The Runge Adoption Journey…

Many of you already know that Kent and I are in the middle of adopting an infant girl from China, but some of you do not, so this is to officially let you all know and to share our journey with you. After we finish our “paper pregnancy” or “paper chase” as it is often called, we will wait approximately 14 months for a referral from Chinese officials and then fly to China, sometime in early 2008, to get our daughter!

We’ve experienced fear and frustration along the way, but have learned that if we keep our eyes and hearts on the goal, it helps our focus tremendously. The “paper chase” part of this journey takes some serious perseverance, patience, and commitment, but anything worth doing in life takes that, right? We sum up the “paper chase” with this phrase, “hurry up and wait”!

The following are the details of our journey so far, but it is not for the faint of heart nor those in a hurry, as I am extremely detail oriented and I can get pretty “wordy”, so it may take you awhile to read; consider yourself warned.

Capon on Left-Handed Power…

I was recently struck as I read this about how vital this approach to relationship is in our care community. By what means to we extend relationship to our clients?

There is one effect that cannot be the result of a direct application of force, and that is the maintenance of a relationship between free persons. If my child chooses not to cooperate with me, if my wife chooses not to live with me, there is no right-handed power on earth that can make them toe the line of relationship I have chosen to draw in the sand. I can dock my son’s allowance, for example, or chain him to a radiator; or in anger at my wife, I can punch holes in the Sheetrock or beat her senseless with a shovel. In short, I can use any force that comes to hand or mind, and yet I cannot cause either of them, at the core of their being, to stop their wrongs and conform to my right. The only power I have by which to do that is left-handed power – which for all practical purposes will be indistinguishable from weakness on my part. It is the power of my patience with them, of my letting their wrong be – even if that costs me my rightness or my life – so that they, for whose reconciliation I long, may live for a better day of their own choosing.

My point here is twofold. The power of God that saves the world was revealed in Jesus as left-handed power; and therefore any power that the church may use in its God-given role as the sacrament of Jesus must also be left-handed. Despite the fact that God’s Old Testament forays into the thicket of fallen human nature were decidedly right-handed (plagues, might acts, stretched-out-arm exercises, and thunderous threats) – and despite Jesus’ occasional use of similar tactics in the Gospels – the final act by which God reconciles the world to himself consists of his simply dropping dead on the cross and shutting up on the subject of sin. He declares the whole power game won by losing, and he invites the world just to believe that absurd proposition.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart, pp. 62-63