I enjoyed an e-mail exchange on transracial adoption with a friend of a friend from Georgia this week. This adoptive mother has a story to tell, here's an excerpt with names removed,
Our little girl is full African American (now 2 1/2 yrs old). We went into our adoption process wanting to provide a covenant home to a child that needed it...seeing race as a rather non-issue. Yes, we'd have things to overcome even in ourselves, but they were based on society rather than the Word so we NEEDED to get over them. We never expected what was to come.
Our daughter's race has not been a non-issue for our family but a radically positive one. As [Pastor] Piper mentions, when bringing one of a different race into your family, you are forced to recognize an individual outside of a lumped-together race. My Mississippi grandfather (who initially had an intense period of mourning regarding our adoption choice) eventually came around with tears in his eyes commenting that our daughter was "the first black girl to ever love him". You can translate that as the first he'd ever loved, or allowed to crawl up in his lap for sure!
Amazingly, graciously, we've been blessed with one positive experience after another, and an almost alarming absence of negative experiences. Black strangers have literally hugged me in the mall "for embracing their race". Socialites in our church have seen their elementary-aged-kids attach themselves to our ever-lovable little girl...even took her to show-n-tell at their predominately white private school since they didn't have a baby sister like their classmates to show off!?!?
In summary, we have realized that transracial adoption is amazing, exciting, and sanctifying in so many ways. We hope to bring at least one more AA child into our family before too long.
Our friend also provided the following links (here, here, and here) to some of John Piper's thoughts on race and the family.
Kristin and I hope that our adoption will be soon; in the meantime we're thankful for our Georgia cheering section!
2 comments:
Hmmm...the show-and-tell thing has just a little freak-show creepiness factor going on, but Grandpa's repentance is A Good Thing.
I can understand the freak-show factor, although I doubt at this age the children are thinking that way.
Interestingly, the private Christian schools I know of in this part of Georgia were started at the same time segregation ended. That should make us all go Hmmm....
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