Before we adopted for the first time, I had only a vague idea about “orphans”.  I knew they existed in damp countries where townspeople wearing shades of brown and gray stood in line for bread rations.  I pictured dark-skinned babies with distended tummies and Chinese orphanage rooms lined with rickety cribs.

Not in a million years did I picture faces that would one day form my family.

One of the magical things about adoption is that God always knows.  It doesn’t come as a surprise to Him.  His walls are lined with family pictures that would take our breath away if we were to get just a glimpse. We think the one hanging on our wall is it.  We think we know things, or that our family is already complete.  But we don’t even know the half of it.

Fifteen years ago, I daydreamed about knobby-kneed, fair-skinned kids with sticking-out ears and (fingers crossed!) Cory’s blue eyes.  But God had already decided something better for me.

Our family grew, and I forget sometimes that we don’t share blood.  We share time and space, a history that is whole enough to carry us home.  We share laughs and germs and rants and prayers.  We are a family.

And still, we grow.

This afternoon I rushed between dinner prep and homework when the front door opened and Robert and his best friend Fernando tumbled in, all long limbs and pierced tongues.  They sat at the island for not nearly long enough and somewhere in between their stories and nonsense, Fernando referred to Cory as “Dad”.  Oh, I saw this one coming. It made me smile.

Because family is so much more than blood.  And no one was meant to be alone.

The needle draws us together, pulls us near, and with every stitch, we’re closer to what we were always meant to be.  And with every stitch, our love grows, covering us and all the ones left standing cold around us until the shivering stops and we know that what we are together is real.

I can’t say for sure that you’re meant to adopt.  But chances are, you’re meant to be impacted by adoption. In one way or another, I believe you’re meant to see that what the world calls brokenness can be a thing of sure beauty, adorned in the best possible ways, unexpected and entirely holy.

It could be a niece, a nephew, a grandchild, a godchild. Maybe your best friend will adopt, or your neighbor.

Maybe you’re not as close to “done” as you thought.

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Shannan Martin believes the turns in life that look like failure are often holy gifts, a lesson she chooses to embrace after the bones of her comfy farmgirl life were shattered and rebuilt from the toes up.  Together, Shannan and her family sold their dream farmhouse, moved to a disadvantaged area in the city, and adopted a 19-year old felon.  Nothing could have prepared her for the joy she would discover as her family began to live the simple, messy, complicated life they were created to live. In walking beside the forgotten and broken and seeing first-hand the ways she so cleanly identified with both, Shannan’s faith was plucked from the mud.  She and her jail-chaplain husband now live on the wrong side of the tracks with their four children. She blogs often at Flower Patch Farmgirl.