[Original Post Date: January 3, 2023]

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On my dad’s Facebook page, there is a video. It is grainy, low-quality, and easy to scroll over. Yet, it is a visual culmination of over a year’s worth of the prayer and toil it took to adopt my younger brother from Ukraine. In the video, you can see our newly minted family trudging toward the airport terminal exit, clearly exhausted after three and a half weeks of traveling approximately 1,300 miles around Ukraine to complete the adoption paperwork and requirements. As we walk towards our welcome party, one family friend calls out, “Welcome home!” His eyes brimming with emotion, my brother cries back in his broken English, “I know, forever. Forever.”

Looking back, I can see a confidence and a joy conveyed in those four words. Adoption is an unshakable, unchangeable act, a covenant—a formal, solemn, binding agreement. Once the final papers are signed, there is absolutely nothing on this side of Heaven that can separate the adopted child from his or her new family. Legally, there is nothing that distinguishes the adopted child from the biological child. There are times, though, when I know my brother doubts the finality and security of joining his new family. From his years in the orphanage, he was taught that people never follow through on their promises. And though he’s belonged to our family for over four years, there are still times when he brazenly defies us. Sometimes I cannot help becoming frustrated with him.

"Can he not see what we brought him from?"

"Can he not see how we provide for him?"

"Can he not see how we love him?"

And then I’m reminded that our Heavenly Father might ask us the very same questions. In the Old Testament, God primarily provides for, and reveals and binds Himself to His people through covenants. God established covenants with the people of Israel in key moments throughout the unfolding of the biblical narrative. In the Abrahamic covenant found in Genesis 17, the Lord proclaims Himself worthy to declare, “I will confirm my covenant with you and your descendants after you, from generation to generation. This is the everlasting covenant: I will always be your God and the God of your descendants after you” (Gen 17:7, NLT). Much like signed papers and courts establish the finality and confidence we can have in the act of adoption, these promises, found in Scripture, establish the confidence we can place in the Promise Maker.

But are you anything like me? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve believed God’s promises one moment, and lost sight of them the next. Although we can perceive, through both His Word and our own personal experience, what He has brought us from—since “…even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead” (Ephesians 2:5)—do we pursue a life of submission and obedience to the One who has sustained us thus far? Or, instead, a life drenched in defiance? The Lord has proven Himself in providing for us repeatedly. But what sort of lifestyles do we pursue? Do our lives proclaim to unbelievers that we solely trust in God’s provision? I would argue that it’s a rare Christian in our Western culture who lives up to this claim.

God routinely expresses the immensity and inexhaustible security of His love, leading the apostle Paul to proclaim, “…indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39b). Do we truly allow ourselves to rest in this truth?

Much like my brother can struggle to rest on this very promise when it comes to his earthly family (that is, that nothing can separate him from us), I submit to you, reader, that we often do not rest on such promises from our Heavenly Father. Furthermore, we do not allow the Holy Spirit to comfort and sanctify us through these promises, nor do we live in a way that displays our confidence in the God who keeps and sustains His promises for His own, deserved, glory. If we cannot have confidence in Him, what else is there to have confidence in?

There is, perhaps, no circumstance that tests the limits of our confidence in Him more than when we go through trials; nothing more adept at causing us to doubt the sufficiency of Christ for our lives than hard times, whether they be physical, emotional, or, certainly, spiritual. So, maybe the more appropriate question is: How can we have confidence in Christ at all when life is difficult and hurts? Further, how and where can we hope to find joy within the trial?

I think that, in part, the answer is found in 2 Corinthians, where its author, Paul, was straining to grapple with the countless hardships he had suffered, so much so that in the opening of this, his second letter to Corinth, he “despaired of life itself!” Yet, Paul later concludes his letter with the reason for his struggle, summarized in chapter twelve, where he recalls what the Lord has told him and then presents the only right response: “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties…” (2 Cor 12:9–10, NIV).

Adoption is hard—no less when it is your own adoption into God’s family. At times, it tears me down in weakness, both spiritually and emotionally. Yet, this place of weakness could be precisely the place where God wants me. And maybe He wants you there, too. Not because He finds cosmic pleasure in watching His children suffer, but because, in our weakness, we are intentionally put in a position of needing the Lord. When we lay down, not only our challenging situations, but our whole lives, at the feet of our Father, in submission, He will slowly, but surely, sanctify our lives so that His power is made perfect in our weakness. When we come to accept the goodness of this arrangement, we can wholeheartedly delight in weakness. This is where we can find joy in the struggles adoption—or any difficult circumstance—can bring.

Despite the intervening years filled with trial and grit, I look back on that Facebook video with fondness. Years later, I can still see the confidence and joy in my brother’s response to friends and family welcoming him home. It is so sweet to see the thrill in his heartfelt exclamation.

"I know, forever. Forever."

Although welcoming my brother into my family has, at times, been a complicated process, I know the Lord has put our family together to bring glory to His name, and it is indeed, in my brother’s words, forever.