We were taken into a room the other day that was ready for a long awaited child. Loving care and imagination had gone into the choosing of pale blue paint for the walls and bedspreads and curtains of red, white, and blue in an arrangement of pencil lines and broader stripes. A crib all made up with sheets carried out the color scheme. A china dog collection filled a small cabinet of shelves, and that along with pictures grouped in a frame made a point of continuity with the couple’s own childhoods. A small piano spoke silently of music to come.
Later that room drew me back alone, to pray for the child it had been awaiting for a long, long time. “Send the child of your choice soon, dear Heavenly Father, to this prepared place and to these prepared people.” This couple for physical reasons were unable to have a child and for several years had been doing all they could to adopt one. The waiting time seemed interminable, but everything was kept ready, for a girl or a boy, whichever the Lord would send.
My early childhood was spent in China, where I soon learned about unwanted girl babies. I was the third girl in my family, born next in line to my parents’ only boy, who had died in his first year of life. It impressed me vividly that in China girls were considered less important than boys, and that many of them were thrown out on an ash heap to die right after birth. My older sister recently said to me, “Edith, perhaps you are right in remembering an ash heap outside the Wenchow city wall, but I remember a pagoda that we used to pass in our walks. This pagoda was the special place for throwing away unwanted girl babies, who were left to die on the heap of bones of all the other unwanted girl babies.”
My first questions to my Chinese amah were uttered in Chinese, my first language. I don’t know that language now, but I know the kind of question. “Why? Why?” I remember my fierce fury that babies could be thrown away by mothers who had had them growing inside them. I remember the baby wrapped in a piece of paper and left on the doorstep of our compound, to be cared for by my mother and father.
“Why?” The answer given to me was an explanation of the difference that Christianity makes in a nation. This was a heathen nation, and the value placed on a life was much different here. I grew up with a strong sense of the contrast between the value of life in “heathen nations” and in “Christian nations.” I realized that in the city of London, or New York, or San Francisco, to have a pagoda for throwing away unwanted babies would be unthinkable.
Abortion. Strip away the controversy surrounding the word, as you would peel the skin from fruit, and what do you have? A living, growing human being made in the image of God, with the potential of becoming a Benjamin Franklin, or a John Wesley, or a Leonardo Da Vinci, or a needed farmer in Montana, a pilot, a doctor, a tailor, or a teacher, is thrown away on the ash heap. People can walk past hospitals that perform abortions without a quiver of an eyelash, with the kind of callous unconcern shown by the Chinese who walked past the faint cries of dying infants. What has happened to people who have come from so-called Christian ancestry? Why are doctors forced into the predicament, as one spoke about the other day, of fighting for the life of a baby with some birth defect in one room while through the wall comes the sound of suction withdrawing a fetus, to be thrown away without a chance for life?
There are empty rooms and empty arms waiting for babies to fill them, for women who, if they don’t want their babies, do have a respect for life and will bear the babies and give them up for adoption. Abortion and adoption—strangely enough, these words look almost alike, but one belongs to the Chinese pagoda of death, the other to the doorstep where life and love are waiting. Now that abortion is common, there are long lists of waiting couples being told that there is no child available. The room I described had been ready for over two years, but the couple’s attempts even to get put down on a list had begun longer ago than that. Amazingly, an answer to prayer came only a few days after we had seen that room, and today a two-week-old girl is being brought home to that prepared place with great excitement.
Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God; and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:15–17). “To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.… Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Gal. 4:5, 7). How wonderful to think that we ourselves have been received as equal heirs, true children, by adoption! What a picture! And Satan is battling hard to have us aborted before we can be taken into God’s family.
Listen: “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:2, 3). A prepared welcome is awaiting the adopted children of the living God. We cannot imagine the marvelous things that are included in that preparation. Thank God for making it possible for us to be adopted and given life in this prepared place. However, as Christians we are meant to share the news with others who need to know about adoption, both in this life and in the life to come.
