Part 3 of 4

Part 1: Book Review: Adoption as a Ministry, Adoption as a Blessing by Michelle Gardner.

Part 2: When Your Spouse is Reluctant to Adopt

When Michelle and Steve Gardner decided to adopt older children with physical challenges, their friends and church family challenged them with several questions. Here are some of the questions they were asked and their response to them:

Is it right to spend so much time and money on one child? Wouldn’t it be better to donate funds to organizations that leave children in their birth countries and minister to their physical needs there?

Most children in such programs are not orphans. These programs, while worthwhile, “provide little opportunity to build values and spiritual truths into the child’s heart.”

Christ spent a great deal of His time with individuals. “We can also pour ourselves into the lives of individuals by adopting one or two children and giving them a desire to reach out to others.”

With so many needy children in America, should we be adopting and supporting children from other countries?

“We don’t need to favor either domestic or international adoption,” writes Gardner. Even in the Bible, the prophets weren’t sent to minister only to their own people, but were often sent by God to foreign locales. In the same manner, adoptive parents recognize that millions of children around the world need families. “Each potential adoptive family needs to consider the sort of child whose needs the Lord has best equipped them to meet,” writes Gardner.

She says that whether a family adopts domestically or internationally, the goal is the same: “To fulfill the purposes of God by providing a loving family for a child, to raise that child to love the Lord with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength and to become more like our heavenly Father as we learn more about His love for children.”