Happy new year!
A passing conversation between Aaron and me on New Year's Eve:
"Here's hoping 2008 has good things in store for us."
"That would be nice."
"Of course, I guess everything that God has planned for us this year is good."
"Yeah. But we'd really like a year full of obviously good things."
We're launching into year four of infertility. No matter what, it seems like we'll turn some sort of corner this year. Pending results from some tests we're re-doing and another consultation with the new doctor, we'll decide whether to return to doing IUIs or IVF. One way or the other, we should be done with fertility treatments by summer. If a treatment works, I'll finally be pregnant (although I know pregnancy doesn't guarantee a baby). If not, we may start looking into adoption of some sort (embryo, domestic, international). Lord willing, we'll be much closer to having a family by the end of this year.
There are a few other "obviously" good things we'd like to see happen in 2008. We aim to pay off our school loans completely, maybe even in the first quarter of the year (20-ish years short of the loan terms; take that, Sallie Mae!). Ideally, we will look into buying a house when our apartment lease is up this summer. If school debt is paid and we no longer need my health insurance to cover fertility treatments, it might be unnecessary for me to continue working. A lot of potential changes loom on the horizon.
2008. It could be an exciting year. It may be full of obvious good. It will be, in God's loving hands, a good year, whether that is clear to feeble human sight or not.
Cheers!
Showing posts with label Adoption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adoption. Show all posts
1.02.2008
3.06.2007
Adoption & the Gospel
Listening to John Piper’s message on adoption encouraged me. I still feel like my heart is a long way from embracing adoption, but I have more faith that God will move my heart into the right place if adoption is how he wants us to build our family. As Piper outlined eight ways that our adoption of children reflects God’s adoption of us through salvation, I felt grateful afresh for the gospel. God paid a great cost to choose me, to take me out of the worst circumstances – my sin – so that I could call him “Daddy” and become an heir with Christ. Through this message, I recognized the significance and purpose of the way God likens his act of salvation to adoption. He could have described salvation in terms of new birth alone, but he purposefully inspired the writers of his Word to also use the metaphor of adoption. It uplifted me to see the value of adoption in God’s eyes. Piper’s elaboration on Eph. 1:4-6 brought tears to my eyes:
“Now I know it is sweet and uniquely precious to have children by birth, and that if you can’t, you look sometimes to adoption, so then it can feel like this is Plan B. God did not save you that way. He didn’t say, ‘Now, Plan A is to have lots of kids this way. But they blew that in the garden. So, Plan B, I’ll have to save them from slavery by adoption.’ That’s exactly not what happened. … His Plan A was, ‘I will save them at the cost of my Son that they might understand how much I love them.’ Which means, for our own experience, that we should think in terms of two uniquely precious realities. One is having children by birth. It’s unique; nothing is like it. And having children by adoption is unique; nothing is like it. You don’t need to weigh these off against each other as though one is better or worse. There are unique things that are precious and beautiful about [each]. God uses both terminology to describe how we become his children. We can think of both. And if we are moving toward adoption as our first choice or our second choice, they don’t need to be ranked like one is better or one is worse than the other. God is able to give you the grace to embrace adoption as equal to Plan A. Even if it wasn’t sequentially Plan A, it can now rank as a Plan A, equal to Plan A.”
Adoption certainly isn’t Plan A, sequentially, for us. But seeing God’s intent from the beginning of time to adopt me as his child, that gives me an ounce more faith that I might come to see adoption as a blessed plan for us.
“Now I know it is sweet and uniquely precious to have children by birth, and that if you can’t, you look sometimes to adoption, so then it can feel like this is Plan B. God did not save you that way. He didn’t say, ‘Now, Plan A is to have lots of kids this way. But they blew that in the garden. So, Plan B, I’ll have to save them from slavery by adoption.’ That’s exactly not what happened. … His Plan A was, ‘I will save them at the cost of my Son that they might understand how much I love them.’ Which means, for our own experience, that we should think in terms of two uniquely precious realities. One is having children by birth. It’s unique; nothing is like it. And having children by adoption is unique; nothing is like it. You don’t need to weigh these off against each other as though one is better or worse. There are unique things that are precious and beautiful about [each]. God uses both terminology to describe how we become his children. We can think of both. And if we are moving toward adoption as our first choice or our second choice, they don’t need to be ranked like one is better or one is worse than the other. God is able to give you the grace to embrace adoption as equal to Plan A. Even if it wasn’t sequentially Plan A, it can now rank as a Plan A, equal to Plan A.”
Adoption certainly isn’t Plan A, sequentially, for us. But seeing God’s intent from the beginning of time to adopt me as his child, that gives me an ounce more faith that I might come to see adoption as a blessed plan for us.
2.28.2007
With Much Trepidation...
...I give you my initial thoughts on adoption. I have been churning this post over in my mind for a while, and I am finally committing to typewritten words. This will be hard, I think, to write, because my thoughts on adoption are not terribly coherent, and because I feel a vague sense of condemnation (wrong, I know) for the thoughts I do have. But in the spirit of honesty, here goes:
Adoption
I have a large disconnect between my head and my heart on adoption. In theory, I think adoption is a wonderful way to build a family. In my naive, pre-marriage and pre-TTC years, I always thought I would want to adopt - but as a way to add on to already-existing children. I had an internal debate along these lines: "Four children sounds like a nice number. But do I want four total, maybe two or three biological and one or two adopted? Or do I want four biological, and then one or two adopted?" Oh, the days when I thought the destiny of my future family was in my hands... Now faced with the possibility of adoption as our only means to having children, my heart balks. Emotionally, that feels like a second best option. And it's not fair to an adopted child to be second best, chosen only because we had no choice. I know that my heart could change (I hope it does!), and I know that once I had an adopted child I would love him or her fully. But knowing that is a lot different that feeling that, imagining myself in that reality. I can't yet do that. At 27 years old, I'm not ready to give up on the idea of having biological children. That thought grieves me. So I don't feel ready to proceed with adoption.
Even if I were emotionally ready to do that, we have some significant practical roadblocks. For one thing, we live in an apartment and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While that doesn't completely eliminate the possibility of adopting, it doesn't exactly boost our chances of placement and it does limit our options to places and methods that don't require significant assets. Also, adoption is expensive (approx. $15K-$35K, domestically or internationally). We don't have that kind of cash lying around (if we did, do you think we'd still be renting?). And then we get to the when, where, and how. Because my dream of having biological children is crumbling, I find myself clinging to aspects of adoption that probably would not normally be important to me. Things that I mentally acknowledge as good, I emotionally reject as second-rate. For instance, I can see the benefits of open adoption (where you maintain contact with the birth-family, the most common situation in domestic adoption), but infertile-me doesn't want to let anyone else into our hard-won family. If we conceived and gave birth to biological children, there wouldn't be any "third-party parents," so I don't want them in an adoptive situation, either. Another example - I absolutely endorse the positive potential of transracial or transnational adoption (although I know each of those have unique challenges, too). But infertile-me is not so sure she could handle the bittersweet reminder of our inability to conceive each time someone commented on our obvious adoption, because our children don't look like us. I cringe at myself writing that - it seems so superficial - but right now I am not ready to field those kinds of questions and comments. As a Christian, I feel like I ought to adopt a child out of the worst circumstances, but as an infertile, I feel a strong desire to be protected from further difficulty, pain, and heartache (unreasonable expectations, huh?). Hence the low-grade condemnation I feel when I think about adopting...
So there they are, my very preliminary and relatively unflattering thoughts about adoption. I know that God can change my heart on these things, and I trust that he will if his sovereign plan is for us to adopt.
Adoption
I have a large disconnect between my head and my heart on adoption. In theory, I think adoption is a wonderful way to build a family. In my naive, pre-marriage and pre-TTC years, I always thought I would want to adopt - but as a way to add on to already-existing children. I had an internal debate along these lines: "Four children sounds like a nice number. But do I want four total, maybe two or three biological and one or two adopted? Or do I want four biological, and then one or two adopted?" Oh, the days when I thought the destiny of my future family was in my hands... Now faced with the possibility of adoption as our only means to having children, my heart balks. Emotionally, that feels like a second best option. And it's not fair to an adopted child to be second best, chosen only because we had no choice. I know that my heart could change (I hope it does!), and I know that once I had an adopted child I would love him or her fully. But knowing that is a lot different that feeling that, imagining myself in that reality. I can't yet do that. At 27 years old, I'm not ready to give up on the idea of having biological children. That thought grieves me. So I don't feel ready to proceed with adoption.
Even if I were emotionally ready to do that, we have some significant practical roadblocks. For one thing, we live in an apartment and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While that doesn't completely eliminate the possibility of adopting, it doesn't exactly boost our chances of placement and it does limit our options to places and methods that don't require significant assets. Also, adoption is expensive (approx. $15K-$35K, domestically or internationally). We don't have that kind of cash lying around (if we did, do you think we'd still be renting?). And then we get to the when, where, and how. Because my dream of having biological children is crumbling, I find myself clinging to aspects of adoption that probably would not normally be important to me. Things that I mentally acknowledge as good, I emotionally reject as second-rate. For instance, I can see the benefits of open adoption (where you maintain contact with the birth-family, the most common situation in domestic adoption), but infertile-me doesn't want to let anyone else into our hard-won family. If we conceived and gave birth to biological children, there wouldn't be any "third-party parents," so I don't want them in an adoptive situation, either. Another example - I absolutely endorse the positive potential of transracial or transnational adoption (although I know each of those have unique challenges, too). But infertile-me is not so sure she could handle the bittersweet reminder of our inability to conceive each time someone commented on our obvious adoption, because our children don't look like us. I cringe at myself writing that - it seems so superficial - but right now I am not ready to field those kinds of questions and comments. As a Christian, I feel like I ought to adopt a child out of the worst circumstances, but as an infertile, I feel a strong desire to be protected from further difficulty, pain, and heartache (unreasonable expectations, huh?). Hence the low-grade condemnation I feel when I think about adopting...
So there they are, my very preliminary and relatively unflattering thoughts about adoption. I know that God can change my heart on these things, and I trust that he will if his sovereign plan is for us to adopt.
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