How Great the Father's Love for Us

Our journey to bring home Hudson was incredible.   It started in May 2011 with a picture and a thank-you email, when we first began to pray for him and that God would provide him a family.  After a couple months of prayer and reflection, God showed us he was to be our Hudson.  Now after 16 months, piles of paperwork, tens of thousands of dollars, countless prayers on our behalf, a 17-day trip and six airplanes later he is ours and he is home.

Along the journey and even since, it has been common to hear people say things like "you guys are so wonderful" or "you guys are great for what you are doing" or "he's so lucky".  Truly, we are not amazing.  We're not really that special, just willing to obey when He has asked us to do hard things.  Any glory in this circumstance goes to God.

On the 14 hour plane ride back to the US though, I did begin to think about our trip that was almost over, and what great lengths we had actually gone through in the last two weeks and the 16 months prior, to bring home our son.  Not that we were awesome, many families have traveled down this road before us and will after us.  But adoption really is an extraordinary step outside of our everyday world into something different and amazing to create a family.  We'd been down this road before in different ways as well as having watched other families go through the process but somehow, now as it was really happening and nearly concluded, it struck me how complicated and involved the process really had been.

Then it hit me, as much as we have gone through to bring home our Hudson, how much more has our heavenly Father gone to great lengths to make us part of His family?  1 John 3:1 reminds us that if we are in Christ, that is exactly what we are:

"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!"