Friday Little Bits: Adoption Training

I am very excited to be in beautiful Duluth, Georgia, with one of our 4theVoiceless team members, Tony Pillstrom, to attend the Together for Adoption conference.  We have signed up for some breakout sessions that I believe will be very beneficial to our ministry to couples seeking to adopt and others seeking to help them.  I will share some of what we learn this weekend in the weeks to come.

From the Together for Adoption conference web site:

Romanticizing orphan care and adoption is so very easy and tempting to do.
But orphan care and adoption always involve suffering. Just ask any birthmother or a child who is one of three hundred orphans in a Chinese orphanage or a family that is experiencing the high-ups and low-downs of the adoption process or the adoptive family that is overwhelmed by the challenges of the post-adoption journey. There is no such thing as orphan care and adoption without suffering.

The primary objective of our September 14-15 national conference is to take Christians deeper into God’s story of Adoption to give hope and practical tools to walk with deep joy through “the sufferings of this present time” (Romans 8:18-23) for God’s glory and the good of orphans around the world. God’s work of adoption within the world is a story that encompasses all of human history, from its pre-temporal beginnings when God predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to the renewal of the heavens and the earth. From the Apostle Paul’s perspective, Adoption is the story that makes sense of the universe, that makes sense of our broken lives and gives the existence of all creation ultimate meaning.

Just look at the way Paul uses the word Adoption (Eph. 1:4-5; Rom. 9:4; Gal. 4:4-5; Rom. 8:15, 23). According to Scripture, Adoption serves as the grand purpose or objective of God’s work of redemption (Galatians 4:4-6). When the story of redemption reaches its intended goal (Romans 8:20-23), Scripture calls it Adoption, and Adoption is ultimately the ‘happily ever after’ of God’s giving us Himself forever in a renewed creation, in which there will be no more tears. Adoption is the God-Story that gives our personal stories meaning and significance within a broken world. It announces that one day everything sad is going to come untrue.