The day this article runs in the paper, Dec. 26, is a special day in our family.
It is not just the day after Christmas, it is my son’s birthday. He is 7 this year.
It is hard to believe he is that old already. It seems like we just brought him home. We had waited so long for this child. For seven years we had tried for a child until the doctors finally told us that we would not be able to conceive. That was devastating to hear. The doctor also told us that we might check into adoption. When the doctor said that, I remember thinking, “No, that is not what we want.”
That is the problem - sometimes we focus too much on what we want when we should focus on what God wants. For a long time we didn’t tell anyone what the doctors had said, and we really didn’t think much about adoption.
One day while having lunch with a fellow classmate at seminary, Kevin just randomly said, “You know my two boys are adopted.”
I said to Kevin, “Oh really, and why would you tell me that?”
Kevin looked puzzled and said, “I thought you might be interested in knowing that.”
A couple of weeks later a family in the church I was pastoring invited Keri and I over to their house for dinner. While there they told us the story of how one of their boys was adopted. They also said, “We thought you might be interested in knowing that.”
A couple of weeks later a man and his wife visited the church for the first time. As they were leaving, the man said to me, “You know I was adopted as an infant and I have been loved my whole life. I thought you might be interested in knowing that.”
In a month’s time, three people with no connection to each other and none of them knowing what Keriand I were dealing with in our hearts, had shared with us their stories of adoption. It was as if God was speaking to us and saying, “Adoption is the plan, I thought you might be interested in knowing that.”
After a lot of prayer and thought, we came to the conclusion that we have a lot of love to share with a child and somewhere there is a child who needs a loving home.
Adoption is a long, involved process. We finally made it through all the long process and our child arrived. He was born Dec. 26, 2005, in Memphis.
Because of all the legal issues regarding out-of-state adoptions, we had to stay in Tennessee for three weeks.
That’s right, three weeks with a new born infant in a motel room. Like most new parents, we didn’t know what we were doing. Somehow we survived it, and more importantly, our new son survived it. We named him Zephaniah. Zephaniah was a prophet in the Old Testament and means “Yahweh has protected.”
Zephaniah 3:17 says, “He will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love; he will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.” How fitting for an adopted child. How fitting for all of us really. We are all adopted into God’s Kingdom.
God rejoices over us with gladness and renews us in God’s greatest gift of love all the while singing and celebrating that we are a part of God’s family.
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Editor’s note: Brian Timmons is the pastor of Pea Ridge and Brightwater Methodist Churches. He can be contacted at 925-0167 or by e-mail at [email protected].
Church, Pages 2 on 12/26/2012