If you haven’t read the amazing story of Rosaria Butterfield, it’s hard to recommend many books more for validation of the work of the Holy Spirit. Butterfield tells the story of her conversion out of life as a lesbian and liberal university professor to become the believing wife of a Reformed and Presbyterian Pastor. She is typically very deliberate in her thinking and I appreciate her clarity. Below is a passage that I saved from Butterfield on adoption from her first book, Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert:
Adoption is not a pathology that marks and plagues people and families for their whole life. But adoption is a complex paradoxical event that combines loss, brokenness and rejection with gain, connection, and embrace. No child asks to be adopted. No child asks for incompetent or rejecting birth parents. No child asks to be constantly told how “lucky” he is to be adopted. Wanted or not, adoption always starts with loss. Adoption always combines ambiguous loss with unrequested gain. An adopted child faces this paradox— this ambiguous grief— at each developmental stage. His or her family must choose to either welcome the complexity or make the child go it alone. We choose to walk alongside our children, even as we don’t always understand how deep or how raw the complexity rests. This journey is frightful. At it’s core is this: do I love Jesus enough to face my children’s rejection of me? (p. 126)
Scotty is a native of Santa Anna, Texas. He graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1994 and completed his Masters of Divinity at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in 2005. Scotty’s Air Force service of eleven years included time as a Security Forces Officer protecting nuclear weapons and also instructing at Officer Training School before being called into pastoral ministry. He and his wife Kerry are parents of three children, Clayton, Avery, and Grace.
- The Christmas Story in John’s Gospel - December 23, 2020
- Communication in Marriage - November 3, 2020
- Aaron Halbert – Missionary to Honduras - March 31, 2017
