#my uncle sent me a book that came out in paperback a few months ago

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

does anyone else get disproportionately stressed out by being given a book they already own. it's like... objectively not a big deal! i can give it away! but also somebody thought of me, and spent money on me, and i cannot benefit from the thing they have given me (even though they objectively got something right because it interests me enough to have bought it already) so i feel both ungrateful and also a little sad that i do not get a new book (and then feel guilty for being sad because i was not, like, entitled to a new book) and oh no those are bad emotions and a gift should be good emotions, help

[davidcampiti]

A LIFE WITHOUT STAN LEE? -- Part One

This is the first month of my life without Stan Lee alive in it.

I think it’s appropriate to post this essay today, on Stan Lee’s birthday, the first one without him actually here to celebrate it. I couldn’t bring myself to write about Stan the day he died, just shy of 96 years old, and the week and month that followed were no better. Today I can put down some thoughts.

I am a child of Stan Lee. His work with Jack Kirby and John Romita appeared in the first comic book I remember reading – the Marvel-produced America’s Best TV Comics, a 25-cent comicbook that promoted the ABC Saturday morning cartoons.   It's one of the first powerful memories of childhood that have stayed with me for all this time.

Across my formative years, Stan Lee's words encouraged me to learn, to read more of everything -- not just comics. I spent much of my early years in the library and ordering Scholastic books every month through school. I read everything -- fiction, biographies, histories, science books.

Yet I grew up loving the comics that blazed brightly with his public persona and, while my parents toiled at just earning a living and staying alive, I learned much from "The Man." Stan taught me a lot about being a decent human being. It wasn't all, "With great power there must also come...great responsibility," though that was there, as well.

In recent years we corresponded a bit about the morals and messages of his words in his scripts, his Stan's Soapbox, and his many lectures and interviews. I told him we should assemble a book, Everything I Know, I learned From Stan Lee.

He wrote back -- "The paperback you suggested, 'Everything I Know I Learned from Stan Lee,' sounds like it could be funny. Especially if it consists of only one page with only one thing learned -- how to spell 'Excelsior!' Keep the faith, David. You're one of the good guys! Excelsior! Stan"

We discussed it a bit more but, soon after, Stan's eyesight worsened and he stopped answering his own mail; whoever took over had no idea what we'd been talking about. I let the idea drop.

Back when I was 12, I decided my career goal was to work with Stan Lee. Eventually, I achieved that goal but not by submitting stories in my teens and 20s but much later in my life, as an agent and book author. By the time I was 14, he'd gone from editor-in-chief to Publisher -- which meant he'd need more writers, right?

The first time I met Stan Lee and got to take a photo with him, I looked up at him and said, “Smile, and look as much like my Uncle as you can.” He laughed and gave my artist friend Scott Rockwell and me a good half-hour of his time, looking at art and answering questions. That was in 1978 – fully 40 years ago – and I remember it all as if it were yesterday. Stan was a memorable guy who could make you feel like the most important person in the room. I only wish I still had that photo; maybe Scott has it buried somewhere.

Four years later, I sold my first professional comics scripts to Pacific Comics and two years after that was writing a Superman assignment for DC with Kevin Juaire. Instead of ending up at Marvel as I’d hoped – which would’ve required moving to New York and being involved in daily office politics – I became a comics packager, then a publisher, then an agent. That’s how Stan knew me professionally, as a writer and an artist’s agent.

In early 1989, at a Capital City Distribution trade show, my Innovation Publishing was set up promoting the books we would be releasing into comics shops in a few weeks.  Stan was walking by, and I suggested to my assistant Paul Curtis that we should invite Stan to dinner.  He ran over, asked, and Stan said yes!  He not only brought along Carol Kalish and regaled us with two hours of stories about life at Marvel, Stan insisted that Marvel pay for the meal!  Nobody thought to bring a camera, but the memories stayed with us.  As I recall, Steve Sullivan, Paul Curtis and his girlfriend Amy, and I were the happy Innovation team at that dinner.  Kevin VanHook came on the trip but was elsewhere at that time.  He made up for it later at a party by chatting on a couch with Stan and later dancing with Carol.

In the '90s, Stan and I would chat at every opportunity at conventions.

When Marvel released a limited edition hardcover reprint of his 1947 book Secrets of the Comics, I decided to give in to my fannish impulses and use its endpapers as my autograph book.

Stan, of course, was the first to sign it in 1996, and a batch of Silver Age stalwarts followed.

By then we made it a point to get photos together every year across two decades. It was a clear timeline of the both of us getting older.

As the internet blossomed, I helped Stan a little when he first joined AOL. He asked me how AOL Instant Messenger worked, how to turn it on when he wanted to communicate and off when he didn’t want to be bombarded with Messages, and so on. Another time, an article he wanted to read was behind a login/password, and he asked me help get him through that. It tickled me to help Stan “The Man” with such basic web-things.

From the mid-'90s through the early 2000s, Stan would call the Glass House offices about once a month to ask for my perspective on what was going on in the comics biz, since we dealt not only with all the Marvel editors but everyone else as well. Real conversations, not the "'Nuff said, Pilgrim!" stuff. He'd graciously take an extra few minutes to chat with my assistant Graeme, who loved talking to his childhood icon.

Around 1997, Marvel's savvy publisher asked Glass House to create two dozen project proposals for a line of second-tier titles that my company would package. We ended up over-achieving and submitted 28 of them -- one of them for the first-tier Fantastic Four that I understood we had little chance of getting, but I had to try. The art was Joe Bennett's doing a Kirbyesque style.

Stan was kind enough to read over my FF proposal/outline and fine-tune my dialogue for the pages, before I submitted.

Likely worried about how an outside packager controlling so many titles would affect his own position, the editor-in-chief buried all 28 projects until, two years later, he assigned an editor to reject every proposal outright; that editor told me my FF dialogue didn't capture the essence of the characters -- not realizing the words were Stan's.

(Sidebar:  It was so ridiculous, that editor even rejected a proposal that another Marvel editor already saw, bought, and published!)

When Meryl and I got married in 2001, Stan sent us a gift -- a lemon cake and a note saying he wished he could've made it to the wedding. We still have the note; we ate the cake.

In 2006, Stan's POW! Entertainment launched Who Wants to be a Super-Hero? on The Sci-Fi Channel, and my Glass House Graphics contributed all the cover artwork for both seasons of the TV show. We even drew the comicbooks that starred both winners -- Matthew Atherton and Jarrett Crippen, both of whom became our friends.

When my friend, then-GHG artist Will Conrad, worked with him on the Dark Horse Feedback comic book, Stan took the time personally to choose Will out of our roster of artists, and to phone him in Brazil for a long talk before sending him the plot. (And yes, it was a full page-by-page plot.) They spoke several times during Will's month working on the book, each time helpful and upbeat.

The second book, with The Defuser, was more problematic. The network and producers weren't honoring their commitments to the winner, so I reached out to Stan who said, "I don't see any compelling reason to bother doing it, since we weren't renewed for a third season." I replied, "Because you said you would? Because you have the power to do it, and with great power there must also come great responsibility?" He made it happen, and Glass House Graphics's Kajo Baldissimo did the art.

We also drew the box art and insert comic books for multiple DVD animation projects that POW! released, with art by GHG's fabulous Fabio Laguna.

Stan always made time to meet privately with my artists, and my family, for which I was always grateful.

Of course when Comics Buyer’s Guide published a big feature issue for Stan’s 75th Birthday, I contributed an essay and hired the great Marie Severin to do a caricature cover for it and sent Stan a giant print of the art.

Around the time of Stan's 90th birthday celebration, I had Tina Francisco create a new birthday cover for Comics Buyer's Guide, and I penned a long article about him, too.

Of course, we sent to Stan a poster of the color art, and he sent back this card -- as always, written in his own handwriting.

TO BE CONTINUED -- IN PART TWO!

[hub-pub-bub]

The Renovo Public Library, in North-Central Pennsylvania, isn’t a handsome wood or brick building on the town square. It certainly isn’t anything like the New York Public Library’s main branch, on Fifth Avenue, with its marble lion guards outside and palatial rooms and hallways. Instead, it’s a small, squat former auto garage built with concrete blocks painted white. The building was remodeled and opened in 1968, in a campaign led by a group of schoolteachers and local residents to obtain, for our remote end of the county, a branch library. It sits on a rise overlooking the Susquehanna river, at the end of a dead-end street, all but hidden from the currents of town life.

Frequently, I was the only person in the building, other than our librarian, Viv. I lingered there on drowsy after-school afternoons because I loved the sweet damp smell of paper and glue slowly decaying, because I loved pulling some forgotten old hardcover from the shelves, and because, simply, I loved being in a room filled with books. Two rooms, actually. There was a small-town stillness, an atmosphere of benign neglect inside our little library that suggested the great works of Western lit were mine alone to discover. A translation of the Greek epic poem the Odyssey had, according to its date-stamped card, an equally epic lending history: checked out twice in 1968, once in 1980, and again in 1992, before I came along, in March of 1994, when I was 17, and removed Homer’s masterpiece from its place for the fifth time in more than a quarter century.

The persistent feeling that the public library belonged to me, that it was a clean, well-lighted place built and kept open for one reader, was reinforced in other ways. In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty describes in fearsome terms a Mrs. Calloway, the librarian at Jackson’s Carnegie Library, who sat facing the stairs, “her dragon eye on the front door.” If Mrs. Calloway could see through a young woman’s skirt, Welty wrote, “she sent you straight back home.” Viv was no library overlord. She kept an ashtray in her top desk drawer to sneak drags of her cigarettes. She spoke in a Kool rasp. But mostly she silently communicated a do-as-you-please air, as if you had entered a self-serve cafeteria. Just like the desserts under glass, it was up to you to discover your favorites.

I didn’t mind this one bit. I liked being my own guide. It created a sense of accidental discovery; and, simultaneously, the opposite feeling, that I had been led to certain books and authors by divining rod. Four blue metal bookcases, or stacks, each about eight feet tall with double-sided shelves and grouped in a single row, held the entire collection for adults—a small, manageable garden from which I drew nourishment over many seasons. I could stand amid those four bookshelves an hour or all day, the hum of the cooling fan and the squeak of Viv’s metal chair the only intrusions.

How many other rural and small-town children have sought the outside world inside a library? Stephen King, Richard Russo, and Bobbie Ann Mason, to name a few, have talked about this. “It was the only place a relatively poor kid like me could get all the books he wanted,” King once said. “I just have this feeling that if it weren’t for the Gloversville Free Library that I probably would not be a writer,” Russo reflected. If you don’t happen to live near a college or a bookstore, if your relatives aren’t bookish, the public library is literary culture in its entirety.

In a lucky stroke, the library was two blocks from my house. My mother enrolled me in a children’s reading program when I was four or five. Though not a patron herself, she knew that a library card was a passport, a way for her only child to travel beyond the hemmed-in mountain hollows and valley town. First imaginatively, and then for real.

  “How many other rural and small-town children have sought the outside world inside a library?”

  I grew up in a world in which books were not topics of conversation nor easy to obtain. The closest bookstore, Otto’s, was in Williamsport, a 50-mile drive—unless you counted the Christian gift shop, in Lock Haven, selling Billy Graham’s How to Be Born Again. This part of Pennsylvania, though mountainous and cut off, lacked the widespread tradition of reading to fill the quiet hours that you find throughout rural New England or the upper prairie states. “Nose always in a book,” some hardworking adult you knew would remark, not disapprovingly, but not exactly enthusiastically, either. Serious readers existed, of course; but as islands, unaware of one another. A few years ago, my childhood friend Mayers’s father died, and I was invited to the house and given some of his books. In an upstairs room, I found novels by Iris Murdoch and Peter Matthiessen and The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, which surprised me, and I thought, regretfully, of how Gene Mayers and I only ever talked about the Phillies.

My own household was stuffed with books, of a sort: coffee-table doorstoppers illustrated with color photos on the subjects of decorating, Christmas, houses, antique dolls and the Amish (my mother’s books), and railroad history in general and the Pennsylvania Railroad in particular (my father’s). My socially isolated mother was a big magazine subscriber, too; her issues of Country Living, House Beautiful, and similar titles were “my best friends,” she said, and they gathered around her in a teeming, teetering party wherever she sat. The magazines brought a little of the world of Manhattan publishing into our house, a big-city hum at a vibrational level.

But my father preferred to work with his hands. And my mother, confronted with anything text-heavy, would raise a palm in resistance and say, “I’m not a big reader.” We got our news and entertainment the way many families did: watching eye-frying amounts of TV. Sometimes I’d go on archeological digs of rooms and drawers in search of more absorbing reading material, a novel or work of nonfiction. The closest I came was Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the pink paperback edition. My mother had left it under my old baby blankets in the bottom drawer of the walnut dresser in my bedroom. As a book in my personal space, it radiated a signal, but dimly.

The library, by contrast, was a charged space. My skin now breaks into the same expectant tingle in favorite used bookstores. All those carefully arranged volumes, offering all those portals, all there for my choosing! In late elementary school and early junior high, I read juvenile mysteries from the children’s room—Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, the series that follows Jupiter Jones and his pals as they puzzle out riddles from a trailer beached in Jupiter’s uncle’s scrapyard. The rusty, postindustrial setting reminded me of the emptied PRR workshops across the tracks uptown. The essential theme of every book, that reason and logic could be applied to explain bizarre or supernatural phenomenon—a screaming clock, a whispering mummy, (puberty?)—appealed equally to my sense of intellectual superiority and my seventh-grade unease.

By high school, I needed harder stuff. I was filled with hormones and feeling inwardly deformed—you may remember it as 16. The adult reading room was on the other side of the building, past the librarian’s desk which separated the two wings. Besides the four bookcases, on one wall there was a Renovo street map dated 1882, framed and faded sepia, and below the map, a wooden cabinet that held the town’s dead citizens, their birth and death dates and where they were buried recorded on file cards arranged alphabetically, my blood relatives included. When I was a kid, you were forbidden to enter the adult room until you turned 12. Even Viv enforced this rule. There was a thrill in crossing that threshold officially, the rite of passage of graduating from child to adult reader, of being unleashed on all those banned books.

  “‘Nose always in a book,’ some hardworking adult you knew would remark, not disapprovingly, but not exactly enthusiastically, either.”

  I devoured true crime hardcovers with lurid photos. In salacious tales of California hippie sex cults and serial killers more emotionally warped than me, I took morbid satisfaction. But when I discovered the two fiction shelves, especially Cannery Row among the S’s, it brought me out of myself and into the joyful, moral universe of literature. Cannery Row was, for me, one of those books. Meaning it was the book. I recognized, in its portrayal of the marginally poor but richly interesting men and women of a working waterfront community 3,000 miles away, my own streets and neighbors. My first appreciation of the alchemical properties of storytelling. Another revelation: the rural underclass was worthy of a novel by a Nobel Prize winner.

Cannery Row stirred the first desire to capture Renovo as Steinbeck did Monterey, and to give other readers the same pleasure I’d received. In short, to be a writer. I read at night in my childhood bed, feeling less childlike with each turned page.

During my last college summer, I moved right into the four blue shelves and camped there for three months. It was a sweet summer of leisurely, rapturous reading, heightened by the awareness that my days of leisure were numbered; in a year’s time, I’d be reading job listings. I’d brought home my most prized textbook, Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories (7th Edition), 1,429 pages of 10-point type. I’d study the table of contents, then search out writers at the library.

The stacks were a kind of magic garden, fixed but boundless. The more you read, the more your interests and knowledge expanded, the more books you discovered. If there weren’t tens of thousands of books, there were enough to get a basic self-education. Twain, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Austin, Faulkner, Hemingway, Cather—the recognized masters were present, usually in the form of thick omnibus volumes with titles like The Complete Novels of. I learned to look for the stellar, mid-century editions of the Modern Library (“The Best of the World’s Best Books”), identified by the colophon, on the spine, of a tiny, naked, leaping torchbearer.

Sometimes, I’d discover a book totally alien in its surroundings. For instance, The Portable Dorothy Parker, an anthology of her stories and poems. Parker had written one of my favorite stories in Fiction 100, “Big Blonde.” But what was the wit of Manhattan’s Jazz Age doing here? Who’d put it there? The Parker anthology had gone out even less than the Odyssey—just twice since the library had come into existence. Its presence seemed a miracle waiting to be discovered.

When I wasn’t at the library that summer, I was working for PennDOT, a job I’d taken to earn tuition money. During our lunch breaks and on rainout days and while waiting on the roadside for a piece of heavy equipment to arrive, while the big, side-burned men on the full-time highway crew bantered around me and rested their bad backs, I had my nose in a book. In those inner-expanding years, beginning a new book produced an actual physical response, a smooth internal uncoupling akin to the first inhale of a joint. Viv would be there behind the lending desk when I burst in after work in dirty jeans and boots in need of another hit.

*

In New York City, where I now live, there are three bookstores within a short walk of my apartment, and countless fellow writers and bookish types with whom to have windy bookish discussions. The public library is a pillar of civilized culture. Funny, though, I’ve made few visits to the NYPL over the years, and when I do visit, I become agitated and overwhelmed. There are 92 branches spread across Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island (Brooklyn and Queens have their own networks). The busiest is the Mid-Manhattan Library, at 41st Street. The seven-story pile buzzes with all the chaos and crowds and enormity of the city, embodied by the uniformed guard at the exit doing bag checks. Confronted with the number 53 million, the NYPL’s collection size at last count, my brain trips a circuit. I miss my four shelves.

It turns out the formalized book culture I sought and found as a professional writer isn’t only about books. It’s equally (and sometimes more) about which book has sold for “mid-six-figures” or been hyped at this or that industry expo or made it onto this or that bestseller list. Sometimes, passing the giveaway tables in the newsroom where I work, I find—the horror!—pre-publication copies and brand-new books discarded in a heap, a sobering sight for any author. This sort of corrupting is inevitable when you turn something you love into your industry. Books are commodities. But still, I feel it as a loss of innocence, a low-grade sadness.

In the Renovo Library, books were simple containers for pleasure. Far from leaving it in the past, I have never let my lending card lapse. When I brought my wife home to Pennsylvania the first time, I took her to the library. Later, I was invited to become an honorary board member. I find myself returning there again and again, the way a competitive swimmer might return to the clear, still pool where he first moved through water for the joy of it.

  “Confronted with the number 53 million, the NYPL’s collection size at last count, my brain trips a circuit. I miss my four shelves.”

  Another small-town Pennsylvania boy, John Updike, once lamented returning to his childhood library as an adult. “I loved the Reading public library and read through whole shelves of P.G. Wodehouse and mystery novels and humor and all the stuff that was very congenial to me,” Updike recalled. “And I went back recently thinking I’d find the same shelves and the same books I read, and of course I was wrong. They’ve all been replaced by people like me who have come along since.”

It’s remarkable, a gift really, how this unique spot, this holy spot, is so little changed. Everything is still as it always has been: The children’s room to the left, the adult room to the right, and the librarian’s desk between them, the town map and the cabinet of dead citizens, the empty, tranquil feeling inside, with the time to browse unhurried, in happy near-solitude. The algorithms have yet to find it out. Six desktop monitors on a folding table place you vaguely in the 21st century. Viv has since departed from the library, and the planet; Barbara now sits behind the lending desk. There’s a wall-mounted big-screen TV for movie nights and lectures, part of Barbara’s active efforts to create a vital community center. The exterior has been spruced up, a new roof put on, a mural painted.*

But the blue bookcases still number four in a single row. When I stand among them, I am in a museum of my own reading life.

Not long ago, I was back poking around in the fiction shelves. I’d recently been reading 19th century novelists, and was on the hunt for more, and there appeared a Nathaniel Hawthorne anthology I’d somehow never noticed. Even after 30 years of raking these shelves, the tiny garden keeps giving.

After a few shuffle steps, I found myself in the S’s, reaching for a faded brown spine that carried the filing letters Ste—the same 1966 Viking edition of Cannery Row, in the same spot. How comforting to hold it in my hands again! How impossible to do that in a big-city library! I removed the check-out card from the paper sleeve inside: A tiny column of dates stamped in fuzzy purplish ink, one of them returning me to that spring afternoon at 16.

There are new kids who come in here now. I see them on the computers in the adult wing playing Roblox, a game of virtual worlds. The over-12 rule has been lifted to provide them internet access. I hope in time their curiosity leads them back into the four shelves, where new books wait to be found. Despite all that has remained the same, no library can be static ground; the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1985 edition, has to be weeded out, the shelves like the earth turned over. Some of these new books I myself have donated. I try to choose broadening reads unexpected in the setting. So that a boy or girl growing up in this town today might walk in one afternoon and discover The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao or Eleanor & Park or Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom and wonder, Who put this here?

  *Some of the language in this paragraph intentionally echoes E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake.”

[stephenaltrogge-blog]

In the summer of 2013, my husband Josh and I flew to Uganda to adopt two small children, a brother and sister, ages 3 and 5. We spent 5 weeks learning, crying, laughing, and praying as we navigated the process of legally adopting and making these kids our own.

We sat in front of a judge, we waited for new passports, we took the kids to have medical examinations and TB tests and we amassed two massive folders of paperwork that basically said, “these two Mzungus (white people) can take these kids home with them.”

In the meantime, our two biological daughters, then 3 and 4, were back at home hanging with their grandparents and aunts and uncles, missing us, but generally enjoying life as they swam and played and were doted on.

Even now, as I look back on that month, my stomach twists as I remember just how incredibly terrified I was. In the lovely videos and pictures that people post, it always appears that adoptive mothers are confident, brave, strong, and loving. I was anxious, fearful, and desperate.

Why on earth did God call me, of all people, to this? And how, how, are these strangers to become my children? What are we DOING?

But of course, time moved us forward. We came home, and the process of bonding and adapting began. In truth, the transition was easier than I had anticipated. Within six months the language changed from Luganda to English. The kids were siblings. God created a new family, and we rejoiced.

Now, four and a half years later, we have a lot of great memories to look back on. We have four funny, crazy, precocious children. They laugh and play and fight with the best of them. Oh and now that the girls are getting older they feel. ALL THE TIME.

We get to see the wonder of children who accept adoption, and having siblings of another ethnicity, as the norm. And it’s beautiful. Like when our Charlotte was asked by a classmate how he was her brother. And she responded in confusion, “Uh…because he’s my BROTHER.”

Or when my brother and his wife, both white, had a baby and our Eva was genuinely surprised that the baby was white. Because in her mind, white parents can have black children and that’s that.

But all beauty and bonding and lovely stories aside, these years have been HARD. We’ve seen psychologists and battled severe educational delays. I’ve had anxiety attacks and discovered the anger issues I thought I had so tightly reined in resurfaced with a quickness.

Discipline has been a total crapshoot, like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks. Will this work? How about this? Maybe this? All the parenting lessons we’d learned – out the window.

We experience the inevitable effects of abandonment, neglect, and the death of a parent. We must reassure again and again and again and again and again. We are in over our heads.

World Adoption Day and Orphan Care Sunday were both several weeks ago, with both striving to draw attention to the need for, and beauty of, adoption, fostering, and orphan care; I thought it an appropriate time to share a bit of our own story. But beyond that, I want to share a few of the lessons we’ve learned.

Recommended resource:

Sale

Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches (Updated and Expanded Edition)

Russell Moore - Publisher: Crossway - Edition no. 0 (10/31/2015) - Paperback: 256 pages

$17.99 - $4.10 $13.89

We’re only four years into this thing, so I’m sure these lessons will change or become obsolete as our experience grows and deepens. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t relevant today, and hopefully they’ll bring some encouragement to those who need it.

We Are Not Awesome

Something interesting happens when you decide to adopt. People think you’re amazing (not the people who really know you. They’re not fooled). But the typical bystander thinks you’re brave and selfless and spiritually deep. They think you have a superpower that they just don’t have. They say things like:

“You guys have such big hearts.”

“Those kids are so lucky to have you.”

“Wow, I don’t think I could ever do that.”

Because we are fallen creatures and pride is our natural fleshly bent, I can’t tell you how easy it is to begin to believe this. “Man, we ARE awesome. Look at this beautiful thing we did. Go us.”

Here’s the hard-learned truth, though. We are as sinful and as in need of the gospel as we ever were. We are sinners who adopted kids. That’s it. If our hearts are big, it’s because our God has enlarged them with his indwelling presence. Any good in us comes from Him.

Our kids aren’t “lucky.” They are sinners living in a fallen world, too. They, too, need the blessing of salvation even more than the blessing of food and shelter and love.

As far as whether or not anyone else can do this: who are we to say? It’s funny to watch people get so nervous when talking to us about adoption, as though we think everyone everywhere should do it. If anything, we are very familiar with what a life-altering, difficult decision it is.

I think that in order for the church to really embrace adoption and foster care, we must do away with this notion of “special” people being called into it. It’s become an easy thing to point to in order to avoid really praying about and considering it. It also sets adoptive parents on a pedestal, which they certainly don’t need.

Normal sinners adopt. God is the one who works the miracles that make it possible.

We Are Not Owed Anything

As a Christian, I believe that adoption is an earthly shadow of what our Heavenly Father did for us when He sent His son. The Bible says in multiple places that when we call on Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, we become adopted children of God. We are co-heirs with Christ, born again into a new life.

I think we can all get our heads around that imagery when we see the adoptive parents drawing their new children into their arms, removing the label of orphan and giving new identities and new lives.

However, where I’ve really seen the gospel picture most clearly is in the worst moments. I’m ashamed to admit it, but deep down there was something in me that felt I was owed something. What I never say out loud, but feel deep down, is, “How could you doubt that I love you? Don’t you see all that I’ve done for you?”

Where is God’s love most clearly displayed? “God demonstrates His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He saves the prodigals, the children who say again and again, “You don’t really love me. I don’t believe you.”

That’s adoption. Just like the Israelites in the wilderness looked back on Egypt with longing, so the orphan will doubt the parents’ goodness again and again. So we doubt God’s goodness again and again.

Recommended resource:

Sale

God's Very Good Idea: A True Story of God's Delightfully Different Family

Trillia Newbell - Publisher: The Good Book Company - Hardcover: 32 pages

$14.99 - $1.50 $13.49

If I respond as I ought, it’s because He supplied the ability to do so. If I doubt Him and refuse to obey, He welcomes my repentance and bestows mercy and grace once more.

This is what it is to adopt a child. Orphans are needy and desperate they will rely on your kindness and grace repeatedly. Don’t put a burden on them that your Father in heaven has lifted from your own shoulders.

This not only applies to our children, but to others as well. Too often I’ve read blog posts by adoptive parents that demand that other people “get it,” or tiptoe around their experiences. I find this to be fairly unhelpful. It’s a given that others will have questions, and sometimes express those questions in unintentionally awkward ways.

Be gracious, be kind, and remember how many stupid questions you’ve asked in your life. Little is accomplished by expecting one with no experience in orphan care to meet your standards.

There Is Only One Expert

Look, guys. You can read a million things about how to adopt well. There are huge books written on the subject. There are guidebooks and memoirs and stories and blog posts and articles. Some of it may be helpful. Some of it, not so much. In the end, here’s what I know. You are a unique parent to your unique children.

This is true for biological and adoptive parents, but I think is an especially important thing for parents of adopted children and special needs children to understand. The one who knows your child best is God. Then after that, you.

Learning this lesson doesn’t mean we haven’t sought professional help. In fact, we have. We’ve gotten so much from it. We’ve also learned that even with all of the research available, the experts don’t totally understand what childhood trauma does to development. But there is an all-knowing God who does understand everything that we don’t.

In our desperation to always know and control, we can forget that we must trust God and allow Him to speak and instruct. He does this through His church, His Word, and His Spirit. He also does it through the provision of experts and professionals, but those shouldn’t replace the three primary sources of His grace, but rather supplement them.

His Grace Is Sufficient

Perhaps this is the lesson of every parent, but I’ve found it to be particularly true as I’ve entered into brokenness and murky histories and baffling behavior. I am not enough for the task. No adoptive parents are. But the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is.

Where I succeed, his gracious provision has made it possible. Where I’ve failed, He’s showing my need for it all over again. Most of the time I feel like a huge mess, navigating a hopeless parenting labyrinth. Thankfully, the end is clear and bright, and it’s not up to me to get myself there.

There are no guarantees of wonderful, well-turned out children, biological or adopted. But the grace of God to walk through whatever is coming is a sure and steady promise.

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