Now I don’t want to paint an unrealistic picture of my childhood. It was pretty stinking awesome! I grew up in a home that in so many ways revolved around me. I was my mother’s only child, my grandparent’s only grandchild, my two aunt’s only nephew. To say that I was spoiled would be the grossest understatement of the century. If I wanted it, I got it. If I needed someone to play with, there was either an eager volunteer or teenage aunt forced into service. My aunts friends doted on me, and any guy that wanted the attention of the women in my life, knew that my approval was required for a second date.
And then this one guy named Danny kept showing up. My mother met him at church, and he had experienced similar past relationship hurts. They began to go on a few dates, and as the relationship progressed I was slowly introduced to the mix. If someone was going to pursue my mom, it was understood we would be a package deal.
One afternoon mom and I went over to his house, a little 2 bedroom home located on his families farm. We sat down in his living room and he gave me some toys. A box of army men and military vehicles. It wasn’t anything overly elaborate, and it wasn’t an bribe to win my approval. The toys were just an acknowledgement of my existence. They were for his house. If we were going to be visiting more often, I would need something to play with, and he wanted me to feel at home. The farm was a fascinating place. There were cows and tractors and electric fences. He even had a great big Siberian Husky named Max that terrified me, but Danny always kept me safe and I was never scared when he was around.
It’s funny what you remember. I clearly remember getting sick and needing to go to the hospital. I recall the dimly lit room with the beeping IV pumps. I remember him driving to Vanderbilt to see me and spend time with mom as she sat by my bed. I remember thinking he didn’t really have to do that. He didn’t, but he did.
I don’t remember him proposing to my mom, or the conversations that surrounded their courtship, but I remember getting dressed up in a suit like Grandpa and the two of us walking my mom down the staircase in the giant narthex at First Baptist Church to give her away in marriage. I remember being happy when he and mom asked if it would be ok if he adopted me as his son. I remember being excited about finally having a dad.
I had never known my biological father and the thought of having that sort of “normalcy” in my life was appealing. To a four-year-old a new dad meant a new home, my own room, and someone to call my own. As I have gotten older, I have come to a much deeper appreciation of what my father was doing.
When Jodi and I got married and decided to have kids, we let genetics take charge. My genes and her genes would be melded together by the Creator of the Universe and He determined all sorts of things from hair and eye color to any predispositions to disease they would get from our families. I love my daughters and wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world, but at the heart of it, Jodi and I had little influence over any of their traits. It was like those gum-ball machines that you put 50 cents in to get a toy. You decide you want one of the toys in the machine, there is an initial action on your part, but you have little control over which toy comes along. (Did I carry the analogy too far? Maybe. I’m just really blessed that I got some amazing girls for my 50 cents!) Regardless, of how they turned out, they were MY girls. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. I couldn’t deny them. A century from now, if scientists found my DNA and their DNA, they would see that we belonged together.
But my dad I don’t share DNA. He didn’t just drop some change into a claw machine and cross his fingers hoping for the best. He chose me. Yes, he chose mom and he got me with her, but he didn’t have to adopt me. There are lots of kids raised by their mother and a step-dad. It certainly would have been considered a noble move for him to raise a child that wasn’t his under any circumstances. But it wasn’t enough for him. He chose me.
He didn’t roll the dice and get what genetics gave him. He didn’t roll the dice at all. He saw me. All of me. Broken. Sick. Abandoned. Unwanted.
And he chose me anyway.
He wasn’t content to just be Danny. He wanted to be dad. My dad.
Nearly 200 years ago, a Baptist pastor named James Pendleton1 wrote about the similarities between the practice of civil adoption and adoption through Jesus Christ.
He said that in both cases, the child is taken from another family and brought into a new one. The adopted child sustains a new relationship with the adopter, and the adopted becomes an heir of the one doing the adopting.
No offense to Rev. Pendleton, but I would like to add one more. In each case, the adopter makes a conscious choice to enter into this new relationship with the adopted. He chooses to take him as he sees him. In each case the adopter sees the adopted and he ceases to just be “a” child, and he begins being “his” child. Brokenness and all.
I was accepted (even with my brokenness), I was wanted (In spite of it), so I was adopted (into a new family, into a new relationship).
I was accepted and I was wanted, so I was adopted
There is a reason why Paul uses the adoption motif to describe what it is that God does when He calls us into his family. In his letter to the church in Ephesus he writes:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. Ephesians 1:3-6
He didn’t roll the cosmic dice. He saw us. He knew we were broken because of our sin. He knew the thoughts that swirl around deep in our minds late at night and in spite of all of that. He chose us. He chose me. He chose you.
You were accepted. You were wanted. So you were adopted.
No wonder Paul offers God praise in Ephesians, and John seems so overcome with joy when he writes:
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! 1 John 1:1
To know that God chooses us in spite of our brokenness– not just to be raised as a step-child– but to be adopted as an heir…
It is too good to be true, but it is.
The joy would be short lived, though. No sooner did the process of my adoption begin, that it hit a massive snag and a giant threatened to stand in the way of our new family’s formation.
- Side note for you small world nerds out there. Reverend Doctor James Madison Pendleton lived from 1811 to 1891. He was a giant in the Southern Baptist world for a number of reasons. I found his comparison of civil and spiritual adoption in a systematic theology textbook written by James Leo Garrett, a professor from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (my alma mater) and a former member of my church in Texas. Dr. Garrett quoted Dr. Pendleton, but before I would include his name in my post I decided to do a bit of research into who he was. Apparently Dr. Pendleton grew up in my hometown, Hopkinsville, KY. Not only that, but he was ordained to the ministry in 1833 when he was installed as the fifth pastor of First Baptist Church in Hopkinsville. The same church that would bring my parents together 148 years later, and where I would be baptized two years after that. Small world, indeed. ↩︎
Jeremy Powell 