Rarely do we make the effort to comprehend the tangible and physical manifestations of Christ in the world around us. As I write this, I’m sitting in the corner of a crummy seafood restaurant in downtown Dayton, OH where I wandered in to find coffee over lunch break. I’ve spent all morning in a Dayton courthouse watching as kids became permanent parts of families that aren’t biologically theirs. Every Friday morning they do adoptions here. It means a good end to the otherwise frustrating and often unrewarding week of paper work, inter-agency wrangling, and sad stories of abused kids.
The courthouse looked like something from prehistoric times as I stepped onto the second floor after being sent through the normal bout of metal detectors and desk clerks. Caseworkers and magistrate’s assistants alike were dressed in wild hair colors and Flintstones costumes to celebrate this year’s theme. Even the judge joined in with her giant inflatable “Bam Bam!” club to smack alongside her gavel at the end of a hearing . This is how they do National Adoption Day here.
Talking with all of the kids and their soon-to-be families as I gave the little ones crayons and coloring sheets, got them all snacks, and ran errands for the secretaries, my heart was glad. All the kids wanted to tell me about their favorite subjects in school, their favorite sport to play, their biggest talent, their favorite food, and all the other funny information that comes from the mind of a child. They laughed while I told them stories about “When I was a little girl…”, and giggled as we played house in the Styrofoam cave at the end of the hallway.
Talking with their soon-to-be legal parents, they shared with me about the joys and grief that accompany this journey of adoption. One dad sat and talked with me in the waiting room about how they really weren’t on the best financial grounds to be adopting twins…. The kids might not get all the newest toys, but they’d have all the love that family could muster. A mom told me of how she’d waited three years for all the paperwork to go through before she could finally call the abandoned little girl hers. Family after family, story after story; all so unique yet so similarly priceless.
And I sit in this poignantly smelling seafood café to write. People are sitting all around me reading their newspapers, sucked into their own personal worlds. It’s been strange this morning to watch some of my dreams start to show their nature in physical form apart from their theoretical existence in my imagination. It’s not all the ideological utopia I can paint things as in my mind. There’s administrative red tape everywhere, paperwork, formalities, long waiting periods, confusion, but somewhere in there, the beauty of taking a child whose parents can’t or won’t take care of them and placing them into the arms of someone who loves them… well, it still manages to take my breath away. To be enthusiastically accepted into a family that doesn’t need to love you; they want to, they choose to. Wow. All I can say, is if I ever do work in foster care I hope it never grows old. I hope the stories and implications of the concept of adoption never leave the awe factor within my thinking.
Did you know there are 129,000 kids in the foster care system ready and waiting to be adopted as I write this? Fifteen of those kids were blessed with homes and families before my very eyes this morning. Oh that such an impact within human action would never be seen as a common place event. The spiritual and physical are inseparable realities making up our existence, the world we live in. What a blessing it is to step away from the Cedarville bubble every now and then to remember that and to experience it firsthand.
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