Andy's Turn

Bethany did a great job describing how we came to decide to pursue the adoption of a child. For me, making that decision (and now, telling people about it) was exciting, exhilarating, overwhelming, and a little scary. Without a doubt, something in our hearts has shifted in a pretty profound way which is hard to explain but is, I suppose, one of the purposes of this blog.

About a year ago I wrote a little piece of reflection on the baptism of Abby Clark, the first Down Syndrome orphan I've ever had the privilege of meeting. If you'd like to read it, you can find it here.

If I were to add anything to Bethany's post, it would be to describe a run I took after the possibility of adopting first came to our attention. On this run (on which ironically, or providentially, I was training for a race that I was running to raise money for Down Syndrome adoptions!) I started to think of all the reasons we had not to adopt. You can read a nice summary of these in Bethany's post, which might all be stated this way: it would be profoundly inconvenient. And it would. And it is. And it probably will be, in certain ways.

But as I ran, inconvenience started to sound like a pretty lame reason. In fact, I realized that this orphan on the other side of the world was a real, living, breathing child. This still amazes me. (As I write this, at 10:15 pm Eastern US time, he is probably sleeping, but may be stirring for the day ahead of him.) And, as I ran, it became clear to me that the opportunity had presented itself to literally change this orphaned child's life. The convenience or inconvenience of it paled in comparison to the magnitude of the opportunity before me. At the risk of considerably overstating things, where would I be if Mary had responded to the angel Gabriel by saying, "I'd really rather not, this sounds really inconvenient!" Or what if early Christians in ancient Rome had chosen not to rescue the victims of infant exposure? Was it any more convenient for them?

All of a sudden, I was displeased, maybe better to say convicted, about how anxious I was to maintain my pretty little life, to manage things so carefully that risk (and faith?) was managed out of my life altogether. And I became aware that this was a pretty good strategy to live a boring, meaningless, safe life.

If this sounds a bit overdramatic (and I admit it might, it's been a long day), I should also add that this processing continued for the weeks and months to follow, and we tried to do a careful and responsible review of whether this was indeed something that we felt called to do. And all I can say is that it is, assuredly. There are many questions yet to be answered, many challenges that lie ahead, a lot of paperwork and errands (and, cough, fundraising). But something happened on that run and I think it's a good thing.

Bethany is astonished at how long this is taking me to write so I'll sign off now.

Andy