I feel the need to preface this series of posts with some explanatory comments about my approach to this endeavor. Among others, there are two particular traps that seem especially prevalent when examining God’s Word, and I have fallen into each over the years. The first is the tendency to study a passage in its original language, culture, and context with such focus that its direct application to life today is overlooked. While I can’t speak for others, I find it hardest to avoid this error when studying the Old Testament, since there is more historical in it than in the New Testament, and the Israelite culture differs from our own in more ways than the Greco-Roman world of the time of Jesus and the apostles. The other mistake is to read Scripture in light of our experiences and thoughts, rather than letting God’s Word inform and transform the way that we view ourselves, our world, and our daily experiences. I confess that as I was thinking about this series and how our adoption of Mikaela (as one specific example of human adoption) mirrors God’s adoption us, my thoughts were first and foremost on us and our situation with Mikaela. I was not focusing on Scripture and His redemptive work and allowing them to guide me in thinking about our adoption.

This approach of mine was splintered within hours of our arrival here in Ukraine, when God showed us how wrong we had been not to communicate our financial situation with our facilitators and that we had been over-confident in our ability to handle the adoption process here because of Kristie’s past experiences and my line of work with TSC, only to save us from despair by what can only be described as a mighty act of His sovereign hand. Never in my life have I felt so clearly that He and He alone was holding me up. In the days leading up to our departure from home, He brought Psalm 121:1 (“I lift my eyes to the hills. / From where does my help come?”) to my mind numerous times, and I began to see that verse differently than I ever had before. The background to that verse I had heard before and saw for myself in Israel two-and-a-half years ago. In the Ancient Near East, it was customary for pagans to construct high places to their deities on the hills of the land. So, the Psalmist here was probably focusing on the supremacy of the Lord over every other god and goddess, as He alone is God, the maker of heaven and earth, and all the rest are merely the inventions of man, nothing more than stone and wood that cannot talk or hear or think. At least, mostly. I now think that there is a second level to this verse that presses this lesson into our hearts and minds even more deeply. I came to realize that I had been looking for financial deliverance for us, and for success in the adoption process, from various people whom we knew and from our adoption facilitators. In short, I had begun to place these people up on the hills of my mind and heart and were looking to them to do what was, in fact, God’s work to do. Ever since we began Mikaela’s adoption, I had been praying that God would make it clear to everyone watching that it would be His hand and His hand alone that would bring her home, not any efforts of mine or Kristie’s. It turns out that I needed to learn that lesson as much as, and perhaps more than, anyone else. I thought that I was trusting Him alone and looking only to Him as we followed Him down this path to adoption. As I have found before, whenever I think that I have learned some particular lesson fully, God takes me to a place where I can see that there is still much for me to learn.

This time, that place was the black, numbing disbelief and near despair that fell on us just three weeks ago today when we thought that we might have to return home without having seen Mikaela, and possibly without ever being able to see her. Then, when our only two choices were to place ourselves utterly in His hands or to reject Him on account of our pain and sin (and to us, even then, the latter was not a real option), He showed us that He was the One who would rescue Mikaela. Certainly there were and still are things for us to do, but we are not doing them by our own might or authority. Were it not for His hand over our paperwork, our facilitators, the judges and other officials presiding over various steps of the process, and our finances, we would be home now with no hope of rescuing Mikaela. I see now more clearly than before that we are not the ones who are ultimately responsible for the success of Mikaela’s adoption. There is nothing special about us that warrants praise or emulation. We don’t deserve to be here, to have the children that we have, whether biological or adopted. We don’t deserve any of the blessings that God lavishes upon us as His children. But that is precisely the point. God has chosen to adopt us, to take us from being dead in our sins to having life in Him, to make us co-heirs with Christ. We are His children not because of anything worthy in us. We are His children because He has graciously justified us by the blood of Jesus and has washed us clean. He is our Father, a Father who delights in doing good by His precious sons and daughters. Through all of this, I find that passages of Scripture do indeed have deeper meaning now than they did before our recent experiences, but that is only because God has begun to transform the way that I think. He has caused me to consider more deeply some of the fundamental and essential truths regarding His Fatherhood, Christ’s Sonship, and the role of the Spirit, and it is only from that place of reflection that the depths of other passages are starting to come into view. I am hoping that over the next couple of weeks—we are praying that we will be in our church at home three weeks from today—I will be able to reflect further on these passages and on the ways in which His adoption of us shed light on our adoption of Mikaela and how our treatment at the hands of our Heavenly Father should inform our parenting of all of our children.