The Exercise of Loving a Stranger
HAVANA TIMES – I have a beautiful 5-year-old daughter and the desire for another child. The rest are obstacles that my objective reality imposes. My wife’s fear of another childbirth, after a tragic experience at the Maternidad de Línea hospital in Havana; our ages—me at 46 and her at 37; the fact that we are immigrants without even having residency in Brazil… and a host of other conditions that make it quite difficult.
Our brothers and sisters from the church we go to have spoken to us about the possibility of adoption, which is a very serious and legally complex matter. I don’t know. Maybe that’s something one should desire fervently. It’s not enough to say, “Oh yes, I want to have another child, and since we can’t, we’ll choose one who has no parents.”
The number of consequences that arise from such a decision is overwhelming. It changes the life of your family and of the person you bring in. Some people have done it and things have gone well, while in other cases it has been a disaster.
Perhaps one shouldn’t approach these things thinking about “results.” I think we should do it out of love, while asking ourselves the right questions.
Am I capable of loving a person I brought into my life out of nothing? Will I love them as my own child, no matter the consequences? Am I physically, psychologically, and financially prepared to take on this challenge? Is my family prepared?
I assume that for immigrants with our current status, adoption would be quite difficult, since it is already a long and detailed process. Maybe it’s not for us. Maybe it is. I don’t know if what I feel is what one is supposed to feel before making such a momentous decision.
My wife met a young man who was abandoned by his mother when he was still very small. His grandmother took care of him for a while and then gave him up for adoption. The family that took him in abandoned him to his fate when he was only six years old. He lived on the streets. He went through everything an abandoned child can go through, until another family took him in.
Today he is a good person, who works to support himself. He is someone who forgave those who abandoned him and who thanks God for having saved him. That young man speaks of adoption as something sacred.
Those of us who believe in Christ are adopted children. I was not born in Israel, the people of God, but I was adopted through the sacrifice of His son.
“To adopt a child is to love a stranger,” that young man tells us—and he’s right.