For the first time recently, I truly saw myself in the context of being an orphan who has been adopted by God...
I remember one particular day while we were in Uganda and we visited a school where many orphaned children were. When we arrived at the school, the children came running up to us with excitement, surrounding us within just a few short moments. They came up with greetings, smiling and asking for water, begging to be picked up, touched, and loved. They put up their dirt covered hands in surrender and looked right in to our eyes with theirs saying “will you take care of me?...Will you love me?...Will you be my friend…my companion?”. They looked in awe at our hands and arms, reaching out to touch and feel the texture of our skin. They hung on every word that we said, even if they didn’t understand it, and just simply enjoyed being in our presence. Out of compassion, we spent time with them, and we loved on them. We even offered them snacks and cuddly little stuffed animals, things that seemed so small to us, yet were so important and big to them. And then….at the end of the day…we put the babies down, packed up our belongings and we left. We walked away leaving them in the hands of their creator…our Father.
The other day as I worshipped God, I began to thank Him for all that He has done and I looked to Him for life. I put my dirt covered hands up in surrender and asked Him for attention, to allow me to feel His presence, to sustain me, and to take care of me. I longed for His touch and was amazed when He reached His arms out to embrace me. In that moment I truly recognized that before I was a child of God…I was fatherless. I was born alone, to fend for myself…searching for someone to take care of me, to be my friend…my companion…to love me. Then, when I first truly met my God, I ran to Him, just as these children did to us. As He reached out to me, I looked at Him in awe, I was amazed at the ways He was different from anyone I had ever met and I KNEW that He could take care of me…..and so I asked Him.
The BIG difference between my encounter with these children, and my encounter with God is this……
He did not walk away and leave me for someone else to take care of. Out of compassion…He picked me up and took me home with Him!
For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. Ephesians 1:4-6
We are so thankful and blessed that God has called us to do the same. To pick up two children and take them home with us….to do everything that we can in this life to make sure that the 147 million orphaned children in this world are adopted by the family of God…AND…that the people that we encounter every day…the ones that are still orphaned and have not accepted their adoption as children of God…will enter in to our family and know the love of God our Father!
