What does it take to create a true connection and communication? How can a family be created from strangers?
In People of the Deer, author Farley Mowat writes about his experience of living among the last surviving people of the Ihalmiut in the tundra of northern Canada. A people who lived traditionally and almost entirely off the migrating caribou herds, they had warmly welcomed Mowat into their camp.
Farley was delighted by the opportunity to learn from and experience the way these unknown and isolated people lived, but there was a significant problem: He spoke no Ihalmiut, nor did they speak any English. Initially they communicated brokenly through an interpreter who had learned some of their dialect, but the man was leaving the Barrens for good. It seemed pointless for Mowat to stay if communication was not possible.
Mowat made a decision: despite being told that their language was complex and incredibly difficult to master, he would learn it, as best he could.
This decision became the pivotal point in the relationship between him and the Ihalmiut people.
He writes that when he acted out his desire to learn their language to the two Ihalmiut men who had befriended him, the effect was astonishing. Once they understood what he meant, they in turn emphatically and repeatedly acted out complete acceptance of him as an adopted member of their people, claiming that he was now one of the Ihalmiut.
Humbled and deeply moved by the unexpected love these people showed an outsider, Mowat resolved to study their language with great effort. He was surprised to find, in the months following, he was able to make rapid progress and began communicating quickly. He was pleased by the seeming ease with which he mastered the basics of their language.
Somewhat arrogant about his success, Mowat tells of an encounter about a year later: Encountering a man who was a member of another related people group, he casually made a long, complicated remark in Ihalmiut – and was met with utter bewilderment. The man had no idea what Mowat was saying: it was unintelligible gibberish.
Mowat came to realize the stunning truth: the people of the Ihalmiut had deliberately created an extremely simplified version of their language to allow him to communicate with them.
Not only had this “pidgin” Ihalmiut been developed and used by the two men who were his self-assigned tutors, they had made sure the entire tribe used this simplified form of language!
The Ihalmiut language was incredibly sophisticated, with many distinct nuances and multiple precise tenses – all of which would have been too hard for him. He would have given up in discouragement immediately if he had tried to learn their language as it actually was.
Because of the love of these people for a complete stranger, and their whole-hearted acceptance and kindness in adopting him as family, they all willingly changed their language to allow him to live among them.
This is a story of unconditional love, undeserved kindness, and grace.
This is also a picture of the breath-taking love God has shown us.
In stunning kindness to us, this all-powerful, all-knowing Being chose to create a “pidgin” language to help communicate with us – He came to us as a human, Jesus Christ.
His Spirit inspired men to write in human words to help us attempt to comprehend Him, His character, and explain His glory. Yet even the most exquisite words can give only a feeble sense of His nature, His worth, His power and holiness.
It is when we make a decision to pursue a relationship with Him that everything we previously knew shifts. He knows we cannot grasp the extent of His greatness. He knows that we cannot fully comprehend the magnitude of His worth. But when we have taken that first step of stating our desire for relationship with Him despite the impossible challenge – He sees our feeble attempt and roars with joy as He rushes to meet us.
As we move toward Him, awkward and faltering, He exuberantly reaches out to us with His arms wide open and an enormous smile of joyous welcome. Declaring we are His forever and assuredly a member of His family, we are loved and accepted completely and finally.
There is no percentage in this relationship we can take any credit for – He gave us life, gave us the desire to seek Him, and then enabled the connection through Jesus’ sacrifice. This is no “lion’s share” of relationship. This is the entire share.
Why? Because He is love (1 John 4:8-10). And encountering this mind-blowing loveliness of God is what give us our greatest joy, deepest delight, and purest pleasure (Psalm 16:11, 36:8).
May we all come to a place where we, though awkward, stammering outsiders, experience the richness of love and kindness that makes us family with our King, though we have done nothing to deserve it.
The Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.
John 1:14, NLT
-Maria
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As we moved through our adoption process of your brother when you all were younger, I began noticing a guarded, sometimes almost weary look in the faces of other adoptive parents, specifically those who had adopted children who were not infants. When I had a conversation with them, they would be genuine and warm as they encouraged me on in our adoption journey, but part of me felt as if they were also carefully trying to avoid words that might spill out that they wanted to protect me from.
I started to be afraid of this look in their eyes, of finding out what it meant, of the cost that likely came with it, and I certainly never wanted to own it or wear it. Now I believe I have probably perfected that certain facial expression, and I know of my own hesitancy that comes when I in turn, try to encourage other people on any difficult path they find themselves on.
Whatever other people have experienced to wear that face of the wary and weary, for me it has been experiencing the cost of living out unconditional love. I have learned that I must make the choice to be a fool according to the world’s standards, and daily repeat that choice. God has used our adoption story to teach me something about Himself and the way He loves.
I was the oldest in a family of twelve children, with nine adopted siblings. Some of my siblings were infants, some toddlers, and some children (the oldest was thirteen) when they joined our family. We did not experience a fairy-tale of an adoptive family. I know some of the ugly that adoptive homes can be – with hurtings from both the children and the parents.
I had siblings go to juvenile detention centers, and after they got out, they quickly got themselves in a penitentiary for other things. I have had a younger sibling die from HIV/AIDS-related illness. I have some siblings I haven’t seen or spoken to in decades. Estrangement and woundedness currently best describes my family of origin. So you would think that I would have wanted to stay away from adoption (like my biological siblings did), but I didn’t.
I had hope that since adoption was such a good thing, giving a home and a family to a child who didn’t have one, it would be fine. I thought that since my motives were right and I was doing something right, it would be a better outcome than what I had experienced in my childhood family. I was better prepared emotionally, had better training, was better supported, I thought. And you children were so wonderful and excited! Every night you would pray earnestly for your brother, even before we knew his name. Your loving acceptance was such a joy to see. I know it made God’s heart happy.
So, your dad and I tenaciously fought through mountains of paperwork, collecting every last scrap of data to be compiled in our dossier. We attended meetings, courses, classes, medical exams, fingerprinting appointments, and psychological evaluations. I had to write requests to all the governments of countries and states we had ever lived in, asking for proof that we had no criminal record. We welcomed strangers into our home to assess both it and us, trying to be transparent and open as we answered very personal questions and gave our private financial information to people we didn’t know, to try to prove we could both parent and afford another child.
Then, after finally coming home from another country with the son we had fought so long and so hard to get, I experienced a dark depression finely mixed with a raging hatred. I honestly believed at one point that I had ruined my life by pursuing adoption. I’m not proud of this.
I was baffled by the storm of emotions and depression I felt caught in, and felt lonely and isolated. I was afraid to share my struggle with others because it seemed so foolish to be struggling so greatly when adoption had been something I had longed for so deeply and fought to reach for so long. I was afraid to let people see the dark anger burning in my heart. I felt like a failure as a parent – what kind of a monster couldn’t love an orphaned child? I feared the cynical “I told you so,” from people who had experienced adoption struggles themselves. I couldn’t bear the obliteration of hope from possibly hearing that this anger and defeated discouragement was the way it would always be. But being put on the pedestal of pious goodness and crowned with a halo of selfless altruism ascribed to me from others who had never adopted felt like swallowing acid.
The cause of this bewildered, blind rage and grief?
It was me.
I had to come to the realization that my anger and pain was from the agonizingly slow death of my self-satisfaction. I had truly believed I was a loving, patient, compassionate, and kind parent. Adopting a child who was not biologically mine forced me to suddenly face my selfishness, impatience, harshness and unkindness. Suddenly I could not avoid seeing the aspects of myself that I was unaware of or used to carefully hide.
Struggling to daily love, train, and care for a toddler who did not love me or even care who I was strained my last shreds of self-satisfaction, because it revealed just how much more grace I gave to you children who behaved in ways I approved of. It showed me how conditional my kindness was, and how shallow the depths of my compassion. I had to claim as my own a child who behaved as though he didn’t care if he was or not, and had not the slightest shred of gratitude for anything I had done for him and continued to do (at least not at first). And of course I realize the irrationality of even expecting it, especially from a toddler from an orphanage in another country! (My loves, please forgive me and know how truly sorry I am for this season. In a way adoption did ruin my life – the self-satisfied and blindly proud life I had known, and now am so grateful to have lost.)
Adoption forced me to look without any rosy shades at the person I was in my own strength, and recognize that there was no way I could make myself love my son without God’s help. I hit the bottom of my capacity for love, and trapped between my raging lack and the pain of my savaged pride, I writhed in depression, shame, and anger. It’s ugly but it’s true.
Meanwhile, your brother was a tender-hearted boy who showed concern whenever he noticed anyone sad (and still does). He has always been a quick learner, and has an infectious smile and laugh. He is an endearing and loveable kid, and our family is incredibly blessed that he is with us. I cannot imagine my life without him, and will always be so privileged that he was gifted to us by God. Of course we had things to work through. (Don’t we all?) Of course there will be on-going areas to focus on, and all of us will need to extend grace to each other, but apparently mostly to your mom (who still has so much to learn).
After that April when we grew our family through adoption, I began, with wonder, to truly contemplate God’s incomprehensible love for me. He had the perfect Son, yet chose to adopt me into His family. My adoption cost was beyond price: His life-blood on a cross, preceded by beating, mockery, and unthinkably gruesome and heinous torture by flogging. And He knew that before He even began my adoption process, and still He proceeded. If He has that much love for me, for you, for all the ones He has called to be His children, how much more will He give me the love I need for others (Luke 11:13)!
I marveled at God’s recklessness in pursuing a relationship with me, given the excruciating cost and on-going struggle as I feebly work to grow in my understanding of Him as my Father and what that means. My God’s sacrifice to make me His, His patience and kindness with my shallow, selfish heart, His deep tenderness as He leads me closer to Him even when I act like I don’t care – I’m beginning to grasp what the Apostle Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 1:18-29. God’s plan to save us through a Savior’s death on a cross seems like foolishness. Who would love that much? Who would endure that kind of suffering for the ones who would reject Him? Who gives so much to those who treat His patience and enduring kindness with such contempt and scorn? What kind of crazy love is this?
So much work, hope, pain, struggle, suffering and love given to bring a person to Himself as a son or daughter! Especially for a person who could decide to reject and discard the love offered, someone who probably will never fully grasp the sacrifice or cost paid to enact the adoption! I say this with the utmost reverence and with tears in my eyes: Our God is a Fool in His love for us, and He did the unbelievable and endured the unthinkable so that we could take our place in His home, eat the food He gives, wear the garments He provides, and have His name added to our birth certificate.
As Michael Card sings:
“We in our foolishness thought we were wise He played the fool and He opened our eyes We in our weakness believed we were strong He became helpless to show we were wrong So we follow God’s own Fool For only the foolish can tell Believe the unbelievable, come be a fool as well.”[1]
Anyone who pours out love without hesitation, pressing through the potential pain and suffering of rejection, misunderstanding, or tepid response, is reckoned a fool in the understanding of this world, because it makes no sense. There seems to be no visible gain or benefit to the love-giver.
This, my chickadees, is why such sacrificial love is so rare and beautiful: It resembles the inherent love-nature of the God who created us. He loves because He is Love, the purest, most holy love there is: that which carries no thought for itself or regard for gain, but loves because it is all-encompassingly the highest, noblest form of regard, honor, and affection expressible.
There is a fiery joy that comes in the outpouring of such a love. There is an unutterable delight brought in the presence of love like this – because it is to begin to enter the presence of our God of Love. In His presence is fullness of joy, and at His right hand there is pleasure forevermore (Psalm 16:11). Paul states that it was because of the joy set before Him that Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame (Hebrews 12:2). He did it because it was the rightest, holiest and purest expression of unconditional Love – and that is Who He is. When we choose to follow Jesus in this way, we too will experience this kind of joy (John 15:10-12).
Anyone who has looked at the cost of such love and then courageously gives it anyway, regardless of the suffering that inevitably comes, is someone who reflects our Father’s character of love. Whether it’s through marriage, parenting, friendship, or any other relationship with people, this world is filled with hurting folks unable to respond to you the way they should. Children and family members will often return your love with selfishness and thoughtless disregard, friends may take advantage of you, business associates cheat you, strangers mock or dismiss you, or worse. Yet this is how we declare our God’s hope to a broken world: By being a fool with a reckless, huge love like God’s love, incomprehensible and baffling. “The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)
April Fool’s Day is the day we brought your brother home to be part of our family. I used to struggle on this day, remembering the pain and bewildering grief of the death of my expectations and self-pride. Now I know it is a day to celebrate and remember that by my choice to follow Christ, I chose to be like a fool. I am choosing to resemble Him in pouring out my love at any cost, regardless of potential pain. Because that is how He loves me.
I do this with such imperfection and a glaring lack of purity in the love I give. But I will fight to keep my perspective on the One who loved me with such abandoned recklessness. I will pray for the strength to hold out my arms wide to those who might wound me, keep my heart soft and open to those who might crush it, and turn repeatedly to offer that which costs me everything to those who might place a low value on it. Through it all I know that there is nothing in this life that can separate me from my Father’s incredible, indescribably deep love for me. And in that there is unspeakable joy.
I pray that each of you come to a sure understanding of His same wonderful, foolish, life-giving love for you, too, and also find this joy.
All my love always,
Mom
[1] Card, Michael. 1985. God’s Own Fool. On Scandalon. Brentwood, TN: Sparrow Records.
