Tag Archives: adoption

A Father With No Regrets

by Christina Fox, in category Father's Day

BARBARANNE KELLY|CONTRIBUTOR

My husband is a strong man. But, as our five children well know, he’s also a sentimental softie when we reach certain milestones. With each graduation, each moving out, and each wedding, there comes a moment when Jim will cry. Whether it be a speech or a toast or a quiet moment hugging goodbye, their big, strong father will break down in tears. This spring and summer, our youngest child graduated from college, will move to Austin to begin his new job, and marry his childhood sweetheart. It’s the Great Sentimental Milestone Trifecta. We’ll need tissues. Lots of them.

Jim’s tears spring from a deep well of love for our children. There are, however, tributaries of regret which flow through his heart. Opportunities missed, unfulfilled plans, whispers of inadequacy—did he do enough? Did he prepare them to go out and live in this world? Indeed, can any earthly father do enough?

Among the many word-pictures in scripture given to us to help us understand God, “Father” stands out. The first person of the Godhead isn’t only the Father to Christ, his eternal Son, but throughout scripture he calls himself Father to those he draws to himself, his adopted children. Through the prophet Hosea, God speaks these sweetly paternal words to Israel:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
    and out of Egypt I called my son.

. . . . it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
    I took them up by their arms,
    
. . . . I led them with cords of kindness,
    with the bands of love,
and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws,
    and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hosea 11:1, 3, 4)

A Father With No Regrets

Even though no earthly father can live up to the perfections of our heavenly Father, we still recognize in these tender passages the heart that beats in the chest of so many fathers we know and love. The imperfect love of our fathers points us to the perfect love of our heavenly Father, who will never weep for opportunities missed or hold regrets that he didn’t do enough for his beloved children…

Three Things Foster Parents Want You To Know

by Christina Fox, in category Adoption

SHEA PATRICK|GUEST

My family has been fostering for the last eight years now, and we have adopted two children out of foster care. I will be the first to tell you that I’m not an expert, nor do I have some official badge that allows me to speak on behalf of all foster parents. Every family’s situation and experience are vastly different. However, as I have been in foster parent groups or interacted with other parents who foster, I have heard common themes. I’ve heard similar stories. I’ve heard foster parents say things that the church needs to hear.

Three Things Foster Parents Want You to Know

We are not “good people.” 
This statement is one of the things that I most often hear when people find out that we are foster parents. While it is a very sincere sentiment, it is not correct. In fact, fostering many times reveals more sin in my own heart — just like marriage and the parenting of biological children does. It is a truly sanctifying experience. We are sinners in need of a Savior just like the children that come into our home. We are not THE Savior and not THEIR Savior. Fostering is entering into brokenness, knowing that we are all broken by the effects of the Fall and our own sin. In fact, fostering is choosing to step into someone’s brokenness. Foster and adoption care is counter cultural in that you are choosing something that will break your heart and choosing not to protect yourself. Fostering is pointing these children to the only hope that any of us have in this life — Jesus Christ. So why do we do it? Because we know that Jesus will show up in power in these broken places, even as we seek to be the hands and feet of Jesus to these children (Matthew 25:40).

We get attached (and that is a healthy thing.)…

A Letter to My Daughter’s Birth Mother

by Christina Fox, in category Adoption

In a world of seven and a half billion people, it seems impossible that my words will ever find you. Still, they’ve been on my heart for years now and today I feel compelled to send them out wherever they may go. Maybe they will find someone else who needs to hear them, or maybe, the same sovereign hand that brought a precious baby to me will bring these words back to the one who bore her. So I send them out and trust that God will do with them whatever He sees fit.

You have sent out and trusted in far more unimaginable and enormous ways than I can ever comprehend.This is why I write.

She is playing on the floor beside me, the one who has your eyes and your smile, and your laugh. I don’t know your name, and you don’t know mine, but those small pieces of you I do know—I know them so very well. They are memorized like a piece of my own heart now.You must be so beautiful, because she is.

My husband sometimes says that there is an empty seat at our table, meaning maybe there is still another child out there for our family. He does this to be funny, in truth. But I admit to sometimes noticing that empty chair. Except it’s not a child who is missing, in my mind.

No matter how much she smiles, your empty chair in her world will always be there.Loss is like a haunting. It’s a vital cord being cut, the ends left loose, never to be retied again this side of eternity. That cord searches for its other end nevertheless, with a gaping openness where there should be closure. Sometimes it looks like seeing a face in a crowd that isn’t there. I remember searching for my own mother’s face when she left this earth too early, and I have to wonder: are you on the other side of the world today haunted by the absence of a little girl? Do you see an empty chair too and wonder?…

Adoption, Visas, and Resting in the Tension of God’s Call

by Christina Fox, in category Faith

Last week, four of us gathered as elders’ wives to pray for our growing church-plant and our husbands. My friend, Susan, had news. She had officially registered to adopt! I felt my stomach flip. An unfamiliar mixture of joy and bitterness clouded my congratulations. I tried to shake it off, but I realized I felt (perhaps) how a woman who has been unsuccessfully trying to conceive feels when her friend announces a pregnancy. I wanted to be happy— I am happy— but a gnawing jealousy arose.

My family and I are planting a church in a “security-sensitive” country. This past year, two of our team families were deported and our own visa was put on hold (and still is). The anti-foreigner (especially “anti-foreign religion”) government has been sniffing out suspicious activity and deporting at will. It is not a stretch to say we could be asked to leave tomorrow.

At the beginning of 2018, before all the unhappy deportations started, my husband and I decided we were going to pursue adoption. A new law made it possible for foreigners to adopt, as long as the child was disabled in some way. We waited for the allotted two weeks to get our visa approved so we could start the adoption process. Two weeks turned into months, a year, and now 14 months. We continue to wait for the government to give us official permission to stay here.