I Will Not Leave You As Orphans

When Maria and I first walked into the orphanage, where we were led to the boys the Russian courts had picked out for us to adopt, we almost vomited in reaction to the stench and squalor of the place. The boys were in cribs, in the dark, lying in their own waste.

Leaving them at the end of each day was painful, but leaving them the final day, before going home to wait for the paperwork to go through, was the hardest thing either of us had ever done. Walking out of the room to prepare for the plane ride home, Maria and I could hear Maxim calling out for us, and falling down in his crib, convulsing in tears. Maria shook with tears of her own. I turned around to walk back in their room, just for a minute.

I placed my hand on both of their heads and said, knowing they couldn’t understand a word of English, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” I don’t think I consciously intended to cite Jesus’ words to his disciples in John 14:18; it just seemed like the only thing worth saying at the time.

For us, it didn’t matter that they seemed like any other orphan in that institution; they were part of our family now. We knew them. We loved them. We claimed them. And it didn’t matter that for the next several weeks, they’d still be called “Maxim” and “Sergei.” The nameplates hanging on the wall of their new room in a faraway country read “Benjamin” and “Timothy.”

In one sense, my sons’ situation was quite unique. In another sense, though, their lives marked from the very beginning the kind of ambiguity that often comes along with adoption. Sometimes people will speak of children who’ve been adopted as prone to having an “identity crisis” at some point in their lives. This isn’t the case for every child, of course, but it does seem that many children who were adopted find themselves asking at some point in their lives, “Who am I?” The Bible reveals though that this kind of crisis of identity isn’t limited to children who’ve been adopted. All of us are looking to discover who we really are, whether we were born into loving homes or abandoned at orphanage doors, whether we were born into stable families, or, like our Lord, born in a stable.

- Russell Moore, Adopted For Life, p. 25,26