Adoption has changed my family in dramatic ways. Many families begin the adoption journey with radical hopes and dreams but the reality of adoption soon hits them. This is true whether they adopt internationally or from the U.S. foster care system. Children need to be adopted because they come from backgrounds that are at best, very emotionally unhealthy, and at worst, complete horrific in all imaginable categories. Children who have been traumatized take their trauma out on their new families without even knowing it. It can be a painful cycle, but it is the reality of adoption. That being said, it is not the totality of adoption.
In this documentary, my daughter Annabelle sheds light on the painful side of what many adoptive families go through. But if you are considering adoption, take heart, the pain you experience is part of a process of redemption, the saving of a child from a life of brokenness and instead, opening them to a life of light and joy. I am so proud of how Annabelle was able to verbalize her feelings through this process in order to help others understand what adoption is like and how it affects families.
The Drop Box
Watch the trailer. Be inspired for what God wants to do in your own life as you open yourself to loving others the way He has loved us. God can use you just like he is using Lee Jong-rak to make a difference.
http://www.dropbox-movie.com/trailer.html
“Unto Him We Live” Blog
This blog “Unto Him We Live” was brought to my attention again this week by my daughter. This family has 12 children. They are also in the process of adopting 4 more from Russia. They have mostly adopted from Russia, but they also have a set of birth twins and one domestic adoption from the USA. Their posts are a humbling example of people who have given themselves to a cause bigger than themselves in the name of Jesus. They have adopted younger children and older teenagers. It is truly a remarkable family. Read their blog here.
Annabelle’s Adoption Story
My daughter Annabelle wrote an article recently for a California Fos-Adopt Agency, sharing her heart about the process, sorrows, joys and comfort that God gives through adoption. I thought I would share it here with you.
It was the eighth anniversary of 9/11-the day I met my little sisters. People had said it was supposed to be one of the most exciting days of my life-something I’ll never forget. It’s true, I’ll never forget it, but I must admit that at the time, I had different emotions mixing in my heart. Only a few days before, my life was perfect-I had a wonderful family and a peaceful, quiet home. Then, before I knew it, my old life began to slip through my fingers.
When we met my two beautiful, black sisters, they were sweet and outgoing, yet their story was painful. Although they were only 3 and 5-years-old, they had endured a lifetime of neglect, abuse, and rejection. Their biological parents lived dark lives, caught in addictions and enslavement to substance abuse. In the womb, my little sisters reaped the negative effects of their mother’s alcohol and drug abuse. When they were born, their mother rarely fed them, changed their diapers, or bathed them. The floor on which they learned to crawl was strewn with open drug baggies and other harmful objects. Their father’s severe, painful abuse was, sadly, a normal occurrence. They constantly lived between pain and hunger. Eventually, after two and a half years of this lifestyle, the Child Protective Services removed them from their parent’s care, or lack thereof, and placed them into the foster system.
Despite many foster families positive efforts, the large majority of Foster Care is made up of families whose sole purpose in taking in children is for the extra income it provides, a stipend from the state. My little sisters lived in one such home with several other children. They had no father figure in the home, or correct care and attention. Foster Care was simply a holding place until a family came to adopt them.
We were that family. We were the ones who had been appointed, not only to take them into our home as one of us, but to train, nurture, and help them develop into successful young women. In our inquiries leading up that day, no one had told us of the baggage they would bring with them. By baggage, I don’t mean physical luggage, but rather the deep subconscious battles they must fight daily fight a result of their past. We were called upon to help them fight those battles. Because of their background, and by no fault of their own, they were trapped by emotions and thought processes, which were absolutely false. They had been forced into survival mode at a young age, and eventually, it became a way of life.
Retraining minds is no small task, but loving is an even taller order. These little girls had become my younger sisters, and I must love them. Through their emotional struggles, my peaceful, quiet home, easy life, and joy disappeared. Despite my losses, I was to give them my unconditional devotion? No, that was the line. I simply could not love them. I began to put up a false font to give people around me, including my family, the impression that everything was fine. I could not let anyone know the real difficulties I was struggling with-I thought no one would understand.
Over two years went by, I was still bitter. Never in all that time, was I selflessly thinking about my family or, more specifically, my sisters. It was all about me and the new, uncomfortable lifestyle I had been given. My whole world had been flipped up-side-down, what else was I to do? I felt like my own home was foreign to me, because every time I walked through my front doors, I was hit in the face with the reality of what my new life was like. I lived in remembrance of the joy I had lost, wishing for peace I thought I could not have.
Then at the height of my pain, I was completely broken of all my bitterness. My hopelessness cracked in one word: Jesus. I was taught through God’s Word that I, in fact, was also lost, I was unlovable and totally undeserving of God’s love. No matter how many times I tried to say I was “good,” I realized that I was just like my sisters. Christ, who loved me despite my sin, was the perfect example of how I should treat my sisters. I thought no one would understand my pain, but really, I was the one who did not understand.
After this realization, my life did not become any easier, but my outlook changed. I was looking at my sisters through a different lens, one of love, not indignation. I began to understand that I was exactly like my sisters. I receive God’s love though I don’t deserve it, therefore I should do the same for my sisters.
Adoption is a beautiful process. It goes beyond the physical realm, and into the deepest parts of the spiritual realm. When we accept Jesus into our lives, we become sons and daughters of the Father-adopted into his kingdom. We are blessed with a love beyond all comprehension. Now that we have Christ’s perfect example, we are called to go and do likewise-to love like Christ has loved us.
My family and I have experienced great amounts of pain through this process, but ever greater is our joy. We have seen Christ literally changing lives. Because of his grace and mercy we adopted a two year old little boy from the Foster Care system in 2011. He is a blessing and joy to our home. Now, we are in the process of submitting paperwork for yet another fos-adoption.
Because of Christ’s love for me, an undeserving, unlovable sinner, I can now love others with passion beyond my own strength. Although I had to experience pain to realize that fact, I am now more appreciative of my adoptive place into Christ’s family, and am passionate to share it with others.
I encourage you to pray about foster adoption. It is a perfect picture of what the Father has done for us, and a perfect way to carry out his example. Each state has it’s own foster system. Adoption from Foster Care is simple and relatively inexpensive. The United States Department of Health and Human Services stated a few years ago, “On any given day, half a million children are in Foster Care in the United States.” Unfortunately, this large number is rapidly growing. The only way to overcome it is one child at a time. Each one of these children is a human life, waiting to be loved and cared for – waiting for a family. Maybe they are waiting for you. -Annabelle Tague
I am a 14-year-old student, daughter, sister and friend. I have been homeschooled in California my entire life thanks to the Lord and my wonderful parents. It’s through Christ alone that I live, move, and have my being.
Adoption Sunday
At Rancho del Rey Church, we recently spent a Sunday focusing on Adoption. How it affects families, God’s heart for it, and how you can be involved.
If the video does not display properly, click on this link to go to the video: Adoption Sunday
Interracial Adoption
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, this documentary by John Piper, Bloodlines, is worth watching.
Thoughts on Adoption and Christmas
About ten days ago, my wife and I stood in a courtroom holding our two-year old son. The court clerk asked us to swear that what we were about to say was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help us God…just like you see on TV. We said yes. Then we sat down and the judge asked us a series of six questions. I honestly don’t remember the exact wording of any of them. I was too choked up and unprepared for the situation. In our previous adoption, a judge from another county just brought us in and had us sign on the dotted line, posed for a few pictures with us and handed our girls a teddy bear each. But this time it was different. The judge in this case wanted to impress upon us the seriousness of what we were doing, and he did, in a big way. We left the courtroom feeling like we had just been involved in a marriage ceremony. We swore to be faithful to our little son Jacobi. We swore we would protect him and allow him to enter into the inheritance of our family and the full rights of what it means to be adopted. Having already had him for six months, we knew we were ready to enter in to this covenant. Since Jacobi is so little, I don’t think he will remember that day. But it was very important for him too. It changed the cycle of everything his past generations have been involved in and created a new path by which he will be allowed to walk in freedom and truth. For me, It was one of the most meaningful days of my entire life. My wife and I were joyful AND exhausted after it was over. And the Tague family now has one more member. Jacobi Ellis Tague.
And then I thought about God. How He adopted us with a solemn oath, with a covenant written in blood and with the sacrifice of his own son. How he allowed us to enter into his own family through freely giving to us a member of his real family, Jesus Christ the righteous one. That is what Christmas really is. The giving of one person, Jesus, for the adoption of many sons and daughters. Christmas is the day we remember what has been given, so that we can receive.
Orphan Sunday Coming Nov. 6th
There are many diverse callings for us to be involved in as Christians. In our modern world, we are aware of needs through modern media that we would not even have known about in former ages. One of the needs that the Christian
Church is beginning to address is the overwhelming need of orphans in our own country and around the world. In Psalm 68:5-6 God is called “The Father to the fatherless and the defender of widows. This is God whose dwelling is holy. God places the lonely in families;” Having adopted three children, I can personally attest to the life changing ministry that adoption provides to children who need parents. Over the last two years, as my family has grown from three to six children, my wife and I have experienced all the ups and downs of joys and struggles imaginable. We have been stretched beyond our limits and also known the joy of literally changing the lives of kids who were destined for a different life without our intervention. It is still very difficult for me to put into words. My wife Kelli and I try our best to describe it like this: We say that there have been three events that have drastically altered our lives: 1) Getting saved. 2) Our decision to home school our children. 3) Adopting children.
In adopting kids, we have learned how drastically a family environment in Christ can change the life of a child. We have also learned how drastically a child needing love can upset the regular balance of a normal family. I don’t say these things to scare you off. But I am very serious about the reality of adoption. It is a life changing calling, much like becoming a missionary to a foreign culture would be a life changing calling. You should not enter into it without much prayer, thought and counsel from those who have already adopted. But before I scare you away from adoption, let me say this: God drastically gave up everything for us in Christ. Jesus came to the earth and became one of us so that we could come to know God. Through Christ, we have been adopted into God’s own family. I believe that God will call many Christian families to adopt children in order to picture the life altering benefit we have received in Jesus. There are many different types of adoption and many different experiences of adoption. There is international adoption, relinquishment and adoption from the foster care system, to name just a few. Each type of adoption has its own joys and challenges. In thinking about whether adoption is right for you, consider the following suggestions:
-Do you have a strong walk with Christ?
-Do you have a healthy marriage?
-If you have children, do you love parenting?
If you can’t answer yes to those questions, you may want to re-consider adoption. Not everyone is called to adopt children, but some are. Are you called? In my own personal experience, adopting my three younger children was the fulfillment of a dream that God gave to my family and the cause for tremendous spiritual growth. It has also caused three young children to come into the kingdom of God.
If you would like more information about adoption, please visit the Orphan Sunday web site.
Or, email me at Matt@ranchodelreychurch.org, I would love to talk with you about it.
(This blog is from the upcoming Rancho del Rey Church email newsletter, Fall 2011)
Adoption
This is a short video from David Platt’s church on what God is doing in the hearts of families that are choosing to adopt and foster children. God loves Adoption. http://www.brookhills.org/local/adults/care-for-children.html
Sitting in the Stands
My daughter is in high school and plays JV volleyball for her home school academy. Tonight the varsity girls team played after her game so we stayed and watched. Unusually, the varsity team played a different school than the JV team. The team they played was from an academy also. Not an academy where most of the girls come from two parent Christian homes where the income is middle to upper middle class with fathers and mothers who sit in the stands and cheer them on like my daughter does. These girls came from an academy for foster kids. They didn’t have parents in the stands to encourage them. They did have ONE friend who sat in the stands with a sign who was cheering for them. But no moms and no dads. No grandparents. Just a coach who was encouraging them and a friend or two.
The varsity team from my daughter’s academy creamed them. But by the time that was happening, I wasn’t focused on the score any more. I was focused on how these unique young women were playing the game. They were trying their best to win. They were getting stomped on, but they continued to smile, continued to strive for every ball, continued to high five each other, continued to get up from the ground and play the next point.
For anyone who has played sports, that doesn’t seem very remarkable. Everybody takes their licks now and then from a better team. But for anyone who knows anything about a child in the foster care system, this is completely remarkable. As I sat in the stands tonight, I thought about the difference between my daughter’s team and theirs. Having adopted two girls from the foster care system, I understood slightly better than most what was happening. Allow me to give you a run down: We will call my daughter’s home school academy school A and the foster academy school B.
Girl from school A, the Home schooled Christian academy, serves the ball over the net. This girl has been lovingly groomed by her parents to understand the values of love, trust, acceptance, faith, family, and joy since before she even understood that she was an individual. She has been raised in a (usually) large family with a father that provides financially for her and protects her and a mother that creates a home of encouragement, responsibility and love. Her mother and father care enough about her to educate her personally, most times at a personal sacrifice, which creates an opportunity for her to be in the top 10% of SAT scores of high schoolers across the nation. She is better prepared than most girls her age to understand the principles of responsibility that would allow her to hold down a job, thrive in adult relationships, communicate in mature ways and create opportunities for others in her home, church and community. In this circumstance, she has also been given Jesus, the most vital and important relationship a person can have.
As the ball soars over the net to the other side, girl from the school B waits to hit the ball. This girl is anxious for a number of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the game. She was taken out of her home sometime before she could really understand what was happening but too late to forget that awful day, which is seared in her mind forever. Her mother was a drug addict and she does not know who her father is. She had to fend for herself to receive food because her mother often forgot about her. She was abused in many ways, not the least of which was neglect. From her earliest possible memories, she has had to fend for herself. She incorporated this process to such a degree that she now fails to allow others to enter her heart in the ways that are most important. But this doesn’t matter much because she has been moved from place to place, as many as ten times, from foster homes that sometimes resembled families, to foster homes that looked nothing like a family. In each of these places her survival skills have been strengthened but her emotional skills and ability to trust have atrophied. She becomes more and more like two different people. A bubbly teenager with bright eyes and an engaging personality on the outside, and a watchful, tiny, fearful and desperately lonely child on the inside. This girl will only graduate from high school with a tremendous amount of help from mentors, social workers and teachers. Even if she does graduate, within a year of her turning eighteen and being turned out of her last foster home, the statistics tell us that she has a 30-40% chance of being homeless for a time. And why should that surprise us? She has not received the careful and loving support of a mother and a father. She has not had anyone to teach her the skills so necessary to survive in the adult world. She doesn’t understand the dynamics of proper communication and empathy. She only understands that she must, at all costs, and in every way, for every possible piece of sustenance, fend for herself. That is the one rule which trumps all other rules. She will likely become pregnant at a young age, struggle with addiction to drugs or alcohol, and succumb to a relationship with a man who is the worst sort of man, an unemployed, drug dealing, abusive, lazy monster who will inseminate her and then leave when she begins to feel sick from the pregnancy.
So when I saw the girls from school B hitting the ball back over the net as well as they could, I cried out to God that people from families that have kids in school A would begin to see the need of the children who end up having to go to school B. I asked God that they would understand how they could begin to help keep the next generation from experiencing anything like what the girls in school B have had to live with. I prayed later with loud cries that God would open the hearts of Christian families to begin to see the incredible difference they could make in the lives of children by adopting them.
Adoption comes from the very heart of God. It is the pre-eminent symbol he has chosen to use to allow us to see what He has done for us in Christ. It is something which relays his very heart to other human beings. Christians, especially home schooling families with so much love to give, could be the conductors of life changing transformation to thousands of young people. It is so costly that you will give up many things for it. You will give up time, energy, sanity, money, and safety. But it seems to me that God did the very same thing when he chose to adopt us.
I won’t tell you the score at the end of the game, but I went up to the coach from school B afterward and said, “Please tell your girls that they played with real class today. Real class.”
“Thank you.” She said. “We’ve been working on that lately.”
I was holding back tears.
If you would like resources to begin to learn about the journey of adoption, visit this site.
About
Matt was born and raised in Carlsbad, Calif. Although he grew up in a devout Christian home, he struggled and rebelled against the Lord as a teenager. However, at eighteen, Matt gave in to God’s love and submitted to Jesus. Soon after, he met and married his wife Kelli. They now have six children and love the role that God has given them as parents.
In 1998, Matt graduated from Vanguard University with a degree in Ministry and Leadership. He is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Biblical Studies from Westminster Seminary, California. For the last eighteen years, he has worked for a variety of Christian ministries including Horizon Christian Fellowship, the Christian Research Institute, and Carlsbad Community Church.
In 2005, the Lord called Matt to plant Rancho del Rey Christian Church in Carlsbad, California. Matt’s heart desire is to help people see Jesus in all his glory. He and his wife are passionate about parenting, adoption, The Bible, missions, discipleship and helping people see Jesus in every aspect of life. His life’s calling is to present the Jesus of the Bible to people who don’t yet believe, and to encourage fellow Christ-followers to live in complete, life-altering obedience to God. He recently authored his first book, Read the Word: The Bible was written for you.
