Why We Adopt – Part One

I just re-read my second blog post from April and realized that I promised to elucidate our reasons for adopting.  As we have explored the world of adoption, from inside and out, I’ve come to see that there are two primary reasons that people adopt.  There are many sub-categories below these two main reasons, and there may not always be a hard line of division between them, but most if not all of them fall into these two categories:

1.  Growing a family.

2. Caring for orphans.

It has been walking through this process of adopting a little boy with Down Syndrome that has brought this to light.  When we adopted Eliot, our reasons were much more oriented to reason one.  We desired to have a son.  We had raised two daughters and were beginning to think we were in the home stretch.  God had a wonderful surprise for us, and we are every day more delighted to have added Eliot to our family.

I must say that the gospel was at the center of WHO we chose to adopt, but not so much in the center of WHY we adopted.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  We wanted to adopt cross-culturally because we wanted it to be very clear that our son was not ethnically identical to us.  This reason was gospel-centered because of the conversations about how adoption relates to the gospel that having an obviously adopted son would provoke.  But the reason we adopted in the first place was because we wanted a son – plain and simple.

One of the things I have thought about, and I will elaborate on this in part two, is that Eliot was not an orphan in the same sense that Peter is.  What I mean is that Eliot was not an abandoned or unwanted child in the same way that Peter is.  And this is one of the things that sets the reasons for adoption apart from one another.  Adoption and orphan care are related but not identical.  They are intertwined but not inseparable.  Adopting Peter, though it certainly is much more than simply caring for an orphan who needs a home, leans more in that direction because of the nature of his state of abandonment.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Stay tuned for part two.