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Broken Families

For days, the news cycle has been filled with stories of parents and children who have been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. I believe our nation's policies, which lead to action, must be weighed with a clear sense of right and wrong. The conversation our country is having today is critical. It shows we still have a pulse when it comes to issues that involve innocent children.

Scripture offers a powerful defense of family togetherness. That is not a political statement. It is in society's best interests. The apostle Paul, for example, spoke of the fact that all families have a common allegiance because their charter is issued by a common Author: "I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named." (Eph. 3:14)

All of my sons have experienced separation anxiety at one point or another. I can vividly many routine bedtimes turning into hours-long marathons because of the fear that gripped them. I can still see their little eyes widening as big as saucers, fearing it might be the last time they would ever see Daddy or Mommy.

Of course, our children didn't have to worry. We literally stationed ourselves steps away, sometimes even inches away, in the same room, on the same bed.

I don't claim to understand what families separated at the border are feeling. Nor do I profess to know the distinct pain that adoption can bring -- separation from one's biological family and from the life one could have lived.

There is a part of me, small but loud, that questions whether I've somehow made a miscalculation. Is adoption actually wrong? Are adoptive Christians or adoptive anyone, for that matter, perpetrating hostility toward other humans by taking them out of a foreign environment and assimilating them into their own? I have read comments to this effect on social media, and they trouble me greatly. There are undoubtedly bad actors in all systems, including adoption, and it is a terrible reality we are forced to confront.

Then I remind myself that there really are families who do seek to place their babies--embryo or otherwise--with loving families. That doesn't discount for a moment the pain they feel over the decision or the tremendous spiritual and emotional capital families must expend to make the decision to place a child.

I am grateful to live in a country where, for all our faults, we enable people to build families that are not exclusively defined by biological relatedness. There are many children in the world whose lives have been forever changed by loving families. There are many loving families whose lives have been touched by a child they otherwise never would have known.

Mine is one of them. May God mend our families in ways obvious and unseen. And may we find a collective moral compass to make the changes needed to mend our society in the process.

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