Adoption as Resurrection (or "What an Adopted Baby Can Teach Us About Jesus")

Several years ago, a teenage girl in my youth ministry told me that she was pregnant and didn't know what to do.

She felt scared and alone. She feared the possible negative reactions from her parents and her friends, and she felt hurt that the baby’s father was not interested in whatever decision she would make.

To make a long story short, the girl ultimately decided to give the baby up for adoption. Eight months later, she gave birth to a baby girl and handed her over to another family.

There was tremendous pain in that decision. She did not make it lightly, and she understood the long-term implications. However, she also knew what was best for this baby girl, and she made the bravest and most selfless decision any person in her situation could have made.

And her sacrifice created a family.

There was a painful moment of death for this girl when she said goodbye to her baby. It was a moment that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

There was a moment of new life for the baby and the family who adopted her.

There was a death, and then there was a resurrection.

This week, my friends Nate and Jackie adopted a newborn baby (you can read their story on her blog). They have been working for years toward this moment. In fact, they did not even believe that they would receive a baby as quickly as they did. I recently heard them speculate that they may have to wait as long as two years.

However, it happened much sooner than they had expected.

In addition to their young son, they now have a newborn baby girl, and she is theirs. They have experienced resurrection, and their family will never be the same.

From a birth mother’s great fear and uncertainty and sacrifice emerges a moment of creation and life-changing love for a growing family.

What a beautiful picture of resurrection.

Thank God for birth parents who make the greatest and bravest of sacrificial choices.

Thank God for people who adopt babies and the families they create.

Thank God for resurrection.

Amen.

 To read more about everyday resurrection, take a look at yesterday’s post, The Avocado Must Die.

When Life Feels Broken (or "The Avocado Must Die")

When I was a teaching pastor at Fellowship of the Parks, I was often referred to as “the avocado guy.” I’d be talking to someone and they would say, “Oh yeah! You’re the avocado guy!”

During my first year at the church, I preached a sermon in which I brought a bowl full of avocados onstage with me and told about a kid I met whose job it was to make table-side guacamole at Fresco’s Mexican restaurant.

The point was that the avocado--while it is attached to the vine--is alive. However, when an avocado is removed from its life source, it starts to die. But in the process of the avocado dying, it is eaten by a person (me) and fills my body with nourishment that keeps me alive.*

Basically, for me to live, the avocado must die.

New life often begins as a death.

 In the introduction to her book Pastrix (which I also cited in yesterday's post), Nadia Bolz-Weber talks about this idea:

The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It’s about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small…. It’s about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live (p. xviii).

 All of the great moments of resurrection life have been preceded by moments of death.

That’s the thing about resurrection; it always requires a death.

Perhaps you’re experiencing some kind of personal, specific death in your own life.

A relationship that was broken that may or may not ever be put back together again.

A way of seeing the world or God or faith that no longer seems consistent with your own life experiences.

A level of trust you once had for others but were betrayed, and now you don’t know if you will ever have faith in another human being again.

A sudden—and perhaps unwanted—change in your job or career that has forced you to ask all kinds of questions about your own personal calling and purpose in the world.

Each of these things is a kind of a death, and death is painful and scary.

However, resurrection can only happen if there is first a death, and resurrection rarely looks the way we expect it to.

Resurrection rarely means that things go back to normal. On the contrary, it almost always points to something new and unexpected and original.

If you currently are undergoing a kind of death in your own life, and you are in the midst of despair, may you live in hope of restoration and new life.

May you learn to see resurrection in the world around you.

May you let the avocado die so that you can experience something new and beautiful.

What do you think? Have you ever gone through a kind of metaphorical "death" only to later experience a resurrection? 

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(*Thanks to Rob Bell for this metaphor in the Nooma video “Tomato.”)