There Are No Orphans of God

The word "fear" has never really existed in my vocabulary.  At the age of two I went running headlong into the ocean because I didn't know that I couldn't swim.  When all the girls were too squeamish to dissect the squid in the fifth grade I was elbow deep in ink and fishy-smelling fluids along with all the boys.  At the naive age of eighteen I moved to Mexico City with only a basic knowledge of Spanish to be a nanny to a three year old boy I'd never met.  The only reason I haven't been sky diving yet is because I'm too poor and it's so ridiculously expensive.  In other words, fear and anxiety were always things that other people struggled with, not me.  Even when I had to fake it, even when my self-conscious little self was shaking in her boots, I've always had this fierce desire to square my shoulders and push through, too stubborn to show it when I was intimidated.  "I am bold" I tell myself, "I refuse to be afraid."

........and yet.......

I am. 

I'm just too proud to admit it.  

If I'd get down off my high horse long enough, maybe I'd recognize that when I think about the future, I sometimes find myself breaking out in a cold sweat.  I sit here staring down the end of my college career.  It's coming, slowly but surely.  Graduation is inevitable, and beyond it is......the land of "What if".  The land of a million possibilities.  The world of "The Rest of Your Life" and "You Better Not Screw This Up."  I can picture myself emerging from the collegiate world, diploma in hand, no ring on my finger, no ties to any particular course of action, and the world at my feet, entwined and and entangled in a million possibilities and potentials.  It's not that I'm entirely clueless about my future.  I have some ideas.  But here's the thing, God's got some ideas of His own.  Ah-ha!  Behold Fear as it makes its grand entrance.  What if God's plans for me are hard?  What if they don't match up with MY idea of how my life ought to play out?  Is He really so good and so trustworthy that I can be okay with following Him blind?  I am afraid of failure.  I am afraid of the unknown.  I am afraid of loneliness.  And if I let my guard down, if I get gritty and raw and honest, I must admit that I am afraid of God.  Not the "fear of the Lord" that the Bible talks about, not overwhelming awe at His glory, no.  I am afraid that if I surrender to His will all the way that I will get hurt.  I am afraid that He either does not know or does not care about some of my deepest dreams and desires. I am afraid of being forgotten by Him.

So how did this bold, brash, almost 22 year old, finally get around to admitting all these fears?  Well, as soon as finals finished the first week of May, I found myself in Panama City, Florida with some of my best friends for a Christian Conference with RUF.  I never wanted to leave that bubble of sand, and ocean, and hours upon hours of time with my Lord, something I desperately needed.  One of the seminars that I attended was entitled "Adoption: Living Under the Smile of Your Father", and at first it was all stuff I had heard.  If you're a Christian you are an adopted daughter or son of God, and He is your Father.  Right.  Got it.  But then the speaker went down a route that I wasn't expecting.  He started to talk about what it looks like to live as a Spiritual Orphan, and what happens when a son or daughter refuses to live as God's child.  The speaker asked us to listen as he listed the qualities that characterize the Spiritual Orphan and to prayerfully consider if perhaps that condition was true of our lives.  The Spiritual Orphan lives as if God has not risked everything to bring them into His family of love, acceptance, and compassion.  The Spiritual Orphan does not  believe that God loves her unconditionally.  Instead, the Spiritual Orphan lives in perpetual mistrust and fear of the Father who loves her.

Now for most people in the room, that idea probably seemed like a nice analogy, one of those great metaphors meant  to simply assist in the grasping of a theological concept.  But for me it was so much more graphic than that.  For me, loving an orphan who does not love you back is not just an idea and it's not just an analogy.  It's been a daily part of my life for the past eight years.  And for that reason, as I found myself identifying more and more with the description of the Spiritual Orphan, I began to feel like I had swallowed a rock.

My parents chose my little brother Peter before he even knew they existed.  Before he was Peter he was Vitya, living cold and hungry and miserable in an orphanage on the other side of the world.  He had never known love, or plenty, or compassion, or joy, or family.  There was nothing particularly noteworthy or impressive about him.  My parents did not choose to adopt him because he was the brightest, or the most handsome, or the kindest of all the orphans in the world.  In fact, quite the opposite, when my mom and dad arrived in the orphanage in Kazakhstan the workers at the orphanage tried to persuade them to choose another more intelligent child.  But they had come for Peter.  They had come for Peter because God had chosen Peter, and my parents, despite all the unknowns and the "What-ifs", decided to risk it all and obey.

Peter became my little brother when I was fourteen and he was six.  He literally went from nothing to everything.  Suddenly he had his own room, a brother, two sisters, a mom and a dad.  He had three meals a day, hugs, kisses, grandparents, a bike, and a puppy.  My parents lavished all these things on him and more, not out of obligation, but because it was their joy to do so.  He was in paradise.  But despite all the love and the the blessings that have been showered down upon him, my little brother still spends much of his life in petrified fear and anxiety, with a desperate need for control.  Peter has been given so many good things, and yet he cannot trust them.  He cannot be thankful for them.  The wounds from his childhood, the abandonment, the despair, and the loss, all go so deep that they have inhibited his ability to experience anything good.  Peter will be happy for a brief moment, or let love slip in for just a blink of an eye, and then immediately sabotage it out of fear.  Fear that if he loves it will destroy him.  Fear that if he lets us in, we would hurt him.  For so many years I have watched him and wondered how on earth he could manage to not know how to trust the family that has unconditionally loved and served him for so many years.  Does he not realize all that my parents sacrificed to rescue him?  Does he not know that we want the best for him?  Is he blind to the pain in my mother's eyes every time he rejects her?  Has he no concept of the fact that my parents saw a stranger and willingly chose to give him a new name, and a new life, and to call him son, even when he did nothing to deserve it?  No.  No he does not.  And there are no adequate words to really describe what it is like to live with someone for whom you have sacrificed everything, who remains willfully afraid of you.

So while others in that seminar down in Florida sat jotting down notes about whether or not they were a Spiritual Orphan, I found myself struggling to keep it together.  Suddenly the pain that I have seen my parents go through with my little brother became the hurt of my Lord and Savior.  Suddenly I was identifying with Peter, my brother who I claim that I cannot understand and with whom I have often thought that I had nothing in common.  In that moment I think that I grasped, in some small way, the deep ache that I cause my Father God every time I refuse to trust Him.  The speaker did not have to tell me that when I live as a Spiritual Orphan that I break the heart of God.  I already knew that part.  I know, because I've watched my parent's hearts break.  The speaker also did not have to tell me that no matter how many times I fail to accept my Father's love, no matter how many times I reject Him and grasp for control of my own life, He will never stop choosing to love me.  He will never stop calling me daughter.  I know, because my parents will never stop choosing to love Peter, and they will never stop calling him son, because that is what he is, whether he ever fully appreciates what that means or not.

1 John 4:18 says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear"  My Savior loves me with a perfect, unending, undying love.  He loves my lost little brother with that same love.  And in that love, I must believe, that there is hope.  Hope for me.  Hope for Peter.  Hope that every day is a new opportunity for us to live, not as fearful orphans, but as the son and daughter that we were created to be, purchased by the blood of Jesus for the glory our everlasting Father.