By Jordyn Glaser
“The Life Letters” is an ongoing pro-life series designed to encourage foster & adoptive parents and provide inspiration and insight to all pro-life readers.
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Jen and her husband made the decision to begin the domestic infant adoption process in early 2012. They applied to a local agency in the Pacific Northwest and moved forward with a national program. Then it came time for them to create the universally dreaded family profile book. From my experience it seems that most people tend to struggle through creating this uncomfortable version of a family sales pitch.
The expectation for the project is to sum up your lives and your families into a few selected photos and snippets of basic information. The profile book needs to thread the needle of being personal, but not too personal. Share your first names—but not your last. Show your home—but not your address. Adoptive parents wade through a lifetime of pictures and stories to create the perfect presentation of who they are—and who they aren’t. This piece of the process is the key to matching prospective parents with their future child and that simple fact is what leads most families down the rabbit hole of anxiety. What do we include and what do we discard? What will matter to the woman who is selecting the parents for her son or daughter? And most importantly, what if we get it wrong?
After navigating the daunting process of creating their profile book, Jen sent the finished product to their caseworker and the agency began sharing it with prospective birth families. Not long after Jen and her husband got the call they had been waiting for. They listened with joy and anticipation as the caseworker explained that they had been selected by a birth mother who was
expecting a baby boy in the fall. Just before she hung up the phone Jen threw out the question that was currently consuming her thoughts.
“I know there are a lot of other prospective families, so do you happen to know why she chose us?” Jen and her husband made eye contact over the speaker phone and silently waited for the list of possibilities.
“Let me see…” there was a pause and the sound of shuffling paperwork, “she said her favorite color is gray and that was the color you chose to paint the nursery.” Her favorite color was gray.
Gray.
After all the time and energy and love carefully poured into crafting the perfect profile book, Jen and her husband were chosen because they had painted the walls gray.
The Distraction of the Details
In the world of adoption and fostering we tend to swing wildly between having abnormal amounts of control and having zero control of the process. We are expected to formally sign documents stating our parameters around the health conditions, gender preferences, exposure levels, disabilities, and age ranges of our prospective children. To even begin the process we are required to choose which agency to partner with and which country or program to adopt from. The expectation is that each of these choices we make will directly place us on the path towards the child we will eventually call our own. But in deep contrast we also cannot control the timeframes, the decisions of birth families, foreign policy changes, the speed of government agencies, and court schedules.
While parts of this process may give us the illusion of control, we are quickly reminded by things like grey paint that it is ultimately all in God’s hands. No matter how much time we give to creating the perfect profile books or how many parameters we place around our process, God will do just as He plans.
In Luke 10 we see the story of Martha and her sister Mary. This is a story in which Christ reminds believers of what really matters and how easy it is to lose sight of that. Martha was not doing anything inherently wrong, in fact the verse describes what she was doing as “serving.” But where Martha got off track, just as many adoptive and foster parents do, was that she lost sight of what was important. She wanted everything to be perfect and she got caught up in the distraction of the details. She even boldly asked Christ to tell her sister Mary to leave his side to get up to help her.
Martha forgot what it was all about.
God & Gray Paint
God calls believers to adoption and fostering—it is His solution for a broken world. What He does not call us to is controlling how this plan plays out. Instead of getting wrapped up in the
pressure and anxiety of getting it right or wrong we need to hold it open handedly to God. When we have our eyes fixed on Him and our priorities in order we can have faith that God is fully capable of bringing home the child He has for us. He doesn’t need us to get it perfect. Frankly He doesn’t need us at all, but He offers us the gift of being a part of His work.
With this truth we can shift our thoughts from planning, perfecting, and controlling to sitting at His feet and trusting that He is already at work. Every detail in the process, no matter how small, is known to God. We can have peace in the understanding that God already knows the child He has for our family.
Our job in this process is to be like Mary and cling to what matters, having faith that God can and will handle the rest—even the gray paint.
