Today is National Adoption Day.  It’s a day meant to raise awareness for the 125,000 children in the U.S. foster care system who are waiting to be adopted.  It’s also a day when thousands of those children will legally become sons and daughters.

While it’s a special day filled with so many joyful celebrations, I know all too well that it’s also a day born of loss and sadness.  Because every one of those 125,000 children, along with millions of others around the world, have a painful and traumatic story that led them to be “available for adoption” in the first place.  There’s so much brokenness in our world.

While I won’t pretend to understand why the world is the way it is, I do know this:  Adoption may be messy and heartbreaking and downright unfair, but it’s also beautiful and redemptive and healing.  It offers new starts as families willingly agree to walk alongside their children in the hard.

No, it’s not the meant-to-be plan for our children.  Truly, no one is meant to experience such overwhelming and profound loss.  But it is a plan.  It’s one way that our journeys can begin to be redeemed and made new.  In a place where our stories collide and become each other’s stories, our Father offers a way for us to love and learn and grow and heal and become all that we can be.  Together.

I am so thankful for adoption.  Not because it promises to fix everything or erase the past.  Or because it’s the way things were meant to be.  No, I’m thankful for adoption because it made a way for me to be a mama a third and fourth time to two of the most precious people who I absolutely adore.  I’m thankful that I get to be a part of God’s plan for their stories.  I’m thankful that they’ve taught me more about life than I thought was possible.

They make me better.  They make our family better.  And as we figure out what love and grace and mercy and healing look like, we make each other better.  Together.