The other day I was telling Jaxon about the first time we saw him in Taiwan.

I told him about the super long plane flight (14 hours).  I told him about how excited we were to see our little boy.

I can remember it like it was truly yesterday.  We met Ted (www.thehomeofgodslove.org) at the airport and he took us straight to the hotel where Bev, his wife, was watching Jaxon.  We went into a YMCA hotel (have no clue why I remember that—probably because I was like why is there a YMCA here).  We etered into the elevator and went up to their room.

When we got to the room, I remember feeling nervous, excited and almost a sense of everything is going to be OK type feeling.  We went in and there was our little man, wrapped up like a chipotle burrito.  I remember thinking holy cow—this is my son.  Even though he has a different color of skin than mine and you can’t see any resemblance of me in him physically I knew that this was my son.

God has placed him in our lives and we chose to do adopt him into our family.  Which to me is a crazy beautiful thing.  I am so excited about the possibilities of what our son can and will do in his life.  But what I am more excited about is that he represents, to me at least, living proof that you can adopt and you can love someone even when they are not a biological child.  He represents a living out of the scripture verse James 1:27: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

I am not patting myself or my wife on the back for following God’s Word, He knows I fail at so many other levels its not even funny.  But I think what I am trying to do here is put skin on the fact that this is a real and tangible way to live out God’s Word.  And it is possible. It is tough. It can be depressing.

But there can be no greater feeling that when you are handed your son to hold for the very first time and know that this boy who was once fatherless just got a daddy, all because we followed God’s Word.  What a huge blessing!

Pray for National Adoption Month!

It has been a challenging week for me, being a dad. I have had a pretty short fuse with the boys. I think it is just one of those weeks.

And once again I have a healthy respect for what my wife does day in and day out.

I think ,sometimes, people believe because we have adopted, that our boys must be different.  Kind of like— you guys did a cool deal for them by adopting them so they must be easy to parent.  Which is definitely not the case:-).  They are still two boys who love to make messes, say no, touch things they aren’t supposed to and well you get the picture.

I think one thing that people also believe is that their love for an adopted child will somehow be different.  Kind of like —they are not my biological child so I can’t possibly love them the same as I would a biological child.

As a guy I used to believe that myth: Ant that is this, because an adopted child is not biological then I certainly could not love them the same.

I can say that after I surrendered this type of thought process to the Lord is when I began to see that in fact I would/could love an adopted son/daughter the same.  After all God loved us—and we have been adopted by Him.

I have two boys, Jaxon (Taiwan) & Levi (Vietnam) and I can’t imagine loving them more or less because they are adopted.  I would die for them.  I can’t imagine my life with out them.  I have been shocked at the level of love I have for my boys.  They are my sons—whom I love just as any other dad loves their kids.

In short I would just say that if you have the feeling, “gosh it just won’t be the same” I would say: surrender that thought process to God and see what He will do with your submission to Him.

143 Million

aka—143,000,000

In my simple mind that sounds like a huge number.

In our world we are used to hearing big numbers.  For example: We have trillions piled up in national debt.  We (the government) hand out 700+billion dollars to companies.  Such and such cost 23 billion.  So and so bought x company for 15 billion. In a sense 143 million seems pretty minuscule.

143 Million is still a formidable number though.

Think about this…in order to equal 143 million you would have to take all the people in…

….New York City (8million+)

….Los Angeles (3.8million+)

….Chicago (2.8million+)

….then add to that the next 47 largest cities in the U.S.

….and then add in the population of Ireland, Nicaragua, Norway then throw in all the people from Denmark along with Costa Rica & Greece—–along with adding in the 62 million people that live in France and that would equal roughly 143 million.

So—when you put in those terms, 143 million is a huge number.

That number is really unfathomable, at least to me.

The fact is there are 143 million orphans in the world today.

143,000,000 children with no moms or dads.

143,000,000 souls.

143,000,000 people whom might never hear of the love of Christ.

 

 

This was taken at the ghetty museum here in Los Angeles. Fantastic place for a date…maybe not so much with your 2 & 3 year old.

Hey, big news!  This month is national adoption month.

I recently had dinner with a few of my friends.  After an hour of conversation, one of them asked—”So how about you, what is your plan for the future”?  You know, an easy question that required little to no thought.

I told him, “You know we (michelle and me) feel called to be where we are at DC”.  I then began to tell him, you know though I really feel like God has us in a place where we could begin to use our platform for adoption.  He said, “How so”?

I began to tell him about the statistic that there are 143 million orphans in the world.  And how there are 500k kids in our foster care system with about 125k of those whom are ready to adopt.

Going on to tell him about how these kinds of numbers could drastically be reduced if we, as Christians, began to live out what the Bible tells us to do.  To love and take care of the orphans of the world.

I asked what if we began to make the decision to adopt a child whether or not we knew if we could biologically have them or not?  Or if we didn’t hide behind things like, “We don’t have the money”.  We could begin to chip away at this astronomical figure.  This figure — that will only grow bigger unless we begin to act.

This is the short version of the story, but he ended our conversation by saying, “That is a radical way of looking at things”.

I don’t know if it is as radical as it is biblical.  When we live out the Bible it is a radical way of living for sure.

So this month…be praying how you might radically live out your faith for Him.

I believe that God has uniquely placed Michelle and I in a place in life where we can work at bringing to light this cause of adoption. Hopefully this month you will see and hear about the different things being done to reduce the number of orphans in the world through different people and organizations around the world.

Here is website dedicated to Orphan Sunday which is on November 8th.