The Joy of Our Adoption

Posted by Marcia Lee Laycock

I am very pleased to host historical novelist Christine Lindsay today for our Sunday devotional. Be Blessed.

Christian Author, Christine Lindsay

God had done an awesome thing. After twenty years of praying, I was going to be reunited with my first-born child that I had relinquished to adoption when she was three days old.

Sarah was a beautiful, well-adjusted, and happy young woman studying to be a nurse and planning her wedding to a wonderful guy. This was exactly what I had wanted for Sarah all those years ago when I was an unmarried mother and couldn’t provide for her. The door to future get-togethers for Sarah and I was sort of open. By all standards our adoption reunion had been a success.

So why was I so angry with God?

In adoption reunion books my trauma was explained as the cold and clinical stage of negotiating the birthmother role. I wanted to throw the book across the room.

This reunion was not what I had envisioned as I had prayed. Sarah and I were total strangers, and it was clear it would take a long time to build the relationship I yearned for. But that wasn’t what hurt the most.

Sarah’s parents did not want to meet me. They were hurting so badly that they stayed at home while Sarah I were reunited.

Twenty years earlier I had chosen this Christian couple from a portfolio, a couple who would raise Sarah to love the Lord Jesus. They had done exactly what I had prayed for. But each day that I had prayed for Sarah, I had prayed for her parents too. They were her mom and dad—how could I not love them? And, I thought, since we all love the same Lord, surely they will want to meet me and have a friendship with me when Sarah becomes an adult.  

But their hurt over the reunion, hurt me in return.

Sarah blessed me when she told me that she had never felt rejected like many adoptive kids feel. She knew that I had relinquished her out of sacrificial love.

But now it was me, as her birthmother, that was feeling rejected. My self-pity disgusted me.

Months after the reunion, I was alone one afternoon. My house was quiet, my husband at work, our three kids at school. I went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. As I reached for the kettle the dam burst and I cried, and I felt the Lord’s voice, I have never forgotten you.

I set the kettle down. Each year around Sarah’s birthday when I was missing her, I had felt the Lord’s comfort in amazing ways. The verse that I’d claimed as my life’s motto came to mind.

Isaiah 49:15, 16a “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands . . .”

I lifted my face to receive my Father’s love.

For years I’d prayed to be brought visibly back into the triad of Sarah’s adoption, but God had done even better. He had brought me back full circle to His love. I was His child. Nothing could ever separate me from Him.

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Christine Lindsay writes historical inspirational novels with strong love stories. Her debut novel SHADOWED IN SILK is set in British Colonial India during a turbulent era. Christine and her birthdaughter Sarah enjoy a warm and close friendship 12 years after their adoption reunion, and Sarah was happy to be the model on the front cover of Shadowed in Silk, and in the book trailer.

SHADOWED IN SILK was the Gold winner of the 2009 ACFW Genesis for Historical Fiction. The Pacific coast of Canada, about 200 miles north of Seattle, is Christine’s home where she lives with her husband and grown up family.

Visit Christine's website