Mothers: A Reflection of God's Love - Point 2

Number two, God is eternal. Like I said, giving birth is not the only way to become a mother. A child can grow in your heart just like a child can grow in your womb. And I don't know how God does it, but his ways, thankfully, are not our ways. They are so much better. I'm blessed to have experienced this firsthand. My entire life, I knew that I would adopt. I can remember being a small child. I wasn't in a Christian home, but I can remember laying in bed, praying to God for all the children out there that didn't have moms and dads. So I knew that was going to be a part of my life. My husband, on the other hand, he took a little more convincing. He's 15 years older than I am. He was an empty nester and headed for an early retirement, and I surprised him with that news. But God can radically change hearts, and I will never forget the day that he looked at me and said, let's adopt. So here's the thing. We thought it would be easy. We didn't care. Boy, girl, age, where they were from, their medical needs, their race. We cared nothing about those things,

so we just figured we'd just get a kid. Well, it didn't work that way, and we hit roadblock after roadblock after roadblock, and after a couple of years, our agency finally came to us and they said, I'm sorry, we can't really get you any children. You don't really qualify for a lot of our programs, but there's this website, and we take pictures of kids and put them on the website that can't find families. We can't find families for them due to one's need or another, and so just look at the list and pick one. I'm like, pick one? Like, that was the hardest couple of days of my life, like, scrolling through, knowing that every one of those children didn't have a family, and I had to pick one? Like, I wanted to pick all of them, and so I just cried, and I would look at them, and I'm like, God, how can I choose? And one day, I looked at this picture of this little brother and sister, and God said, those are your children. Now, I would love to tell you they were these just adorable little cute kids, but the picture was horrible. The little girl, she tried to cut her own hair, and so her bangs were like this long, and it was crooked,

and the little boy was making this weird face, and they had chicken pox on top of it, so I'm like, great. So, I said, okay, honey, these are our children, and we didn't know about them. We didn't know where they lived. We didn't know their background, what they dealt with, but we knew that they were ours, and instantly, we loved them, and here's the thing, God, he feels the same way about you. It does not matter what you look like. It doesn't matter where you're from. It doesn't matter what your background is. He loves you. From the moment I saw those kids, I knew that they were mine, but that does not mean the process was easy. We had a lot of ups and downs as we adjusted to this new life. Turns out they were from Poland. We didn't even know you could adopt from Poland, but that meant they didn't speak our language, and they didn't know what it meant to be in a family, so they didn't have that example, and they had years of trauma. They were seven and eight years of trauma that we had to work through, and they didn't know how to do that, and I think that this shows us the perfect picture

of what it looks like when someone first gets saved, right? They come into a new family. They're adopted into God's family, but there's a lot of ups and downs as they're trying to figure life out. There's a lot of things that they don't know, especially because they don't speak God's language yet. They don't know how to respond. They don't know what emotions to show. They don't know what's expected of them. They don't have any knowledge of how the family is supposed to act. This is why the church needs discipleship. Okay, Jesus gave us the command. He said, go into all the world and make disciples of all nations. A disciple is someone who's a follower or a learner, someone who conforms to the ways of another. In this church, we're supposed to follow, learn, and conform to the ways of Jesus Christ, but how do we do that if we don't know how? So what that takes is someone who's a little more spiritually mature than us, someone who's a little bit further along in the family to come alongside of us and show us how. So my biological children did that for my adopting children, right? They walked with them. They showed them the way. They showed them how we respond to things.

They taught them how to be in a family. I can remember this one particular time. Our little girl is so precious. She wanted to speak to us so badly, but she didn't know English and we didn't know Polish and we were using a translator app, but she just made up her own language and assumed that she was speaking English. So she would just come talk to us in this language and we had no clue what she was saying and Google Translate had no clue what she was saying because she made it up, right? She's just gibberish. And so one day, she's getting frustrated because she wants something and we have no clue what she's talking about. So we're like, I don't know. And she's like, blah, blah, blah, I don't know. So all of a sudden my biological daughter comes out from the back bedroom carrying this stuffed elephant and she walks up to her sister and she goes, here it is. And I'm like, how did you know? How did you know what she was looking for? And she said, I know my sister, right? Like, my daughter had spent time with her sister. She had bonded with her sister. She was walking with her sister and she knew her sister's needs. And that is the purpose of discipleship, right? Pastor Pacer always says, we need to be walking

with someone who's a couple steps spiritually ahead of us. We need to be walking next to someone and we need to be walking in front of someone who's a few steps behind us, okay? So my adopted kids, they were walking behind, right? Like they were being discipled, but now they're in a place that they know. They've been home five years. They know how to walk with their siblings and they're walking side by side, but later this year when we bring new kids home into the family, these kids now get to be the one discipling and it's this beautiful cycle, okay? And that's what we need here at the church. So I just wanna say if you're not in a discipleship group, clearly I'm very passionate about it. You should join one, either be discipled or disciple someone else. It's so important. But despite how long that took, despite how long it took them to conform to the family, despite how many ups and downs there were, those children were my children. The moment they became mine, they were mine forever and there was nothing, no up and down, nothing that could stop them from being my children, okay? And it's just like this in the family of God, only it goes even further. Because when you accept Jesus Christ, you are God's child and it is eternal, eternal.

You are his. And 2 Corinthians 6, it says, I will be a father to you and you will be my sons and daughters. And that's just so beautiful. So.