What are you passionate about?

I had a friend ask me once, "Misha, what are you passionate about?"

Well, I did not truly have a very firm answer. I had an idea and it was a foggy one at best.

Since moving from college and into the "real world" I feel like God is clarifying the given passions, desires, and purposes in which He has written on my heart. He has moved.

We have talked about adoption and been planning for it since earlier in our marriage (all 22months of it :o) )

I think about it really every day. One day, God set a fire in us for that call. Which I think that every Christian is called to adoption or care for the widowed in one form or another - whether it is funding them, or bringing the orphaned into your family, or running an orphanage, etc. It is a command in the Bible(see James 1:27) - so I can feel confident in saying that. Which should be the main reason to jump on in. You don't have to wonder if God has called you to it.. He has! James 1:27 "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
Not only that but He saved us, brought us into his eternal family, "In my Father's house are many rooms... I am going there to prepare a place for you."John 14:2, "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." John 14:18

We ourselves have been adopted by God "For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!" Romans 8:15

Wow... that puts things into perspective. We are all adopted. That is the Gospel. Once sinners, redeemed and made children of God! So what better lifelong way to live out the Gospel than to adopt a child, an orphan, into our earthly families... love them and lead them to Christ. Talk about EVANGELISM.

JI Packer Knowing God
If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. “Father” is the Christian name for God.…Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. (pp. 201–202)


Thank the Lord for the ABBA Fund Blog and the article that I found through it, because it truly describes the growing passion that God has planted in my heart.

Owen Strachan, posted on adoption.

"Perhaps in coming days, we’ll see churches flooded with children from around the world worshiping the living God, the One who cares for the poor and needy (Psalm 140:12). Once abandoned, once destitute, perhaps we’ll see a great movement of children who now know not only warmth and care, but love in its most extreme form, the love of God in Christ as preached and lived out in the local church.

Were this to be true, we might see that all tribes and tongues of the earth may discover the gospel not simply through missionaries who go and stay, but missionaries who go and bring back. That is, couples who could spend their money on a bigger home, or a faster car, or yet another expensive vacation will catch a vision for investing their hard-earned money in the salvation of the lost through adoption of the orphan. Maybe you don’t have to be sent through a foreign missions board to be a missionary; maybe you can be one by the simple but life-transforming act of adopting a child or two (or three or four).

Couples could do this when past the child-bearing years, as well. Have some money and extra time? Maybe adoption–or support of the adoption efforts of other families–is for you and will be a better way to pass the time than still more perfection of one’s golf swing or enhancement of one’s wardrobe. There’s nothing wrong with these things in moderation, but there seems to be a higher cause to serve with one’s time in later, more comfortable years.

It is difficult to estimate the difference we Christians could make if we wholeheartedly bought into this mission. How much would we bless lonely, isolated, suffering children by adopting, and how much would the Lord bless us in our decision to deny ourselves yet another material pleasure and to spend that money as a missionary and an agent of mercy to the lost?"

(*bold added by me)

Now THAT is why I feel so strongly about adoption. Please keep us in your prayers, that we would raise the money and God would lead us in this journey - in His time, as He wills.