If You Have to Ask . . .

It was almost four years into marriage before Ginger and I adopted our first child.  Like many newlyweds making a start in life, we asked ourselves when the moment would be that we could afford children.  It is, of course, one of the silliest questions ever asked, when children become affordable.  Like so many things in life, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. 

Thirty-two years into the adventure of parenthood, I’m still hoping to hit the sweet spot when my children, now well into adulthood, become affordable.  It turns out that they were never more affordable than in those first days when they were so new and their needs were so simple.  Diapers and baby food are nothing next to car insurance, tuition, and weddings. 

It is so like me as an only child to ask whether there would be enough to go around, having never known a time when there wasn’t.  But having grown up without siblings, I had no first-hand knowledge that more people to be cared for would not necessarily put a strain on the ability to care for those already there.  The question children posed for me went beyond affordability to a more basic question of subsistence, maybe even survival.  As ridiculous as it sounds from my very privileged point-of-view, with more mouths to feed, I worried about whether there would be enough.  The logic seemed simple enough.  The things necessary to sustain life are finite.  More people around means less to go around.  The basic affordability question did not look good. 

By the time we adopted our second child, I was in seminary with no income and Ginger was in a low-paying job at the seminary.  There was a good deal less than when the first one arrived to a lawyer father a year away from partnership and a teacher mom just named one of three teachers of the year in the Atlanta Public Schools well-settled in their first house in the suburbs. 

Here’s the interesting thing.  The question of affordability, to say nothing of whether there would be enough, never entered into the discussion the second time.  We just decided to adopt another child.  We had saved the fees from our previous life, and we just had enough experience to know that there would be enough.  Having one just naturally led to the second. 

It didn’t take balancing the checkbook to know that another baby was affordable because we would find a way for it to be.  So we set up the crib and changing table under the loft bed in our very small apartment and went about growing a family. 

The epistle for this Sunday bears repeating:
So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh—for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.  For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.  For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.  (Rom. 8:12-17)

I may have once lived by a spirit of fear, especially the vague fear of whether or not there would be enough.  I still fall into it from time to time.  But welcoming Andrew and Matthew into our home so many years ago has given me a glimpse of the spirit of adoption about which Paul wrote and that  urges my heart to cry, “Abba! Father!” and “Ama!” “Mamma!” 

It’s what I would expect from a God whose nature is to exist not simply as one but whose oneness is based on more than one, and whose very nature leads God to create the other in order to share.  As the old adage puts it, as Paul knew, and as the nature of God undergirds, “If you ask to ask how much, you can’t afford it.”

Peace,