I plan to be tweeting in case you want to follow that way.

Here’s a taste from one of the organizations that will be there.

An easy, sweet love is not enough to raise any child, whether born or adopted into a family. And the love that some adopted children need is gritty, painful, agonizing, uncertain, and maybe a lot like death.

Jason Kovacs at The Abba Fund writes:

While more and more churches are calling their people to step out in faith to adopt and foster there is just as much need for them to call their people to count the cost and to provide the care they need when the child is home.

I see this included in the very passage we use to call people to adopt – James 1:27 says that “pure and undefiled religion before God the father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction.”

We do a disservice to adoptive and foster families if we are not helping them understand what that “affliction” means. We further disservice them by not doing everything we can to learn and understand and support them in entering that “affliction.” They cannot do it alone.

I hope you will read it all. And don’t overlook Jason’s links to a series of very helpful, thoughtful short videos for anyone who has adopted from a difficult place or is considering it.

]]> http://noelpiper.com/2010/04/20/love-is-not-enough/feed/ 3 http://noelpiper.com/2010/04/15/adoption-may-be-grueling-but-it-is-good/ http://noelpiper.com/2010/04/15/adoption-may-be-grueling-but-it-is-good/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:25:25 +0000 Noel Piper http://noelpiper.com/?p=1378 I’m not going to defend the woman who put her adopted son and an airplane and sent him back where he came from.

But I’ve known enough tragically difficult adoption situations to make me wonder if more knowledge of the situation might not make it easier to have a little empathy with her. Not that what she did was right, but that we might see how she felt driven to an extreme solution.

What we can say for sure is that she got in over her head and made a very bad decision.

This video gives a helpful overview of the situation and beginning at about minute 3:45 asks most of the questions that are at the front of my mind:

• Did this woman not receive adequate information about the child?
• Did this child receive good treatment in the orphanage?
• Did this woman get properly vetted ahead of time?
• Did the agency examine her home study and other information carefully enough to make sure this was a good fit?
• Did she receive training?
• Was there ongoing support?

I’d also ask:

• Was there adequate professional help available when she needed it, including from the adoption agency?
• Was thought given to the difficulty of single parenting, especially with the adoption of an older child, which everyone knows is likely to be more stressful?
• Were there a church and friends who were part of a personal, unofficial support network?
• Was there sufficient language translation help so mother and son could communicate and to help the child make the difficult transition into another culture and language?

In an ideal world, every child would have a loving home. In an ideal world, raising children would be easy.

In the world we live in, parents and children in a loving home–whether born into the family or adopted– may have the “just the normal” stresses and joys. Or they may face the realities that one friend writes about, regarding children with attachment disorder or other disabilities, including fetal alcohol syndrome.

The Joint Council On International Children’s Services has asked that bloggers talk about the truth–that adoption is a good thing. Here’s a list of some families that are posting thoughts about their adoption stories.

Our own adoption story begins here and each post links to the next.

Then I discovered more of the story right here at home. When Jenny (who lives in our downstairs apartment) read what I’d written, she came straight up to tell me a follow-up story.

Jenny is from Houston. Sagemont Church is her home church there. Sagemont learned that there was still $30,000 lacking to pay off the mortgage on the Beach’s original house–the one that was ruined by the hurricane and was razed to make way for their new house. So they passed  buckets for the Beaches on a Wednesday night.

$30,000 was the amount that would complete the mortgage payment. Want to guess how much was put into those buckets?

$30,000.25.

So God used the testimony and need of the Beaches to build the faith of people who didn’t even know them personally, by providing exactly what would bless the Beaches.

(Here’s an article published today, listing of donations toward the Home Makeover for the Beaches. Sagemont Church’s gift is in the 3rd bullet near the end of the article.)