Finding Jesus in a Russian Orphanage
— Friday, January 16th, 2009 —
This article will run in today’s Baptist Press, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches (Crossway).
When my wife Maria and I at long last received the call that the legal process was over, and we returned to Russia to pick up our new sons, we found that their transition from orphanage to family was more difficult than we had supposed. We dressed the boys in outfits our parents had bought for them. We nodded our thanks to the orphanage personnel and walked out into the sunlight, to the terror of the two boys.
They’d never seen the sun, and they’d never felt the wind. They had never heard the sound of a car door slamming or had the sensation of being carried along at 100 miles an hour down a road. I noticed that they were shaking, and reaching back to the orphanage in the distance.
I whispered to Sergei, now Timothy, “That place is a pit! If only you knew what’s waiting for you: a home with a Mommy and a Daddy who love you, grandparents and great-grandparents and cousins and playmates and McDonald’s Happy Meals!”
But all they knew was the orphanage. It was squalid, but they had no other reference point. It was home.
We knew the boys had acclimated to our home, that they trusted us, when they stopped hiding food in their high-chairs. They knew there would be another meal coming, and they wouldn’t have to fight for the scraps. This was the new normal.
They are now thoroughly Americanized, perhaps too much so, able to recognize the sound of a microwave ding from forty yards away. I still remember, though, those little hands reaching for the orphanage. And I see myself there.
The doctrine of adoption doesn’t simply tell us who we are. It is a legal entitlement, one we are prone to forget. “If children, then heirs-heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ,” the Spirit tells us (Rom 8:17).
I don’t know about you, but “inheritance” was something I, growing up in my working class world, never imagined would apply to me. An “inheritance” was something rich people left for their kids-for the spoiled trust-fund heirs who might speed around Malibu in their sports cars. It’s hard for us to imagine the place of inheritance in the world in which our Bible was first revealed.
In the world of the Bible, one’s identity and one’s vocation were all bound up in who one’s father was. Men were called “son of” all of their lives (for instance, the “sons of Zebedee” or “Joshua, son of Nun”). There were no guidance counselors in ancient Canaan or first-century Capernaum, helping “teenagers” determine what they wanted “to be” when they “grew up.” A young man watched his father, learned from him, and followed in his vocational steps. This is why the “sons of Zebedee” were right there with their father, when Jesus found them, “in their boat mending their nets” (Mark 1:19-20). When your father died, the vocation belonged to you, to pass on to your son.
This inheritance structure is a picture of something deeper, more real. The Bible identifies Jesus as the One who inherits the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. He is the One of whom it is said, “You are my Son” (Psalm 2:7), who is given “the nations as your heritage, and the ends of the earth as your possession” (Psalm 2:8).
The Bible speaks, paradoxically, of our adoption in Christ as a past event, but also as a future one. “We wait eagerly for adoption as sons,” Paul writes, and he tells us what that looks like: “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23).
We legally belong to our Father. But, as long as our bodies are dying-as long as the universe is heaving in pain around us-it sure looks like we’re orphans still. We know that we’re children by faith, not yet by sight.
This is why “suffering” is so important. It isn’t some self-flagellation, as though someone in a monastery in the Sahara is necessarily any holier than someone who’s not. All believers in Christ, the Scripture teaches, will suffer-all of us. You will be glorified, Paul says, if you suffer with him. The problem with too many of us is not that we don’t suffer, but that we assume that only Third World Christians or heroic missionaries are suffering. My boys didn’t know that they were suffering in Russia; they would feel it as suffering now.
We get too comfortable with this orphanage universe, though. We sit in our pews, or behind our pulpits, knowing that our children watch “Christian” cartoons instead of slash films. We vote for the right candidates and know all the right “worldview” talking points. And we’re content with the world we know, just adjusted a little for our identity as Christians. That’s precisely why so many of us are so atrophied in our prayers, why our prayers rarely reach the level of “groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). We are too numbed to be as frustrated as the Spirit is with the way things are.
“I know you think this terrestrial orphanage is home,” our Father speaks through prophets and apostles and consciences and imaginations, “but it’s a pit compared to home.” Or, as the Spirit says through the Apostle Paul’s adoption teaching: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom 8:18).
I want to see that orphanage one more time. When the boys are a little older, maybe twelve or fourteen, I plan to make the trip again, with them. I want them to see, to feel, where they came from. It’s hard to imagine now what they’ll think of it. They’ll probably hate Russian food as much as I do-and look forward to slipping off with me to the McDonald’s in Moscow when we can find it.
At the orphanage, I’m sure their eyes will widen as we walk up those cracking steps into that horror movie-looking front door. They’ll probably go limp inside, just like I did, when they see all those abandoned toddlers peering out from the corners of the doors inside. Maybe they’ll try to replay in their minds the circumstances of the nights they were born. I’m not sure what all they’ll think of the orphanage.
But I’m quite sure they won’t call it home.
A beautiful exposition of the doctrine of adoption. Thank you.
My wife and I are looking forward to adopting once our two children are a little bit older so we can maintain the birth order and adopt younger than them. I think you are so right on the money Dr. Moore! What better way to express God’s love than to adopt children just like He did with us. Amen!
Dr. Moore,
I look forward to reading your book.
God has blessed Cathy and I with three
wonderful children (MAddie, Sam, And Allie)
from China.
Jeff
Dr. Moore,
I’ve never been to Russia, but did visit Ukraine in January of 1995 on a short term missions trip. The poverty and general “grayness” of the people was astounding. We were there to visit a bible college — and I still remember one young man who only had one set of clothes to his name, and a young family who had spent nearly a week on a train from Siberia to come to the school. And the church we went to on Sunday morning - a 3-hour long service and the place was filled beyond capacity. When the chairs ran out, they stood along the walls and out into the entry. No one complained about the length, not even the little ones who sat quietly playing near the Christmas tree that still stood to the side (this was January).
What a marvelous picture of our poverty, relative to our adopted wealth and our good Father you have shown us. Thank you.
Kamilla
P.S. I think you’re wrong about Russian food - but I make the best Stroganoff this side of the Dneiper, so I’m a bit prejudiced.
Dr. Moore,
Thanks for posting the excerpt! I looking forward to reading the book, and I pray that it both encourages many brothers and sisters in the gospel and spurs many families into gospel action through adoption.
Mike
As an adoptive mom of two ‘older’ Russian-born daughters I know the great need for a Biblically sound view and understanding of adoption–it has been the mainstay of our parenting challenges and blessings! I’m looking forward to reading this book–thanks for the excerpt!
Dr.Moore, I read about the children you adopted from Russia with great interest. Being of Ukranian descent I came here as a young child. But had the fortune to visit Siberia in2005 with my Italian husband. We were on a missions trip with a family that origenated from there, we were the first American couple that had been there, we were as far up as Ust-Kut. The gray dark oppressive atmosphere was difficult to overcome, but the warmth of the people were wonderful. My husband also hated the food!! He says there is no Russian cusiene. True. I met wome that worked in the orpahnages. They also said the same thing you did. They try to bring the Gospel to them as much as they can. My husband and I send money to them every Christams, and they send letters back with all the things they got.
I live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I lost my home and, through that experience, God has given me opportunities to speak to a lot of people. I’ve often said that, if God took us to heaven and allowed us to look back at the earth, it would all look like Katrina debris and I wonder why we struggle so hard to hang on to it. I like the way you described it as an “orphanage”. It’s much more accurate.
Dana, I am a Mississippi Gulf Coastian too, born and raised. My family members are almost all still there, and also lost a great deal, some of them everything material. My prayers and sympathies go out to you!
Thanks for this excerpt. I think for me, as a member of an infertile couple, the decision to adopt is tricky.
God has obviously created us infertile. Is there a wisdom in it we can’t et see, and so should we not circumvent that through adoption?
Would we ultimately be ‘using’ the child to fulfill our own needs / desires to parent and be loved as a parent. I think I would also be asking myself if my actions we entirely altruistic.
But you excerpt has stimulated my thinking more than the book I am currently reading, thanks
Philip,
I know how difficult it is to want children and not have them. God, in His amazing great wisdom, has made many provisions for us all — including, as you know, good works prepared in advance. And you know that James tells us that we are to look after orphans and widows in their distress. I believe that childless couples are God’s answer to the inevitable orphans in the world. Those of us who long for children can be so blessed by those children who long for parents, and the children are likewise blessed by parents who love them so.
My husband and I adopted three children from Asia. It has been the best thing we’ve ever done. Our daughter would have grown up in a Chinese orphanage, with no family name, and would have likely become either a prostitute or a laborer (she’s very pretty, so probably the former). Our sons watched their mother die in the tent they lived in in Vietnam, and went begging at the ages of 5 and 3. They also would have grown up in poverty in a country that oppresses Christians.
I will forever be grateful to God for giving us these precious children, and to my husband for giving to me what I wished so much I could have given to him — children.
May God bless you in all your doings, and may all your doings bless God.
Pam
I adopted my son from a Moscow orphanage in 1994. He was 11 months old, malnourished and in poor physical health. He had been abandoned by his birth mother, and was a premature birth. He is a miracle. He has more than overcome his developmental delays, is excelling in school, and in his love for his lord Jesus Christ. He has shown me the value of love for our lord, and I thank God every day for allowing me to give him a chance at a good life.