Why China's "Waiting Children"? (Part 4)

Matthew 25: 40 And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'

As we began the process of looking into agencies and programs, it didn't take long at all for God to close many doors- some countries we weren't eligible for, some required very lengthy stays in the country. China was actually one we first thought was closed to us because they have a "4 children in the home" limit. We kept looking. I found myself poring over adoptable children's pictures and I was always looking at the cute ones, I'll admit. The Lord pricked my heart and showed me that was not HIS heart. Jesus went to the least desirable by the world's standards. He came to those who were the outcasts, the ugly, the despised of the world. How far is my heart from where it needs to be! What is the one thing we pray for when we are pregnant? A healthy child (and I secretly hope they are cute!). In our culture, abortions occur all the time when a child is found to have even the slightest problem. These children are truly among the "least of these" that Jesus is talking about. In China, girls are not valued, much less a girl with a deformed limb or a cleft lip. These children are orphaned mainly due to the "one child" law. Parents aren't allowed to put their children up for adoption, so they are abandoned and found by orphanages.

Early in our marriage Joey very seriously said to me that he thought someday we might have a child with special needs. I was not surprised, and I don't know why. I just never thought it would happen by adoption. To ask for that sounds nuts! We found out after doing some research that China's "4 children max. in the home" does not apply for the "hard to place" special needs children. Thank God, He says that in His kingdom the last will be first, and the first will be last. His thinking is so different from ours!

We looked online and did phone interviews with four agencies. What set apart Lifeline agency for us was the MaoMing orphanage they are connected with near Hong Kong. It houses 60 orphans, all with medical special needs. If these children are not adopted by a family, they will typically spend the majority of their youth in institutionalized care and most will never have the opportunity to lead a normal life. I watched an interview of a woman describing the first time she went to an orphanage in China and saw her future daughter there. She described how dirty the special needs babies were- they were bathed last and were of a lower priority than the healthy children. Totally opposite of how Jesus said heaven will be. That gripped my heart! Looking at the pictures and videos of these waiting children, Joey said, "we need to go get Charlotte". Now, we aren't certain she is the child we will adopt, but at the very least, she was the motivation God used for us to choose that agency and the MaoMing orphanage.

http://lifelineadoption.org/adoption/international/china/maoming-kids/

Truly, this is not something I ever would have chosen on my own. If it were up to me, I would have continued to ignore the call and enjoy an easier life. I am just thankful for His amazing grace that I didn't have to get swallowed up by a whale to get me to do what He called us to. It is so freeing to finally submit to His will with a long overdue cry of, "yes, Lord, I will go. Send me." To God be the glory, great things He has done!

Why Internationally? (Part 3)

"Matthew 28: 19-20" Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."

There was never a question about domestic vs. International for us. We had no idea which country, agency, or any of the logistics, we just knew God was calling us to go completely out of our comfort zone and embark into the unknown world of international adoption- we had no choice but to trust and obey in faith. For our family, part of our "Great Commission" calling is to go into 'all the world' and bring a child into our family to love and share the love of Christ. This was one aspect of our hearts' desire to adopt Internationally. We also knew we were supposed to choose a country that was restricted or hostile to the gospel. While there are so many who need homes right here in America, at least these children are in a country with great opportunity and a chance to hear the truth of God's word. It is just not like that in approximately 54 other countries around the world. Here is a short link to read about China.

http://www.persecution.com/public/restrictednations.aspx?clickfrom=bWFpbl9tZW51

Why Adopt? (Part 2)

James 1:27 "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."

While not every family is called to adopt, as Christians, we are all expected to do something and not turn a blind eye to the plight of children around the world. I turned a blind eye for so long! For us, sending a check to a good cause to ease the suffering just wasn't enough, for "obedience is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22). I'm sure it sounds crazy and we'll be asked a lot of questions about why in the world we would want to do this when we already have 5 children and obviously do not have trouble having kids "of our own". It is hard to understand and cannot be explained without giving God all the credit and pointing to Him. When I was an orphan without a heavenly Father because of my sin that separated me from Him, He came and sent His Son to take the punishment for my sin and forgave and adopted me to be His child. Adoption is a beautiful picture of the Father's love for HIS children- an earthly picture of a heavenly idea.

It's hard not to wonder how adopting one child in a sea of literally millions of orphans can actually make a difference. But, for that one child it will make a world of difference. I am only one child of God's in a sea of millions, and how very grateful I am that He counted me as important enough to die for. Christ would have come down to save just one sinner like me. He rescued me from the plight I was in, and now He wants me to be His hands and feet to help one of these precious little ones. Not that I am the rescuer, but that He is and I am a vessel He can use to bring others to Himself. What a privilege! What a calling!

It all comes down to this. Children are a blessing and there's always room in our hearts and our home for one more. There is a little child out there somewhere right now without hope in the world waiting for this Mommy to come get her and she has no idea how great her life is going to be someday. She will have a whole house full of people to love her- a family to call her own.

Do Something Radical (Part 1)

I've learned to never say what I won't do. I told Joey before we got married that if he wanted someone who was going to homeschool his kids, that person was NOT me. It's funny how when we finally give in to doing what the Lord wants us to do, he can make it so that we want to do the thing he's called us to more than we ever thought possible. After all, it wouldn't be obedience if we were just doing what we wanted to do. It was that way with homeschooling, and it's become that way with this crazy adventure called international adoption. It wasn't that adopting hasn't always been in the back of my mind. It has been. But, way, way back. Before we got married, we discussed adoption as something we would do "someday", and I was totally comfortable with that. We looked into it while Joey was in Korea when we were engaged and he often visited a local orphanage. I'll have to admit, I was secretly very relieved when we found out adopting from Korea was not an option at that time. It came up a few other times in our marriage, but I always had a reason why it was just not a good time. Joey read "Adopted for Life" a couple years ago and I know he was hoping I would read it, but I didn't even want to hear about it, much less read the book and risk being convicted about it.

Upon Joey's return from Afghanistan, it became clear that my complacency in my Christian walk was no longer going to be an option. Joey and I each read three books that brought to life what we already knew to be true from the Bible. Those three books, which I highly recommend for every Christian to read were "Stop Dating the Church", "Crazy Love" and "Radical"- followed by me finally reading "Adopted for Life". What a much needed jolt to my spirit! God called me to so much more than my comfortable life here and now. I do not want to stand before Him someday ashamed that I lived for me and my own desires. I want to live for Him and His glory and share in His eternal and global perspective. "Crazy Love" had been given to me by a Christian friend over a year before I actually read it. Again, I really did not want to read this book, because I knew it would require something of me and I was already resisting the Lord's voice in my life to "come, follow me"..."sell everything you have and give it to the poor and come, follow me". I was like the rich young ruler walking away from Jesus sad because I had so much, and I didn't want to give it all up for him for far too long. I love the way God works, though. He doesn't let us stay this way when we are His.

We were selected to go to a family retreat at Sandy Cove in Northeast MD this summer free for military after a deployment. We almost didn't go because we thought we were going to be moving. I sent an e-mail to Sandy Cove to cancel our reservation or at least switch us to come a different weekend than "home school week" because it was going to conflict with our move. But, alas, our orders were changed and we weren't moving and somehow that e-mail never made it to Sandy Cove. Instead what I got from them was a confirmation e-mail for our reservation for homeschool week. So, we went. And, what was the speaker talking about all week long? Living a "Radical" life for Christ. Being willing to sell or give up everything to come and follow him. Wow. The same exact thing we had been reading about and that the Lord was constantly pricking my heart with- my resistance to doing what he wanted me to do. We heard so many testimonies that week of families who had adopted. They set out to be a blessing to others and in the end they were the ones blessed. The Lord worked on my heart there and asked me if I really believed all children were a blessing, or just my own (the ones I could have biologically)? One of the mornings Joey and I actually put into words what we were both knowing we were supposed to do. It was time for us to start the process to adopt. I was still scared, but I knew that saying no to God was not an option anymore.

As soon as I submitted to God and gave up the fight, He filled me with a desire and a passion and now I want to adopt. It truly is amazing how quickly this happened- it was almost instantaneous. I went from saying no way, I can't do that and I could have told you a million reasons why it was a crazy idea (and I can still do that in my weak moments of doubt and worry!) to having a heart realizing God's love for precious children around the world who need a family to love them. Yes, it is a crazy idea. It is Radical. But, everything God has called me to do so far in my life, He has equipped me for and walked me through every step of the way, and even given me the desires of my heart that I didn't know I had.

"Psalm 127: 3-5" Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord...Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!"

Christian Carnival CLXXXI

The most recent Christian Carnival, a collection of current posts on Christian thought, is posted at Mere Orthodoxy. Matthew cleverly put together a little poem for each post, and the one for my new Earth post is:

Water becomes wine,
Science says that’s fine,
But cannot register an opinion.
The earth begins from nothing,
Due to God’s speaking,
where science finds its limits.


Check it out!

New Earth Creation

The year is 27AD. There is a celebration of a marriage in the town of Cana, in the Galilee region. One of the guests is a relatively unknown fellow who has attended with his mother, Mary. His name is Jesus of Nazareth.

During the festivities, a problem arises – the host of the wedding celebration has forgotten to have enough wine on hand for the party. Unless something happens fast, the host will be embarrassed and the party will be remembered as a failure. Discerning that her son can somehow do something about this, Mary tells her son that there is a problem. Jesus is not particularly receptive to her suggestion that he just ‘do something’. However, his mother ignores his reaction and instead tells the head servant to ‘do whatever he tells you to do’. The servants follow Jesus’ order, and where once water had been, wine now stood – the best wine at the wedding, to the amazement of many.

As we encounter the work of God in his miracles, in his actions taken and the results that follow that only he can do, we are faced with a question directly applicable to our creation dilemma: What scientific test could we perform that would tell us that the wine now in the jars was water only 60 seconds ago? What could we do to the wine to tell us of its sudden appearance, in apparent defiance of everything we know about how wine is created?

The answer is simple – nothing. There is no scientific test that would show that the wine was created instantly. There is no scientific test that would show that the woman who had an issue of blood for 12 years was healed instantly. There is no method we could use to show how Jesus made a blind man see instantly. In every case, God spoke, and it happened immediately, and not only could we not show that it was so after the fact, but we also cannot show that each was ever broken in the first place, or that it was the word of God that did the healing.

“Young Earth” creationism is the same. Some have claimed that God making a creation that seems older than it is would be an example of God being deceptive in some fashion. Laying aside the inherent (necessary) foolishness of the assumption of universality – that, for example, the amount of Carbon-14 in a living organism now is the same as it would have been 1 million years ago – there is no more deception in a creation we can’t prove its age than the same problem with the water and the wine.

In fact, I am far more likely to assume that our failure to “prove” a young earth creation from science is answered better by the Scriptures than by science. “For God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and the base things of the world, and the things which are despised has God chosen, yea, and the things which are not, to bring to naught the things which are – that no man may glory in his presence.” (1 Cor 1:27-29)

Jeremy has said that to believe that the earth is young, in the face of scientific ‘evidence’ to the contrary, is completely irrational. While Jeremy is a theologian of the highest degree, I would differ slightly. I would say that it may be foolish, but that it is also an expression of humility that recognizes my limitations compared to the God who the heavens cannot contain, whose works defy all the wisdom of men. While both the old and new earth theories I’ve described fit a historical view of Scripture, I will stick with a new earth theory that affirms that “evening and morning was the first day”.

Old Earth Creation

As mentioned previously, to believe in theistic evolution - that God used evolution to create man - requires a previous commitment to an age of the earth that is old enough to allow this evolution to occur. If the earth is this old, it is essentially impossible to believe that the creation account is a literal six-day event, because a six-day creation has man in existence only five days after the creation of the heavens.

Old-earth theory was essentially unknown until the advent of evolutionary theory. As evolution became culturally popular, theologians tried to find ways to make the reading of Genesis 1 fit evolutionary theory. One attempt was the "gap" theory, which proposed that there is a very long time gap between Genesis 1:1-2 and the rest of Genesis 1 - between the creation of the earth itself and the creation of life forms. There often is an expansion that explains that there was a completely formed heaven and earth, but something catastrophic, such as the fall of Satan from heaven, led to the destruction of the earth, leaving it without form and void. My Scofield reference Bible has this explanation.

Another effort is the literary framework method, explained by Jeremy in the link in the last post. This essentially says that the framework of the text is poetic, indicating a section that is not intended to be read literally, and thus its point is not intended to be historically accurate, but instead to demonstrate that there was a logical order to the pictures of creation given to Moses by God.

A third effort is age-day theory. This explanation posits that the Hebrew word transliterated "yom" that we translate to "day" does not always mean a 24-hour day, but can mean simply an unspecified period of time. As that is completely true, it has some exegetical value behind it that the other two do not. Yet what has been a struggle for me in accepting this theory is an exegetical reason in that passage that would lead us to beleive that the intent of the author was to read anything other than a 24-hour day for "yom".

However, recently I was presented with such a proximate exegetical reason...the seventh day. The Scriptures read that "So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen 2:3)"

What did He rest from? He rested from creating. So, if on the seventh day God rested from creating, when did he stop resting from creating? Has he begun creating again? I don't think so. If God's rest from creating the heavens and the earth ended on the seventh day, and he has not begun creating the heavens and the earth again, could it not be the seventh day still? And, if we are not aware of when this end of creation began, may it be that the "days" are very long periods of time to us?

What do you think?

Creation, Evolution, and Theology

It's a grand sounding title, but the coverage will be limited. Two and a half years ago I wrote a series of posts about evolution, concluding here.

My position hasn't changed from what is stated - your stance on evolution does not have an impact upon your spiritual condition. What has changed is this - why you have your stance speaks volumes about your spiritual condition.

While Jeremy posted one of the better defenses of old-earth theory, a required component of theistic evolution I have seen here, based upon literary styles, I found it still pretty unconvincing. I don't deny the presence of poetic elements, I simply acknowledge (and I'm guessing Jeremy does, too) that they do not demand a rejection of a more literal interpretation of the days as days. (I do think the whole 'sevens' issue is of little value to the argument).

Yet, in recent months I have come across the two most compelling arguments for both old-earth and new-earth creationism. Stay tuned and decide for yourself!