Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Celebrating Adoption! (Part One)

My friend Alethea invited me to a special luncheon a couple weeks ago.  The luncheon is a special annual event each spring to support Colorado Christian Services, an adoption agency. Specifically, it is Alethea’s adoption agency!  I have attended before and it is always a lovely luncheon with a silent auction and wonderful program.  This year was no different.  Alethea invites many of her friends and I think she ought to get a prize for having the most friends attend!  We took up almost two tables!  This year CCS was celebrating their 50th anniversary!  Just think of that…fifty years of helping women choose life over abortion!   Fifty years of placing babies into the arms of women who otherwise might not have any children!  Fifty years of building families, counseling families, and honoring life!  Now that’s a celebration!!

I am both blessed and  privileged to have in my life a wonderful friend like Alethea.  Would it surprise you to know we met at Bible Study Fellowship?  She is the teaching leader of our class.  I remember when she and her husband moved to Englewood and she joined our group here in Denver.  We were both discussion leaders at the time.  She was asked to be the substitute teaching leader at the same time I was asked to be the class administrator.  That was about six years ago.  It was at that time I got to know Alethea a little better and she shared her struggle to have children.  When our class staff would meet to pray, her request was often along the line of having a baby.  And when that door was tightly closed, the request became about  wisdom  if, or how to adopt.  Alethea often describes those days as “darkness.” 

Over the years we have shared much of our lives as we studied God’s Word, learned to apply it and grow from it.  God brings different experiences into our lives to teach us and to cause us to become more like His Son, Jesus Christ.  We don’t necessarily get to choose those experiences because He sees what we can not.  He knows what the perfect tool is to bring about the changes necessary to bring out the beauty in a life and in which He alone is glorified.  The tool God used in Alethea’s  life was infertility.  The tool did its work.  Work is not always easy or enjoyable.  But because Alethea cooperated with God in that process,she stepped out of the “darkness” into His wonderful light.   She is now the busy Mom of two beautiful little girls!  And she loves to take every opportunity to share about her journey through adoption, CCS and all that the Lord has taught her.  (That could be the secret why so many of her friends gladly say yes to her invitation to attend the luncheon each spring!)

alethea, mom , gma #2

This is Alethea and her Mom, Chris.  She also is a Teaching Leader in Bible Study Fellowship. Next is Alethea’s Grandmother, and then two of our class leaders, Kristen and Gail.

gail, angie, michelle, debbie rhonda at ccs luncheon

That’s Gail again with Angela, Michelle, Debbie, and Rhonda…all BSFers!

ccs luncheon

This is Table #2…Elyse, Alethea, Charis, and Whitney. 

pam and christine

Also at Table  #2 was Kristen and Pam, above, and Hope and Loral, below.

hope and loral

Adoption is a blessing and a reason to celebrate! What a wonderful picture of the greatest adoption of all, that of being adopted into God’s family and becoming His sons and daughters!  I am so glad to know Alethea and have a better understanding of all that God has given us by what she has walked through.  My next post is from her.  You will be blessed as well! 

“…just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”  Ephesians 1:4-6

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