tails and sweet little boys with the biggest smiles you have ever seen, and I wanted to bring them home. Then, I noticed a few other pictures that caused my heart to break. These photos were of a little boy with crossed eyes, a teenage girl in a wheelchair, a baby with a cleft lip. And I wondered, “Will anyone choose them?”

I prayed over these children today. I prayed that God would bring someone in their lives that they can call “mommy” or “daddy”, perhaps for the first time.

Tonight the church staff worshipped together at our annual Christmas party. Towards the end of the evening, we sang the song, “Restoration”. Over and over again, the lines were sung, “You bring restoration. You bring restoration. You bring restoration to my soul”, and the Lord brought these photos to the forefront of my mind. As I began to pray over these children, I sensed the Lord pressing on my heart that, without Christ, I am one of the children in the photos. I am an orphan without hope, without joy, without a family.

I am the broken one, the one with handicaps and deformities and an unclean slate. And when looking upon my photo, knowing full well the thoughts and intentions of my heart, God points to my picture and says, “That one!” “I choose that one.”

The Scripture comes to mind, “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:14-15).

As we continued to sing, I pictured these children, sitting at the heads of tables in the kingdom of God, when the last shall be first and the humble shall be exalted. When God will ultimately, “…take my mourning, turn it into dancing…take my weeping, turn it into laughing…take my sadness, turn it into joy”. And I rejoiced tonight for them, fighting back tears. That perhaps one day they will find themselves to be lifted up, clean, restored in the kingdom of God. And I rejoiced in Christ for my own soul as well, that written out in the margin by my own picture is engraved the word, “Mine”.

The theme of this evening’s worship was on the brokenness of this world and longing for Christ’s return, and as I continue to think on these things, I plead with my Father that He would “Bring restoration”, because somewhere out there, these children I saw on the Internet today are still in the midst of great turmoil and pain, waiting for their adoption as sons and daughters, even as I “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).

“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18).

Conversations

Beau wrote a weekly email to the church staff recently that I found to be encouraging even to a layman. Here it is:

"Friends,

One of the great privileges that our vocation provides us is the opportunity to talk about God with people. Indeed, talking about God is more than just an opportunity He provides for us; it is a responsibility that He has charged us with. We are a community of priests. One of the roles of the priest is to help God’s people stay attentive to Him. This happens through words. Undoubtedly, God accomplishes this in other ways as well, but people come to and grow in faith through hearing the word of Christ. And people hear because others speak. God has called us to be a gospel-speaking community of priests.

And what a marvelous ministry He has given us! What a joy it is to be entrusted with the responsibility to ever be speaking to God’s people of HIs character and His gospel! However, as you know, there is a subtle temptation that accompanies our vocation and the constant conversations we have about God. The temptation is that we become better at talking about God than to God, that our comments and counsel about God cease to be an overflow of our communion with God.

Therese of Lisieux, a French nun, expressed this temptation and tendency piercingly. She wrote:
“Talking to God, I felt, is always better than talking about God; those pious conversations—there’s always a touch of self-approval about them.”

This quote has challenged my heart the past few weeks. It has helped me think more deeply about the pious conversations I am involved in every day and the propensity of my heart to be comfortable with speaking about God a lot and speaking to him little. Let me encourage you as the Holy Spirit has encouraged me these past few weeks to continue to guard against this temptation.

My prayer for my own life and ministry this week, as well as yours, is that our conversations about God would be an overflow of our conversations with God. I am praying that our meetings over coffee, the tweets that we post, and the counsel we share in emails would spill over from our communion with God. That there would be not even a hint of self-approval in anything we do.

Grace and peace to you, Beau."

Thinking About Denny's

Just a few days ago I was driving past Denny's, and I wondered as I drove by what their "new thing" is. Do they have a new kind of biscuit or pancake they are advertising to keep up with the changing times? Perhaps a gluten-free biscuit or nine pancakes for ninety-nine cents? And I realized that whatever is going on at Denny's, it must be at the center of Mr. & Mrs. Denny's worlds. They must be thinking constantly about how business is going, hoping the public will like the new turkey bacon they are using, and so on.

Then I drove past a Toyota dealership. I pondered how Mr. & Mrs. Toyota must be feeling right now. Lots of positive advertising from them on top of lots of poor press about them must be overwhelming. There are articles on the fronts of thousands of papers and broadcastings on hundreds of networks about the new Toyota recalls. They must be terribly worried, thinking the whole world is looking down on them, as they lie in bed awake at night, hoping their company does not fall apart.

In reality, however, very few people are genuinely concerned about Denny's new biscuit or Toyota's recalls. I happen to have a Toyota, and I spent about 45 seconds of my day researching if my particular model had been recalled, realized it had not, and moved on with my day.

If you are not already terribly bored and are still reading, you might be wondering what in the world Denny's and Toyota has to do with anything in the world that you or I might care about, and I will now end your (lack of) suspense.

My meditations on that drive down I-35 got me thinking about how everyone, including myself, has something in their lives that is consuming them, that is at the center of their lives and thoughts, and that they (subconsciously) believe the rest of the world is noticing and judging.

Then I realized that all of these people are thinking far more of their own condition than anyone else is, and that the general public probably doesn't care as much as they think.

As I drove further, I began relating this to you and me.

That no one is thinking about us as much as we are. That the four pounds we gained on vacation that we are obsessing about, wondering if people are noticing, are actually noticed and cared about by little more than ourselves. Those around us are thinking far more, if not only, about their own appearance than about ours.

Or the way we are choosing to raise our children, what school we will be putting or not putting them in, how well they are behaved, and so on, is far more consuming to us than to anyone else. Everyone else is thinking about themselves and what is the center of their lives, not ours.

The point I am trying to get to is this: I think we often take ourselves much too seriously and believe others are watching us far more closely than they are in reality. Thus, if we are trying to please anyone else by our appearance, our parenting, our housekeeping, our material possessions, and so on, we are doing so in vain.

At the end of the day, I thought about Denny's for about six seconds and Toyota for forty-five seconds, and if it were not for the lesson I was being taught, I would not have thought of them again for probably another year or so (or Denny's probably ever).

And if that is the case with Denny's, Toyota, you, and me, whom in the world should we be living to please?

It is written: "'As surely as I live,' declares the Lord, 'every knee shall bow before me; every tongue shall confess to God.'" SO THEN, each of us will give an account of himself BEFORE GOD. (Romans 14:11-12)

In the end, we will all be standing before God, who judges the living and the dead. No man or woman can help or defend or speak up for us. Christ alone can speak up for us, by the blood of the Lamb, and I hope to Him that we will be found, not conformed to the pattern of this world, but longing for heaven and seeking His kingdom above all other things.

May Denny's, Toyota, and whatever else we might pass today prove as reminders for us to remove our eyes from ourselves and our circumstances, and to instead be consumed with God, His glory, His people, and His return.

The Myth of the Perfect Parent

As I was reading Christianity Today this morning, I came across an article by Leslie Leyland Fields called, "The Myth of the Perfect Parent". These words popped off the page at me, as I so desperately desire to be that parent. My child is not yet old enough to determine if I have done a good enough job raising him in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Because as this article points out, our culture tends to think that you can judge the success or failure of the parenting by looking at the success or failure of the child. And what could be further from the truth, as the author points out, that even our Father God, in His perfect parenting, has rebellious, wayward children.

Since Haddon is still only an infant, I am not in this battle yet, but there are other battles. My parenting skills are not yet based on Haddon's godliness or lack thereof, but they are based on his sleeping habits, his health, what he eats, what type of diapers he wears, attachment parenting vs. baby wise parenting, hospital birth vs. natural birth, down to whether or not he uses a pacifier! These battles are temporary at best, though it is easy to find myself caught up in worry over these things, and if, at 5 months, he is still not sleeping through the night, I must be a terrible mom, I must have failed. And for the record, he is not sleeping through the night. There, I said it.

I am thankful that the Lord is already beginning to teach me that my attempts to control and to be the "perfect parent" are in vain. Although I know He will teach me this over, and over, and over, and over again as I raise my son. The goal is not to be a perfect parent. The goal is to be a faithful parent. And as long as my focus is on my own success or failure, rather than faithfulness to and love for the kingdom of God, I have failed.

So Lord, help us to do our very best, only by your grace, at being God-fearing parents, and to trust you with the outcome of our children, whether that be their sleeping habits or their godliness.

You can check out this article at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/january/12.22.html

On Missing the Company of Christ

Being at such a young church campus, I run into A LOT of newlyweds. I meet and talk with many of these new brides (of which I am one, being only married myself 2 and a half years), and I invariably hear the same thing from them all. On second thought, I hear a similar story from even those who have been married several years.

They, or we, oftentimes feel like we have departed from our First Love. When we were single it was "easier" to be undivided to the Lord, to depend solely on Him, to love Him most. And now that we are married, we feel our affections and devotion divided, and we wonder what happened to the romance we had with our Lord such a short time ago. We want it back, but we have no idea how to get it.

I propose the idol of marriage, of a man worshipped and depended upon over the Maker. And this morning, as I read from Charles Haddon Spurgeon, I was challenged in this area by the following words, and I wanted to share them with you:

"Tell me where you lost the company of Christ, and I will tell you the most likely place to find Him. Have you lost Christ in the closet by restraining prayer? Then it is there you must seek and find Him. Did you lose Christ by sin? You will find Christ in no other way buy by giving up of the sin, and seeking by the Holy Spirit to mortify the member in which the lust doth dwell. Did you lose Christ by neglecting the Scriptures? You must find Christ in the Scriptures. It is a true proverb, "Look for a thing where you dropped it, it is there."

So look for Christ where you lost Him, for He has not gone away. But it is hard work to go back for Christ. Bunyan tells us, the pilgrim found the piece of the road back to the Arbour of Ease, where he lost his roll, the hardest he had ever travelled. Twenty miles onward is easier than to go one mile back for the lost evidence.

Take care, then, when you find your Master, to cling close to Him. But how is it you have lost Him? One would have thought you would never have parted with such a precious friend, whose presence is so sweet, whose words are so comforting, and whose company is so dear to you! How is it that you did not watch Him every moment for fear of losing sight of Him? Yet, since you have let Him go, what a mercy that you are seeking Him, even though you mournfully groan, 'O that I knew where I might find Him!' Go on seeking, for it is dangerous to be without thy Lord. Without Christ you are like a sheep without its shepherd; like a tree without water at its roots; like a sere leaf in the tempest--not bound to the tree of life. With thine whole heart seek Him, and He will be found of thee: only give thyself thoroughly up to the search, and verily, thou shalt yet discover Him to thy joy and gladness."

Whatever it might be for you, whether you feel you lost Him in the closet of prayer, or in the idolatry of a man, go repent and find Him there. I will be over and over again doing the same with you. And I declare and hope with Spurgeon, "such a precious friend, whose presence is so sweet"!