We Christians can play strange games with the will of God. Sometimes we rationalize the unfathomable workings of God, and water Him down into simplistic strategies we are capable of understanding.
For instance, right now we are fighting to get our 8 year-old foster son back so we can complete our adoption of him. As I’ve written at length, he is a troubled little boy with streaks of violence in his nature. HOWEVER, he has never harmed our girls, and loves our tiny family dog, and is extremely nurturing and loving toward my younger grandchildren. In fact, he shows none of the classic signs of a person who is already so psychologically damaged he cannot be helped.
He has simply been through a ton of trauma in his short life. Frankly, I’d be just as mad at the world as he is.
So every now and then some kindly friend will say to me, “Maybe God is removing him from your life to protect your family? What if he grows up to abuse your daughters and bring violence in your home?”
“What if” is one of those fun games Christians can often play to explain away something hard that God wants them to do. If things get too difficult, if we have to fight for something, if there’s any chance we could be hurt in the process, we back away and blame it all on “God protecting us from harm”.
How convenient.
Here’s my “what if” – what if we avoid every hard thing God asks us to do, and use the excuse we’re just protecting ourselves? How much pain in this world would we conveniently ignore, just so we never get our hands dirty?
First, we have zero reason to believe our foster son would ever act out violently against our daughters. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have kept him in our home one more day.
But most people drop out of fights like these, as soon as they become a fight. They say they want to help some cause, but give up at the first sign of difficulty. And no one will question you dropping out if you play the trump card of “I felt I had to stop for the good of my family”. We know when we say that, everyone will give us a free pass.
That is the tactic the TN DCS folks used when they met with us over a zoom call last week. In the most patronizing way possible, they told us they weren’t letting our son come home “for our own good”. All their thoughts and concerns were for us, we were told. Our commitment to the child was admirable, but they just couldn’t take responsibility for what he might do.
(By the way, this was after they sent this “dangerous boy” back into our home for a week after the last time we hospitalized him. Evidently, we would somehow be magically protected from harm for that week before he was sent away. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.)
But this week, we found out their warnings were just a tactic in hopes we would back off. When we kept enquiring about continuing our adoption of our boy, they then emailed us a letter on June 17 backdated to June 7, stating now suddenly we were a home in “bad standing”. They made accusations we had abandoned our son and even made racial accusations that are laughable considering our family’s multiracial make up. Of course, they never visited our home or gave us the ability to answer these accusation.
That’s because they made them just to scare us and get us to stop fighting. Sadly, they don’t know us very well. We now understand the corruption we are facing.
So if there was any chance we might give up and say “well maybe it was just not God’s will for us to adopt this little boy”, that chance is gone. In truth, if there were never any chance of getting him back home to his room covered with Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog pictures, we would keep fighting now to expose a system that not “broken” but desperately negligent and corrupt.
We are not going to take the “easy out” other folks are trying to give us. Because if everyone gave up when they faced opposition, we wouldn’t have a nation or a faith left to defend.
We seem to have lost the concept of sacrifice as part of the Christian life. King David, when offered a field free of charge to build the temple on, replied “how could I give God that which costs me nothing?” But we seem determined to offer God only the cheapest trinkets we can. Anything that causes a disruption of our comfortable lifestyle is deemed unreasonable.
Yet I believe it is only those true sacrifices, the ones that come from pain, that God pays attention to.
And God never promised me an easy ride in this life. Instead, he promised me the world would hate me and would give me “trouble”. “In this world, you will have trouble” – the words of Jesus are sobering to hear.
But I’m not worried, because I truly believe His next words…”but I have overcome the world”. That’s a fight I’m determined to be on the winning side of.
