Okay. I admit it.
I had a fantasy.
And, it went something like this:

I imagined that one day our family would make a difficult and costly journey to a remote land, rescue the lonely orphan(s), and bring them home, and they would be grateful for the sacrifices we made, and we would be content that our family is complete, and everyone would ride off into the sunset (piled in our Dodge Caravan since there are too many of us for one white horse), and we would all live happily ever after. My fantasy met reality when, in 2010, our family of four adopted two older boys from Peru, where they had been living in an orphanage for five years after their biological parents had died. The difficult and costly part of the fantasy proved to be true, in ways that I could never have imagined.

When we arrived home from Peru and introduced our new sons to our friends and extended family, we fielded questions like: “How are the boys adjusting?” And, “Are they good boys?” Given all the adjustments that they had to make, I think the boys did remarkably well. But, although they are precious, darling boys, and they are very intelligent and handsome, they are no more good than our family is good. I remember one person explaining to another back when we first began our adoption journey that we were adopting the boys because we are good people. Horror! Nothing could be further from the truth. Christ teaches us that there is only One, One only who is good (Mark 10:18). The truth is, we added two sinners to our family of sinners, and we are all being stirred up together in one big pot. And it is only with a generous, very generous, seasoning of God’s grace that anything good can come of this at all. My life is unrecognizable from what it was before we adopted the boys, and I find myself asking, “Who does this? Who builds a family this way?”

“One can think . . . of adoption as a radical form of hospitality, one that challenges the limits of the host’s mind and body, but also allows, through this challenging, to truly let both the strange and the stranger in,” writes Dana Amir.1 We certainly “let the strange in.” When we invited the boys into our home, we opened the door to the complex trauma that had embedded itself into our sons’ bodies and souls. None of the six of us remained unscathed. First responders sometimes suffer with secondary trauma due to the nature of their work, and PTSD ambushed me and dug its claws deep into my being. Most of the time I felt like I had pulled up a chair along with Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

Our family sometimes refers to God’s kingdom as the Upside-down Kingdom because Christ teaches things like, “you must lose your life in order to find it” (Matthew 10:39), and “he who would be first must be last” (Mark 9:35), and “you must give away your life in order to keep it” (Mark 8:35). We could add, “in order to build, you must first tear down.” Don’t get the wrong idea; our little family of four was very happy and mostly healthy, but in order to enlarge our souls to make space for the boys, we needed an extreme home makeover. So, we called on the only Contractor we know who does this type of work. Our Father. All of us who are brothers and sisters of Christ, sons and daughters of the Father, have joined His family through the gift of adoption, an adoption born of infinite love and achieved through an infinite sacrifice that we, with our finite minds, will never, even throughout the span of eternity, ever understand.

Adoption is always birthed from loss. In our case, we must not forget that our adoptive sons lost their biological parents to death. And, we ourselves lost our two biological sons to death. Death is the enemy, born of the curse. It is not part of the original “circle of life,” something which we embrace and to which we reconcile ourselves. Christ did not make friends with Death, or balance His good with Death’s evil. Christ conquered Death, and therefore we have hope. Death is a “simple evil” and we take comfort in the words of C.S. Lewis who said that only God can take a “simple evil” and transform it into a “complex good” (The Problem of Pain).

We took several adoption education courses in order to prepare ourselves for the adoption, and we read lots of books and spent time with many dear brothers and sisters who are several steps ahead of us on this path. And, I knew that the boys would never be replacements for our biological sons. Nor did I expect or want them to bear this burden. But, still, I wept privately after we met them because the reality took on depth as I mourned again for the sons of my flesh. They will not be restored to me here. And, I am pretty sure that, even though they are flourishing in many ways, our sons continue to grieve the reality that we are not, and never will be, their biological parents. Fourteen years in I can say that although they haven’t been destroyed by their loss, neither have they been fully healed. As Frodo Baggins says in the film, “There are some things that time cannot mend. There are some hurts that go too deep.”2 Perhaps their story will end much like Frodo’s did, and they will only enjoy full restoration in the Undying Land of heaven. Learning to live and thrive in the Land of Unresolved Tension is the reality and not the fantasy of adoption.

So, I look again around the table and see that it’s not the Mad Hatter’s tea party after all, but the Lord’s table. It stretches away throughout the ages and across international boundaries. Seated at it are all the adopted Saints who have joined the family by giving away their lives to walk in the strange ways of the only One who is Life. And we are not being served tea and crumpets but Bread and Wine.

Guess I’ll have a cup.

Notes:

1 Dana Amir, “From Turning Away to Turning Toward: Adoption as Radical Hospitality,” Psychoanalytic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (February 2024): 1-18, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1551806X.2023.2284060.

2 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, directed by Peter Jackson (New Line, 2003), DVD.