kids

Several of my friends are adopting kids right now. It's pretty great. Besides getting to meet (and see through the interweb, sometimes) their really sweet kids, it's made me think a lot.

There's this one family especially (friends of friends) who adopted two girls and a boy from Central America last year. Their kids (3,6,8) grew up living under a railroad bridge before their parents adopted them. Despite the fact that I barely know this family, I think about them and their kids all the time.

When I was in Latvia two summers ago, I met a kid named Kristopp, a seven year-old boy, who was rip-your-heart-out cute and funny (see photo! he is, right?!) Though I speak next-to-no Russian, he'd shyly carry on whole one-sided conversations (in Russian) with me just nodding back. At the time, he was living in a windowsill in a manufacturing district in Riga. The place was not only falling apart--smoke stacks, concrete buildings, boarded-up houses--the neighborhood was totally unsafe, not to mention, he was seven and roaming Riga by himself.

Hearing about this family whose kids have gone from such a similar place as Kristopp to living in a nice house with their own cute little rooms and these great young parents who are crazy about them is moving.

I want to adopt my own kids, eventually, and have wanted to for a long time. I think that's part of it. But it's something about redemption too, which is less, I'm starting to think, like us "getting right with God" and more like us getting picked up from under bridges and windowsills and brought home to parents and a house with a pool (or a nice backyard.)