Wednesday, January 12, 2011

In My Shoes...


"In my shoes" is a weekly series that is updated every Thursday. I hope you enjoy the following post and that like me, you will learn more about a different walk of life, which will help you to love better! We love comments or likes and would love to have you follow this series with us. We have some amazing women and amazing topics to share. If you have something YOU would like to write about, please contact me!

Adoption is defined as:  to choose or take as one's own; make one's own by selection or assent


“It is finished.  From this day forward, Matthew will forever be Matthew Josiah Garrison.  And you will forever and always be his mother and father.  He will have full access to all your inheritance under the Texas State Law.”   Those are some of the very best words I have ever heard in my life.  Judge Montemayor spoke those words to my husband, my son and I on January 9, 2009.  The words were not followed  by applause or cheer, although I was cheering in my head, what followed was just my head and heart sinking into the reality.  


Our journey begins back in 2002 when I married my wonderful husband.  Our journey in marriage has been full and fun and unexpected all along the way.  God has taken our family and built it in the most beautiful way I can imagine.  You see, after 5 years and 3 miscarriages, and the sadness and disappointment and frustration all of that entails, God began to reveal what he had been sewing in to our hearts for years.  He was going to allow us to be blessed by adoption.  We would become parents through adoption.  We had always hoped to adopt, we just had no idea what that meant, or when it would happen….or HOW!  Our oldest, Matthew Josiah was adopted at birth.  

Then, 2 years later, on Matthews second birthday, I gave birth to my daughter Anna Faith, and when she was 10 months old, God brought us a sweet  11 month old boy, Knox Manning, from the foster care system who we are in the process of adopting.  




I get asked this a lot, and I can tell you that in no way at all, do I love my adopted children less…I love all three of them differently because they need different things as they are their own little unique personalities.  But the intensity and the heart is the same.  I know that may seem hard to grasp or maybe even a little unbelievable, but it is true.  I have learned that biology does not equal love, because my kids who are adopted affect my heart and my life in just the way my biological daughter does.  Look back again at the definition of adoption…isn’t that what we do with our biological children too?  We choose to take them as our own!  When I hear people ask me, or my friends who have adopted, if our children, “know their real mom?” or if their siblings are their “real brothers and sisters”, it is so off!  You see, that woman is called their birth mother.  She is important and wonderful, but she is not their Mom.  That little girl I gave birth to is their REAL sister, who they love and protect and throw food at and wrestle with.  It doesn’t offend me when people ask questions like this.  It just feels odd, because at the core of who I am, they are my kids.  God sewed them into my heart and our family with the same intensity and feeling and truth as our biological child.  It truly is a miracle.  

God is so unbelievably faithful.  He is so good…and with 147 million Orphans in the world, he is going to move!  We are so grateful to be part of His moving on their behalf.  As I sit on my couch right now writing this, I glance over my computer screen to a photo of my 3 babies.  I have learned so much about Gods heart for us through adopting my 2 boys, and giving birth to my daughter.  You see, Gods love for us was made perfect in Jesus.  It is through the sacrifice of Jesus that God says he adopts us as His children…into His family.  I don’t know that I would understand the tremendous magnitude of that if I had not walked this road with my boys, and my precious daughter.  It is a wonderful, mysterious and precious journey that has Gods beautiful hands all over it.  

For many reasons, many of us function in this world with an “Orphaned Heart” .  I know I did…and still do sometimes!  I am a major work in progress!  What does that really mean, you ask?!  It means  for all those places in my life where I don’t feel like I belong or that I am claimed or loved or wanted…whether it be in friendships, with family, in ministry, whatever…the fruit of those wounds is hypersensitivity, sadness, insecurity, distrust, etc… The fruit of those wounds is an Orphaned Heart.  Through adoption, God placed my 2 boys firmly in my family.  I am their Mom.  In every sense of the word, all I have is theirs and they are mine.  I know that and feel that at the deepest place in my heart.  My love for my 3 kids is so overwhelming at times.  I am just overcome in the deepest place in my Spirit to get this love I have for them IN to them.  I long to tell them WHO they are and how wonderful they are.  I long to tell them that they have a hope and a future.  I long to tell my boys of their adoption story in a way that will make them feel loved and set apart.  I long to tell them that I love them just because they are…because they are alive and breathing…I love them! Before they could smile at me, or play with me or say, “I love you”, I loved them!  God moved them from an inheritance of pain and poverty and hopelessness to an inheritance of love and peace and wholeness.  Through their adoption, everything is transformed.  What is totally amazing is how God has shown me, through my experience with my boys, how deeply He loves me.  How deeply I am HIS!  How his adoption of me, through Jesus, transforms everything!  You see, if the fruit of an Orphan is a heart that is never filled, never whole, never at rest, in contrast the heart of a Child who is walking in their identity is a heart that is filled to overflowing, made whole in His love and can rest in the fact that they are totally claimed by The King of The Universe, Their Creator.  And that transforms us at the very core of who we are.  God has used adoption in the hearts of my kids and my heart to totally change everything.  We are His, and He is ours!  Just as the judge said at Matthews adoption trial, that he has “full access to all our inheritance..” so do we, as Gods children have full access to all of Gods inheritance.  That means we get access to all that God so desires to pour out on us, simply because he loves us.  Our identity is rooted deeply in Him.  We get to be whole, and healthy and free and loving and at peace.  May we walk in the fullness of His love for us, knowing that He has “taken us as His own”, and that being adopted into Gods family transforms everything.



Written by Courtney Garrison.

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