Adoption. Poetry. Pop culture.

I grew up on the banks of the Missouri River in a small town in southeast South Dakota. The headwaters of the Missouri River are 700-ish miles west of there, as the crow flies, in Three Forks, Montana. The Madison and Jefferson rivers meet just upstream of the Gallatin River to form the Missouri River. This is called a confluence. I was 30-years-old before I knew this confluence was an actual thing. I visited the headwaters once, in the summer, and I stood on the bank and thought about a life shaped by waters. We are—as a certain angler might say—haunted by them. I lived downstream of this confluence for 15 years and never once thought about it. But I was shaped by their combined flows. I was shaped by the big, muddy story they told.

Think of this here website as a confluence of waters that maybe most of us didn’t think could become one. Or that maybe most of us have only been living obliviously downstream from. But the congregation is real, and the reality they’ve shaped as they cut through the limestone of our hearts is undeniable. Let’s take each of them—adoption, poetry, pop culture—in turn.

We’re all orphans—every single human on this planet—looking for our forever home (see Psalm 84). If adoption and foster care are anything, they’re everything.

My wife, Lindsey, and I have fostered five children and adopted three of them. It’s been a beautiful, wild, amazing, gut-wrenching, wouldn’t-change-it-for-the-world adventure. We did not, however, wake up one day and say, “Hey, let’s become foster parents.” This calling found us. This calling has shaped us and given us words to better speak about and eyes to better see our own family stories and our own need for home and healing.

Such is the way the God of the Christian Bible works. He, too, knows a thing about adoption. About caring for orphans. About making families out of less-than-ideal circumstances.

The Chinese character for poetry is a confluence of “word” and “temple.” The Greek root for poetry means “to move.” Poetry is a water that carries us to the place where we can name our longings, give voice to the traumas we’ve suffered and, most importantly, find reassurance that the forever home we’re longing for is a real place. Or, rather, a real Person. As St. Augustine said, “We have seen the facts, now let us seek the mystery.”

The bigger story about a Father who stops at nothing to make us his children inevitably finds its way into our smaller stories. The words about the Word who promised not to leave us orphans (John 14:18) shape the words we shape, and they show up in all sorts of places. In Hogwarts. In the Hundred Acre Wood. Gotham City. Middle Earth. Even in the anthologies of Dad Rock. “We live in the stories we tell ourselves.” But we don’t live in the stories we think we’re living in.

If you’re a foster or adoptive parent… then I hope the notes we take here give you courage and needed resources for the road you’re traveling. I hope that the waters we dive into help clear your vision, and Lord willing, help you better process all of the everything you’ve experienced, are experiencing and will experience as you let this calling take you places you never imagined.

If you’re not a foster or adoptive parent… well, nobody’s perfect. I hope that by being here, by walking this road with me and my family, with all the others looking for mile markers on the way to our forever home, that three things happen:

1. That you realize, more deeply and truly, that, like the swallows and sparrows (Psalm 84:3-4), God has made a home for you, and that this truth gives you the courage and creativity needed to shape your home after this eternal pattern.
2. That the smaller stories—from literature, to film, to sports, to emo rock—remind you of that home.
3. That you consider letting the work of fostering or adoption call you further up and further into the deep need of the world and the deep pools of the Father’s love and hospitality. Chances are really good that the county where you live is spilling over with children who feel exiled, unwanted and in need of a forever family. You are needed. And it’s okay to be terrified.

Is the shrug emoji an acceptable answer? I had initially launched with hopes of posting once a week, but that is proving to be unrealistic. For now, once a month is a good starting point. Sometimes it will be more, sometimes it will be less.

Regardless of the frequency, in these posts we’ll be taking notes (sorry, had to) about where this confluence of adoption, poetry and pop culture reminds us of the greater story in which we’re living. And who knows where this thing will go as the waters tumble up and over rocks and into the existential riverbends of our being.

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