The Question of Suffering

When we first talked about adoption, it was simply a good thing to do. Selfless, generous, and all that. When Matt and I really started to get serious about it, it was because God was impressing upon us his heart for orphans. The most surprising part about this journey is how it is changing us. Changing our marriage, our relationships with our kids, our view of a hurting world. We have just started this process and yet it is clear that this is no easy task. Sometimes it painfully stretches our relationships. We have to confront just how selfish we are with our time and our money and our comfortable little lives. Adoption is forcing us to come to terms with our need for control, racial stereotypes and tensions, and our all consuming focus on ourselves.

One of the greatest questions in all of human history is why does a supposedly loving God allow suffering? It keeps both believers and agnostics awake at night, tossing and turning on pillows damp with tears.

I have been to Honduras and the Dominican Republic and Matt has been to those countries and Mexico and Haiti. We have been to New York City and Chicago on mission trips. We have seen toddlers whose bellies are distended with hunger, liquid brown eyes round with suffering. Homeless men and women bundled in their belongings, faces etched with a lifetime of poor decisions and unfortunate circumstances. Women whose only thought is keeping their children alive one more day.

We have read accounts of the horrific conditions in Russian orphanages, teenagers who weigh as much as toddlers and spend their whole lives in cribs. Babies in Ethiopia and Haiti who are fed mud mixtures to keep bellies full because there is no food. Rooms filled with cribs in China, babies peering out with dull eyes. The hopelessness, the suffering, the complete and utter injustice.

The question is not why does God allow suffering. The question is - Why do we allow suffering? Why do I?

The desire I have to be comfortable and content is strong. I want to keep my money in tight fist-fulls and spend it on shoes and clothes, products to make my hair shinier and my teeth whiter.

This past election I heard a lot about rights. Specifically my rights as a woman. Defend them! Vote for them! Protect them!

And yet...I have given up my rights. Though I fail often, I give up the rights to myself everyday. My right to spend my money however I want, my right to be comfortable, my right to treat my unborn children however I choose, based on convenience. I choose to exchange my temporary and fleeting rights for something much greater.

To adopt is to value someone else's comfort and contentment more than your own. It is a dent in the great ocean of suffering and injustice that covers this world.

I can't change the suffering of this world. I cannot stop the horrors that happen every minute of every day. But I can teach my sons that their strength is measured in helping the helpless, their honor in loving the unlovable. I will whisper to my daughters that to be a life-giver is an unspeakable joy. I will tell them that it is a struggle to be you-first in a me-first world. That laying one's life down for another is the greatest of all things. It is hard and it is painful but it is a battle worth fighting.