And the hope found in the incarnation of Christ.
At the end of a family Advent devotional time a few weeks ago, I closed with this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer’s right-before-bed liturgy:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
James made a comment about remembering how good it was to pray that prayer when loved ones were dying last year.
James may not have been thinking about his deceased biological father when he said these words. But his words opened up something in Rain, our middle child. She started talking about her bio parents. I took Lily and James to bed, and when I came back upstairs, Lindsey and Rain were still talking on the couch. I sat next to Rain and listened as she wished, through tears, that she had memories of her bio parents. That she could talk to them. She saw James experience all of these things last year. And now here she was, grieving people she has no solid memories of. People she has never really talked about much before, even. She sat there in our living room wishing that her bio parents would read the Bible and decorate their homes for Christmas and believe in Jesus.
We told her that she was grieving. Lindsey shared how her own parents got divorced when she was young and didn’t grown up with her dad around much—but that God provided for her in other ways, and even went on to restore her relationship with her dad later on in life. Then she told Rain the even though she doesn’t know her biological dad, she has a real dad who will be her’s forever.
Rain kind of smiled at this. We hugged her and told her that it’s okay to grieve the hard things. And to be thankful for God’s kindness and the story he’s writing with her life.
In the middle of this conversation, Rain said something about how, sometimes, she thinks about her bio parents when she’s going to bed at night and cries. I honestly don’t know if that’s true or not. But I suppose it is. Or that it could be true. We all have something that keeps us up “when half-spent was the night.” It is equally as true that these unanswerable black gaps in our personal narratives can be filled in the light of Jesus’s redemption.
Lindsey and I are oddly glad that Rain is verbalizing these wishes and longings and griefs. It’s good and healing. It is a way to look beyond the midnight hour to the sunrise that’s creeping over the horizon in a certain gray hope.
The bio parent conversations can swing wildly from one instance to another.
Fast forward two nights. It’s late, we didn’t do any reading or praying together as a family before putting the kids to bed. I am in the kitchen putting food in the fridge. Rain walks up and says that she wants to talk about her bio parents. “Nope, not tonight,” I said. “It’s late and we talked about them the other night and I’m tired and we just need to go to bed.”
Dad Of The Year candidate, right here.
As far as I know, she slept through the night.
As I’ve processed these conversations, I was reminded of an article I came across a couple years ago. It’s by a Korean-American poet reflecting on her adoption by Americans. She’s describing the themes and tensions of her life—the same themes and tensions at the core of her latest poetry collection. The essay touches on everything from race, to trauma, to identity, to grief, to belonging, to the complications inherent within adoption.
She writes, “As a child, my origin story was a gaping hole I did not know how to fill. . . . Despite the fact that I do not remember, I carry the trauma of my early abandonment and displacement in my body. I feel it rise like a tide in my throat every October, my birth month.”
She then offers a warning about “the narrative [becoming] flattened” when “the vast majority of adoption stories are told by adoption agencies and adoptive parents” rather than by the adoptees themselves. “Through writing, I was able to fill the absence with language. On some days, the page became a vessel where I could wrestle with the specters of a lost family, country, and history. On others, it was a triage station, where I tended to the wounds of separation.”
This essay has stuck with me. As I’ve shared stories of our family’s journey through fostering and adoption, I try to ask myself, “Am I flattening my kids’ narratives? Am I being honest, fair, and respectful of their experiences? What will they think about what I’ve written as they get older? Will they hear their voice, or just mine? And, as they age, are Lindsey and I giving them tools to use their words to talk about their own stories?”
Friends of ours adopted their daughter when she was an infant. Growing up, she never said a word about her biological parents. It was never a topic of thought or conversation. Our friends thought she was totally secure, that there were no attachment issues. One day, their daughter was at a friend’s birthday party, playing volleyball. She was 16 or so. In the middle of the game, without warning, the daughter broke down in the sudden realization that her biological parents were somewhere out there in the world.
If I remember correctly, her adoptive (real) parents worked hard to avoid a major existential crisis and severing of their relationship.
In Christianity, adoption is presented as a way of understanding God’s redemptive love toward us. It’s always framed as a positive, as the epitome of how far and how willingly God goes to rescue wayward sinners. But in real life, adoption is not so tidy. Even adoptions within the same cultural context are vulnerable to doubt, trauma, and an insidious sense of loss.
The peril of writing my family’s story in real-time (or close to it, anyway) is that I don’t know how things will “end”—whether that’s a given season of life or the final marker of a developmental milestone. A decade from now, our two oldest kids will be 19 and 18, respectively. I would be lying if I said that I don’t worry about how they will process their life narratives as they hit their teenage years. And what effect it will have on their view of God.
These fears are not unique to foster or adoptive parents. Most, if not all, Christian parents do battle against the terror and uncertainty about how their kids will “turn out.” It’s what we do. It’s part of our lifestyle.
At a small group gathering some years ago, I was talking with a guy in our group about the future of his boys’ faith. He looked at me and said that failure or unfaithfulness wasn’t an option. He was going to make sure his sons kept their faith through their teens and twenties. He would be the one to work out their salvation in fear and trembling. I am paraphrasing a little. But the sentiment conveyed was that he was the one ultimately responsible for the outcome of his sons’ faithfulness.
I didn’t quite understand this at the time. It was before our kids came to us. As I listened to this dad, I was judging his white-knuckled Armenianism. It is the Lord’s faithfulness, I thought, that matters more than my own efforts in the upbringing of my children. God will finish the work he started.
I still believe that last part. More than ever, probably. But I can also empathize more than ever with the view expressed by that father. Fathering my kids, these kids from hard places, is my life’s work. Failure is not an option. I will do everything I can to ensure my kids don’t meltdown in the middle of a volleyball game or write a book of poetry that exposes all the arrogance and blindspots of their adoptive parents. Not today, Satan.
Then I think about the conversation we had with our daughter about her biological parents. Or all the conversations and experiences we’ve shared with James concerning his biological dad. How can I push back against these griefs and midnights? Will my sins and shortcomings as a father sow seeds that will ripen into a mid-volleyball match meltdown?
Too many questions. Too many white knuckles.
Two paradoxical truths about parenting. Truth no. 1: God is faithful. Truth no. 2: God’s faithfulness does not abdicate me from being faithful.
So I ask for mercy. I place my hands on my kids as they receive communion each week and pray the Lord their soul to keep and their hearts to heal from the hard beginnings of their lives.
Into and over all of this, the incarnation of Jesus offers empathy and authority. Empathy in the respect that Jesus himself experienced similar sufferings. His very birth was of a scandalous legitimacy. He was raised by Joseph and not a “biological” father. He was displaced from his home and culture at a young age. He would go on to be despised and rejected by people of his own culture. The creator of the world was no stranger to the strangeness of creaturely-ness, and all the muck and misery that entails.
As for authority, it is Jesus himself who makes possible our adoption as children born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). He did not stop at incarnation. In his death and resurrection, he trampled the gates of death and displacement and sin and trauma and all the effects thereof. His faithfulness will sustain those whom he calls to be heirs of an unbreakable family and kingdom. There are no attachment issues, no midnight-black narrative gaps that his scars can’t heal.
Christmas embodies both of these qualities. It preps us for Jesus’s return when he will judge righteously and make all things right and new again. Twelve days of Christmas seems hardly sufficient to wrap our minds and hearts around this.
It’s morning as I write this. My kids are asleep. Fresh snow covers the fields and trees outside our living room windows. The sunrise comes slowly through a bank of clouds low on the horizon. The Christmas tree lights reflect off the windows. Even though the days are growing longer, spring feels further away in January than it does in December.
Now the clouds are blushing pink.
Come soon, Lord.
This is such a beautiful read. Thank you for walking the path of healing with the kiddos.