It’s not one of those things I can place my finger on when it started, the first time I remember being overwhelmed with the needs of humanity in regard to this heartbreaking reality.
You see, I’ve largely taken for granted that at family reunions, everyone knows my name. They love me. They have stories of my birth, and those times when I toddled around the kitchen begging to eat ice cream for breakfast. I’ve taken for granted that when I was young and other kids asked what my parents did, I had an immediate answer. “My mom’s a teacher. My dad, he works in the hospital looking at people’s bones.”
I take for granted that I live with people who share my DNA, and that I know those who gave me the particles that helped start this thing called life. Even my name. I take for granted that there were two wonderful individuals who carefully thought and searched and chose the parts that would make up the silk kimono of phonetics wrapping and defining the life of this girl. I take for granted that I know my story. The story of Heidi Benson.
Not everyone has that. Did you know?
Perhaps it was the time I watched a Home for the Holidays special in 3rd grade that my heart broke when I realized how many kids didn’t have what I did. Maybe it was the times my family hosted international orphans for months at a time, and I saw the thrill on their faces as we included them into our family. Maybe it was the way their eyes would sparkle when my mom bought them light-up shoes from Payless.
Maybe it was when I went to the home of my “little brother” whose mom had just died of cancer and whose dad was sitting in prison that it first burdened my heart. It could have been while writing my senior research paper for composition that I came across statistics about the foster care system that left me on my knees crying out to God. Perhaps it was those times I sat in the studio of my jazz musician uncle who told me of his memories of the world of adoption, and his search for identity in the madness of it all.
Perhaps it was how every home I stayed in this summer had some connection –they had been foster parents, had adopted a child internationally, in the US, or were adopted themselves. Maybe, just maybe it was the first time I read James 1:27 and bothered to think about what those words say. “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.”
Maybe it’s when I remember that I’m adopted. Though alienated from God because of my sinful nature, he predestined me to be his adoptive child through faith in the death and resurrection of his only Son.
I love kids. I want so badly to be able to express how spending everyday this summer with hundreds of kids affected my thinking. How I can explain that it exposed my overwhelming selfishness and pride? How can I put into words that it grabbed my heart, my emotions, the essence of my very being? How do I tell you that every time a child came and gave me a hug, a smile, or came running to me with tears dripping down their little snotty faces, I had a resounding peace that told me I would spend the rest of my life fighting for the lives of little bugger faced, greasy fingered kids.
I hate sin. I really do. I hate how it corrupts everything, how it warps what is good, how it distorts what is innocent and precious, how it tears into the lives of families, of people, of children. But praise God for his grace! Praise him for choosing to redeem us and therefore give us hope in this dying and desperate world.
Now it’s our call as believers to spread that hope, to share the gospel; this good news of the promise of Christ with everyone. It is our job to be the embodiment of that hope in the lives of people everywhere.
That’s why I want to work in the foster care system someday. That’s why I want to work with adoption. That’s why I’m at Cedarville, why I choose to study, why I choose to smile. It’s why I desperately try to be a living example of the pure joy that comes from knowing Jesus as my Savior, and my closest friend.
I hope I never grow weary of pursuing good, and that I never tire of investing in the lives of people. Human relationships are the actual conditions in which the ideal life of Christ is to be exhibited. Therefore, I pray that people are always my highest priority. Not grades, not grad schools, not prestige or recognition. I sincerely hope that someday my life is utterly unnoticeable. That people wouldn’t even think of recognizing me, because Christ is so much more evident. I pray that he may increase, and I decrease, so that he may receive all the glory and honor that so much due to his perfect and holy name.
I don’t pretend to think that I’ll ever be able to make the foster care system a perfect place, or that adoption will lead to perfect situations. We’re people. We’re broken. Sin’s made that an impossibility. I do hope that for God’s glory, and because of his grace alone, I can help. I can be an advocate, an encouragement, and an agent for reform. I hope someday kids can say I was someone who loved them, and someone who cared.
Kids are important to me because they’re important to God. They’re precious, so I’ll fight for them. My savior is the Father of the fatherless. I want them to know. This is my heart. Will you help me?
