Adopting Rudy
An honest conversation about our journey to adoption.
Hi friends,
A few weeks ago I announced on Instagram that my wife and I had adopted our first son, Rudy…
I know some of you are here specifically to hear more about our journey, which I promised to share.
I still haven’t found time to write out the whole story to my satisfaction. (Rudy has better ideas for how I should be spending my time.) However, Jenny and I recently had the pleasure of sharing some of our experience with adoption so far on The Commentary podcast, and I wanted to share it here. This way you’ll get to hear both our perspectives—not to mention a few baby grunts from Rudy himself.
(And here is the Apple Podcast link.)
Listening to the conversation again, I was struck by how raw a few of our comments sound, especially regarding the brick wall of infertility.
Despite the frustrations of our journey, though, Jenny and I want everyone to know how joyful we feel to be Rudy’s parents, and we hope that comes through. God has allowed us to feel weak in ourselves so he could be our strength. Two months into parenting and I’m realizing that’s a lesson we needed to learn, and are still learning.
We only briefly touched on the theological significance of adoption in the episode, but I was glad Mark brought it up, especially how the Westminster Confession of Faith devotes an entire, if brief, chapter to the topic:
All those that are justified, God vouchsafeth, in and for his only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption, by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God, have his name put upon them, receive the Spirit of adoption, have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry, Abba, Father, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him, as by a father: yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption; and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation (WCF 12).
Christians are used to calling God “Father,” as they should be. The doctrine of adoption reminds us that we are not God’s children according to natural generation, but by spiritual regeneration and adoption. We enjoy the “liberties and privileges of the children of God” only because God takes us into his spiritual family for the sake of Christ, our faithful Elder Brother.
Though we lacked natural birth rights before God, through adoption are we “pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him, as by a father.” Surely this is why the Confession refers to adoption as God’s grace. And so it is.
