WLSU: To Live that Belief

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Have you ever been transformed by love only after believing in it for a while?

I have.

Here’s what I mean: Have you ever had an experience of transformation that is connected to a person, a belief, a moral idea that you have proclaimed for a time – months or years- and then suddenly in a clarifying moment you are, for lack of a better word, converted to the thing you already believe, or know, or have?

Maybe I should give an example. When my husband Andrew and I were trying to become parents we were chosen by a pregnant woman to adopt her child, as yet unborn. For prospective parents in an infant adoption process in the USA this is an incredibly exciting and fraught moment. Exciting because the months of waiting and wondering if we would ever actually be chosen to parent someone seem to be coming to a close. Fraught because no woman can actually choose to give up a child until that child is born. This is both practically and legally the case – a woman cannot relinquish a child until she has given birth. In most states there is a waiting period after signing papers where the mother can revoke her relinquishment.

This is a good thing. Giving up a baby should only happen if it must, and if the woman chooses. It’s never a happy thing for a parent to lose their child.

Andrew and I had a mantra, a value that we articulated frequently to each other and to our community. We don’t want anyone else’s baby. No baby is “ours” until they are legally “ours.”

Proclaiming this belief was, it turned out, very different from living and being transformed by it.

When the woman who had chosen us gave birth to her daughter she changed her mind.

We arrived a few hours after the baby was born. We held the infant and counted her toes. I held her mother’s hand and cried with her as she prepared to say goodbye. Then the social worker told us to leave so that papers could be signed. But the mother couldn’t do it. Faced with pen and paper, she knew that despite the tough circumstances of her life, she could not give up her child.

She made the right choice. If a woman can choose her child, I believe she absolutely should. And wow, it was painful for us!

That was when the thing I had believed, and claimed, and said out loud, became a force for transformation in my life.

When we got home from that trip our friends were mad. They knew we had been hurt. It felt, to them, like we had been lied to.

I felt differently. I knew that we had participated in a very important and transformational moment in the life of a mother and child. We helped a woman make the choice to keep her baby – and I knew that making that choice was a sign she was emotionally ready to parent.

I also knew that I had signed up for this, when we decided to adopt. Adoption is messy and ethically complex. We wanted to do it the best way we knew, in a way that supported women, supported choice, and supported love.

The love of that mother transformed me. I was grateful, almost immediately, to have been part of such a basic and important moment for her and her child. Being a part of her life in this way hurt us. And it made us better people.

In the years since then I have become a mother to two amazing kids, and learned more about the messy, miraculous world of motherhood than I ever thought possible. The pattern of proclaiming a belief first and being transformed by it later has continued. Many times in the practical on the ground life of parenting I have had to come face to face with a value I have articulated and realize that to live that value will change me.

Friends, as Christian people in this world we are often asked, or even pressured, to state what we believe. I hope we do this, carefully and openly and bravely. I also hope that we notice when the opportunities present themselves to be transformed by the beliefs that we proclaim. We believe that God loves everyone – of course we do. But will we live that belief in transformative ways when we are faced with people who threaten us, hurt us, or compete with us for resources? We believe that part of our identity as Christians, formed in our baptismal promises, is to respect the dignity of every human being. Will we let that promise transform us when we are alone in a voting booth, or face to face with human rights violations perpetuated by our tax dollars?

Here is what I learned through our experience with a failed adoption match: claiming to believe in love, justice, hope, and humanity can start with saying what you believe out loud. Being changed by a belief, however, is a longer process. It requires embodied experience, challenge, and a willingness to go through the painful, wonderful process of being transformed.

And, people of God, it makes us better humans.

This work of proclaiming and being transformed? This is how we become the people God created us to be.

People made in the image of Love.