More Than Enough

Several years ago I began reading Karen Kingsbury novels. I liked her so much that I began reading every preface and dedication in her books to discover where she might derive her inspiration. It was in those pages that my heart was first drawn to Haiti. We had always talked about adoption, and have believed strongly for many years that we would adopt someday. We have considered and researched both domestic and international adoptions from many countries. However, there was something about the descriptions of the children in Haiti that drew me in, and kept my curiosity for years. I now know that her descriptions were not a mere conjure of a novelist imagination, but true depictions of Haiti, and its beloved children.
The "moms" who are dear friends, also adopting children from our girls orphanage are passing around Karen Kingsbury's "A Treasury of Adoption Miracles". It was my turn to read it this week. The last in the long list of amazing adoption stories is the Kingsbury's. They have adopted three boys from Haiti. She says, "People ask us about the transition. How do you bring children into your home who have nothing in common with you? You have different skin colors, different cultural understandings, different languages--even different food preferences. We tell them this: with much prayer. You see, we knew going into this adoption process that we would have different colors, different countries, different cultures. But we would have the same Christ and that, we believed, was enough. It was enough at the beginning, and it remains enough now. More than enough. Our primary heritage is found not in our ancestors or family genealogies or birthplaces but at the cross, in Christ alone. There's a story often told of a particularly rough storm that came up one night and left a sandy beach strewn with starfish. The next morning a child walked along the shore, stopping every few feet to pick up a starfish and fling it back to sea. An old man watched the child and finally shouted at him, "Why bother, son? There are too many starfish to make a difference!" With that, the boy picked up another starfish and looked at it intently before heaving it out to sea. Then turning to the old man, he said, "It made a difference to that one."
One of our adoption fundraiser t-shirts asks the question, "How do you reach 147 million orphans?" The answer, "One at a time!"....or as my son Evan likes to point out when people read his shirt aloud, "Yeah, well we are taking two at a time! How many are you?" Honestly, we would like to take a few more than two...and maybe we will one of these days! Right now we are praying and working toward bringing our two precious girls home. We know there will be big adjustments, and are preparing the best we can for the adjustment time...yet we know that in all these things, He is always more than enough.