I bent over his adorable smiling face as he wiggled and writhed on the carpet, his mother struggling to pull his pants back up after changing his diaper. I blew a kiss to him, saying “I love you Ian! Bye!”
To my surprise, Ian looked at me and without hesitation took his chubby little hand, put it to his mouth, and blew me a kiss of his own. As I straightened up and walked towards the door, he continued to smile and wave at me as I left the nursery.
…
Every last Sunday of the month, I am scheduled to help teach the two year-old Sunday School class for the first morning service. My main job is usually to do puzzles with them, help them scribble pictures, or feed them goldfish and animal crackers. Sometimes, we teach them a Bible lesson, or Auntie Ellen comes around and reads them a Bible story.
Having worked in the nursery for about six years now, I have seen a wide range of kids. We have children who speak English, Mandarin, or Cantonese. Many of them are already beginning to be bilingual.
Some of the children are easygoing and will play with just about anyone. Others spend the entire time crying because they suffer from separation anxiety. They are extremely quiet and only speak in a whisper, and or they never stop babbling on or singing at the top of their lungs. Some sit still the whole hour and a half, and some are so hyperactive I wish I could tether them to something and let them run around in that small circumference.
Yesterday, I got to meet two-and-a-half year old Ian for the first time. Ian carries with him a certain fascination for me. He isn’t particularly different from all of the other children I’ve babysat in the past, but what makes him special is that he was an orphan. The couple from my church decided to go to China to adopt him; he has been in California for about a month now.
We have a small handful of adopted children at our church—all of them from China. But working with Ian is my first real experience with them. There are things that are very particular to his adjustment to life here that I find extremely interesting.
For instance, the temperature in the nursery was comfortable, but Ian began to sweat because he was wearing a bright blue bomber hat and navy blue hoodie sweatshirt. We wanted to take them off so that he would be more comfortable, but as soon as we did, he began fighting and crying.
His dad explained to me that, in the orphanage, he never owned his own clothes. Everything they had was communal. He’s afraid that if he lets us take his hat or his jacket off, he won’t ever get them back.
There are other things peculiar to Ian’s situation as well—not speaking very much or very often, wanting to go out in the mornings because it means that people won’t enter and leave the house without him, or having a mortal fear of western-style toilets because they are really large and completely foreign to him. He must also transition from Mandarin to Cantonese (which his mom and siblings speak) and English (his dad’s language of choice).
Like many young orphans, he has so-called “abandonment issues.” But it’s exciting to see that he seems to have accepted his entire adopted family as his own, and hopefully someday he’ll come to accept his church family too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about adoption lately, because of the recent adoptions that I have contact with, and because of several of my friends who have personal experience with it. Watching the evidence of Ian’s transition to life with his adopted family in a country far from where he was born has made a deep impression on me.
It reminds me of our own adoption as sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. We have already been given his name (Christian means “Little Christ” after all); we have already been given new identities as those proclaimed holy and righteous in God’s sight.
At the same time, we are not yet perfectly righteous or holy like Christ—we must continually work to become what we have already been declared, just as Ian must adjust to his new identity and relationship with the adopted family that has legally and literally declared him one of their own.
The picture of adoption is a great reflection of the amazing grace and love that God bestows on sinful, rebellious, merit-less humans like us, choosing each of us to become His son or His daughter, with all of the blessings that come with membership in His family.
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