Family

Family:

a. a basic social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not: the traditional family.

b. a social unit consisting of one or more adults together with the children they care for

 

What is a family? This question seems so straight forward at first, but as I become older and think about starting a family, I become more and more amazed at how many different types of families there are, and what exactally do I want my family to look like. Being adopted automatically changes the makeup of my family from the 'traditional family'. I have a Mom and a Dad, a brother and sister...but I also have a Birth-mom, and  sister who doesnt share my brother and sister with me. Now I also have a new family having married my husband. But wait...I don't just have our new family, I have in-laws...and I have 'birth-in-laws'.

 

I volunteer with an organization that supports adoptive families and a youth group made up of teens in fostercare, aged out of foster care and have been adopted. This too has played a part in my understanding of what a family is.

 

Family is so much more then parents and thier children.

 

I have friends who are currently adopting kids out of foster care, kids with special needs, kids in other countries that don't have the resources to care for them. Again, my idea of family is enlarged.

 

I am reminded of what the bible explains as family over and over again:

 

In Ruth 1, we learn about permenence. Naomi tells Ruth to go back to her mother, but Ruth pleads to stay saying “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”

 

In James 1:27 we are commaded "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress"

 

These stories make me ask myself, what do I want my family to look like? I pray that it is a family that loves relentlesly, that is made up through more then mere bloodline, that I can be a home to orphans. And I pray that I can encourage others to look at families differently too, that they may see a home for orphans in thier own families, that more children would find peremency, that more teenagers would be adopted, that more Christians would be empowered by the power and grace of God to carry out his good works and take care of the orphans and the widows.

 

 Here are some of the links to some of the stories mentioned that have inspired me:http://carlaburlando.blogspot.ca/
http://nataliekeller.blogspot.ca/
And if you want more information on Adoption please check out the Adoptive Families Association:
http://www.bcadoption.com/default.asp