What a blessing

Once a month our Childrens Ministry Leader invites parents to stay and participate in their children's Sunday School time. Today she dedicated the hour to celebrating God's ministry to the orphan. She invited those of us who have adopted or are foster care parents to share our testimonies. To share how God moved our hearts to adopt or provide foster care - to share how He lead us to our child(ren) - and to share our biggest blessing through the experience.

I know my story, so it wasn't difficult to share specifics about how we came to adopt and how our process went. But gosh, when she asked me to share my biggest blessing - well that is tough. We've received so many through our adoption of Ana, that I don't know where to begin! I went to bed not knowing exactly what I was going to say. I slept restlessly and at 6:30 this morning God woke me with words!

Biggest Blessing

God’s love for us is so deep. He doesn’t care who we’ve been, what we’ve done, or where we came from. The only thing he cares about is the condition of our heart. He sees our desperate need for a Father. Someone to provide for us, to guide our direction, to listen to us, to simply love and accept us. God has given me the blessing of 4 beautiful children – 3 that I birthed and 1 that I traveled across the world for – and it doesn’t matter how my children came to be mine – they are mine – they are mine to love.

MY biggest blessing – well that would be when Ana sings along to her favorite CD and realizes that song is about her! Well, it’s really about all of us – but to a 4 yr old everything is about her!

The song goes -

“Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

And Ana says in excitement – doesn’t matter what color we are, Jesus loves everybody!!

I have sung that song for years, but have never REALLY put it into context until now. I have only seen things through my white American eyes. Well, now I see things through different colors. And that is a blessing in itself.

I'm not sure anyone understood my words, because of course I cried through the whole thing! Ugh! But I felt God's presence and it was amazing to listen to everyone's story! All the stories were different in how they came to adoption, yet we all knew that God guided us to it and through it. That He chose our children for us - that He knew from the very beginning that Ana would be a part of our family - that she would be our daughter.

We are so excited about what God is doing in our church. We believe He is stirring the hearts of people - moving them to have a heart for the orphan - molding their hearts to be more like His. And shouldn't that be our goal? To be more like Him?

I fall short in so many ways. But He knows my heart. And I am ever so thankful that He chose me to be His child! And as a child of God, I want to please Him - I want to be closer to Him - and I want Him to say to me, Well Done.