There’s a section in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans entitled “Children of God Through Adoption” which I never thought of much when I heard it or read it over the years. It took on a deep significance after my wife and I adopted two children 20 years ago. There’s a physical aspect of adoption, the bringing of a child into the home. There’s also the legal aspect of the new relationship between the new parent and child. Our adopted children have birth certificates that identify my wife and I listed as their parents. Then there’s the heart aspect of offering our love to them and their willingness to accept it.
When St. Paul writes – “For those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “Abba,* Father!” The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.” (Romans 8 15-17), – he makes the assumption that the adoptees want to be adopted and are excited by the offer of being brought into God’s family through baptism. What orphan wouldn’t want to accept the offer of adoption and to come in from the cold?
Some orphans refuse adoptions.
Our son, while adopted in a physical and legal sense, outright refused his adoption. He never accepted it. He had attachment issues which meant he could never allow himself to trust his new family for his safety, his well being, his security or his future. He learned in his short life of five years in a Russian orphanage to trust only himself for his survival. As a child with parents, it meant he would also need to give up control – to let go – of all the habits that kept him alive up to the point when we adopted him. That wasn’t going to happen.
He could certainly see and experience the love of the family, between my wife and I and between us and the other kids but he did so from the outside looking in. Since love requires absolute trust, and since he could not trust, his response to love was to try to destroy it. As a ten year old he told my wife and I that his goal was to break up the family and he would only be happy if my wife and I were divorced. He hated the concept of love which ran counter to the control he felt needed to survive. He saw our family as a cage and he wanted his freedom so as to ensure his own safety. Survival was baked in to his psyche.
We offered him a new life pulled from the horror of being a Russian orphan into an amazing life; a life of love, security, happiness, support, and a family and he rejected it all. Does that story sound family at all?
Hint: Read the Bible.
We all have some level of attachment issues when it comes to our comfort, our place as an adopted child in God’s family. God offers us adoption into His family and most of us, are in a sense “forced” into that adoption through our infant baptism. We certainly don’t have to accept it and many people these days often out right refuse that adoption for a whole host of reasons.
I think it’s mainly due to the fact that we want to be masters of our own domain, to direct our own life as we see fit and we trust only ourselves for our survival. We don’t have faith that God truly loves us and has our best interests in mind. We are on the outside looking in. So instead of accepting the family of God, we work hard to create, all on our own, a sense of security and some basic level of happiness through the pursuit and worship of the worldly trinity: me, myself and I.
