Restoring Families through …Adoption?

I read in the latest Time Magazine about an EXTREME version of adoption happening in St. Louis. The typical process for adoption into a permanent family among children in foster homes or orphanages can take years, and for children over the age of 10, those with disabilities, or African-American, it can be take even longer.  This is the sad truth of today’s adoption process.

But the new way of doing things in St. Louis was epiphanied while watching an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. How is it that a whole house can be built in one week, without any new technology or extra people on the site?  And how could this same success be incorporated into the adoption process?  Could we have a Home Adoption: Extreme Edition?  This is what’s happening in the adoption agency in St. Louis.

Instead of taking years to connect a child with a quality home, the whole agency focuses in on one child a week – applying for multiple placing services at once (verses one at a time) and pushing to get all cylinders firing to get this kid in a loving family.

And most interestingly, for many of the children, that loving family is their own.

The agency hires two private investigators to hunt down the rest of the original family of the foster child.  These gumshoes do pavement pounding, online research, and drum through the public records to contact uncles, grandmas, and cousins…anyone who might be distantly related to the abandoned child.

Stats say that families are more likely to adopt an orphaned nephew or grandchild than a total stranger.  And studies are saying its healthier for the kid too.  It’s important that a young person is connected to their known family, and thus, a larger story.

While reading Isaiah 43 today, I couldn’t help notice God describing himself as a “kinsman redeemer” - which fit perfectly with role of the private investigators.  A Redeemer in ancient society was to be a fail-safe of protection for a family if they got separated, sold into slavery, or otherwise in danger.  The Redeemer would either buy them out of slavery, or take action against the oppressors and rescue the family member. While foster homes are not exactly slavery – it is so encouraging to think that children across the nation are being fought for with such white-hot intensity, and re-assimilated into their very own family.

For as long as it takes, this agency fights tooth and nail for the salvation of one little kid.

And God is your Redeemer. He is carving a path through wilderness and trying to make contact with you. He wants to introduce you to his family…to RE-introduce you to a family you forgot you were a part of. His aim is to rescue you, to ransom you, to remind you of who you truly are.

It can be frightening for children so long separated from their biological families to be reintroduced into the family system – but it is many times the healthiest thing for them. Give yourself the same chance - look for where your Redeemer is coming from, and run toward him.  Then be about the business of rescuing others!

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