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.
https://vimeo.com/41392386
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.
Is Christianity the only true religion?
Ravi Zacharias Ministries has been actively engaged in the question of religious truth for many decades. Listen to this cogent answer from one of Christianity’s foremost defenders.
The relevance of God
Oxford professor John Lennox discusses the relevance of God during a forum at Duke University.
Questions about Christianity – Will we know if our loved ones aren’t in heaven when we are there?
This is a great question and one that hits close to home for all of us. There are a lot of people we love that don’t follow 
Jesus. When we think about this, it causes sadness. Sometimes we wonder if we will still be sad in heaven when we think about them. It is natural to think and feel this way now.
The Bible does not give a direct answer to this question, but it does give us clues. One of them is found in I Corinthians 13:9-10 “Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.” These verses seem to indicate that when we get to heaven we will know much more than we know now. Some great Christians have speculated that perhaps our knowledge in heaven will so closely resemble God’s view of things that we will feel as he feels. God loves everyone who has ever lived. He loves even those people who reject him. That is the message of John 3:16. However, even though God loves those people, he understands that they have freely rejected his gracious and loving offer of salvation. Therefore, he is able to enter into loving those that have accepted him with his full love with the understanding that this is not what everyone chooses. Because of his greatness and glory, God is not drawn into depression or anxiety over the decisions of those that reject Jesus. Knowing that when I get to heaven I will be like Jesus comforts me and helps me remember that I will someday think, act and feel just like Jesus. I don’t know how, but he will make heaven a place of greater knowledge for me, greater love, greater understanding and greater fellowship than anything I have experienced here on earth.
This answer does not satisfy our heartfelt feelings for those people who reject Jesus, but we must remember that we will think and feel much differently in heaven than we feel right now. Also, as you feel hurt or sad regarding those in your life that do not know Jesus, take time to do two things. 1) Pray for them to be saved. the prayer of a righteous person accomplishes much. 2) Share the gospel with them again. Give them another chance at coming to know the love of God in Jesus. this type of heartfelt love and action pleases God.
Halloween
I read an interesting article today from the Resurgence on the history behind Halloween. Read it here and let me know what you think!
Questions about Christianity – Why hasn’t God revealed himself more clearly if he wants us to know him?
Why doesn’t God show himself more clearly to us if he is really up there? This question has been asked by countless people, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, past and present. Implicit in the question is the recognition that if God is there, and by definition is the most powerful being ever, he should really want us to know about him. Additionally, many people feel that if God is truly loving, then he should make it easier on us. And that is really the crux of the matter. We want it to be easier.
The Bible tells us that God is known by all people naturally. Romans 1:19-20 says that all people naturally know there is a God simply by looking at the natural world. It displays a complexity that could only have come about by the power of a master designer:
19 They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. 20 For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.”
Romans chapter one goes on to describe how all people choose not to worship God as the great invisible designer. We instead choose to worship other things. All of us possess a sin nature which naturally turns us away from God. We put the onus of relationship on him rather than ourselves. We believe that God should do more for us instead of us turning and acknowledging him. This is why people want God to do more in revealing himself to us. But what if God has already done that and more? What if God has already given us everything that was valuable to him by sending his own son to earth as a human. What if God has really given us his love in sending us Jesus? Wouldn’t that make God both right and loving in giving us all the evidence we need?
Some people will conclude that God would need to do more, like appear in front of them magically. But these same people live their lives with so much less evidence regarding everything else they do. They don’t demand that much proof for anything else they believe. This is sometimes referred to as the issue of justified beliefs. How much evidence does it take to make a justified belief? Christians believe that belief in a supreme being, as a belief that has been natural to all people over time for all of history, is still justified by us today. Others request more evidence or say that science has now canceled out the need to believe in a supreme being.
Christians have pointed to the fact that God must be known by faith. Not faith that seeks no evidence, but faith grounded on believable evidence and then stepping beyond that evidence into a relationship with the one toward which the evidence points. Hebrews 11:6 says “And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.”
So, in answer to the question of why God doesn’t make it easier to believe in him, I would say two things:
1) Perhaps it is already easy enough, if we will think about what is really going on in our hearts.
2) Perhaps God has already made himself known decisively in the person of Jesus, the greatest religious figure ever to walk the earth.
Think about it. Asking God for more evidence may be like waiting to receive a gift that is already sitting in your lap. All you have to do is open it.
Questions about Christianity – Hasn’t Christianity killed more people in the name of religion than any other faith?
This question has various names and facets, but basically, it comes up as “Christianity teaches love and peace, so why is it responsible for more deaths than anything else in this world?” This is a penetrating question in terms of why a teaching would be ignored by people who supposedly embrace it, but before I answer it, I need to clear away some of the misinformation.
First, Christianity is not responsible for more deaths than any other religion or movement in world history. If you take the communist dictators of the 20th century, they account for over 26 million deaths alone. In fact, nobody knows for sure what the exact toll is for Russia alone, whose communist leadership slaughtered untold millions in the last century, all in the name of a movement that purported to be for the good of the people. For more information on this subject, just read Jonathan Glover’s “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century”
Next, many incidents in the past have grown larger than their actual importance or statistics because of an ability to use them as examples against Christianity. Two of the most popular are the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials. Both of these circumstances are used to condemn Christianity and all organized religion. In reality, these events are indeed stained with instances of religious violence, but also with the reality of nation, race and historical circumstance. What I mean is that we look back on those events with a certain perspective that has been created for us by those that are against Christianity itself and the facts of the matter are much deeper than simple propaganda.
Regarding the crusades, I would encourage you to look to the writings of Dr. Christopher Tyerman, a professor at Oxford, especially his book, ”Fighting for Christendom.” Tyerman brings together some of the complex circumstances that were involved in the events of the crusades. Whatever your perspective, his writings will challenge the notion that the crusades were simple religion masking as imperialism.
The same can be said of the Salem Witch Trials. In all, a sum total of 25 people were executed as a result of the trials. This is a tragedy, but not on the scale of how the trials have been portrayed as evidence of the faults of religion. Some people think that thousands of people were executed as a result of what they have been told or read in history books. Additionally, though the trials themselves occurred in 1692-1693, as early as 1705-1710 entire churches and communities were apologizing for their role in the trials themselves. So, if it was Christianity that produced the trials, it was also Christianity that produced the repentance and sorrow to the families of the victims of these trials. Along with this, it must also be noted that the modern hospital system, university system, the model of the non-profit organization and other humanitarian organizations that exist today were overwhelmingly created by people who were explicitly Christian in their beliefs and actions. Therefore, the good that Christians have done must be thought of as well as the bad.
In just these two instances of the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials, an objective inquiry will reveal that although followers of Christ have been at times guilty of gross injustice, there are also forces at work which seek to distort those events for the purpose of vilifying Christianity.
However, even if these historical events have been distorted for use against Christianity, it does not thereby excuse the events themselves. Indeed, Christians must deal with the question of why Jesus’ followers don’t often seem to follow Jesus teaching about violence. The Christian doctrine of Sanctification teaches that as Christians grow in their faith, they become more and more like Jesus. But, Christian doctrine also teaches that we all continue to fall prey to sin, temptation, greed and evil. The history of the church it full of examples of people who sacrificially gave up everything: money, possessions, ease of life,etc.. in order to help others. The history of the church is also full of people who continued to pursue their own selfish gain after claiming to be converted to Christ.
Jesus told us that a tree would be identified by its fruit. A good tree will produce good fruit and a bad tree would produce bad fruit. At the end of the day, people to do wretched things cannot be associated with Jesus and his movement. Even though Christianity is a movement of heart change, it is also a movement where Jesus said, “they will know you are my followers by your love for one another.” Actions reflect heart intentions. Anyone who commits vicious acts of violence against others in the name of Jesus is not associated with him, even if they say that they are.
Jesus himself claimed the right to separate those who called themselves his followers versus those who really are his followers in Matthew 25. In that chapter, Jesus says, “Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord” but they won’t get into heaven. It is the people who actually do the will of Jesus that will be granted entrance into heaven. This is not a works based theology, but a doctrine which teaches that heart salvation will eventually be reflected in outward actions that reflect Jesus himself.
So, in conclusion, it cannot be claimed that Christianity is guilty of the worst atrocities in world history, it simply isn’t true. There have been people throughout history who have done terrible things, even in the name of Christ, but this can’t be placed at the feet of Jesus himself, who taught and lived a perfect model of God’s love.
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.
