God's Adoption Papers

Mark Buchanan, in his book Things Unseen, told of an experience where he and his wife visited an orphanage in Bangkok, Thailand. Following are his description and thoughts of the visit.

The children came to us, ran to us, clung to us. They were starved for touch and voice. They could not get close enough to us. We each carried around several children, while others hung onto our legs and arms. . .

But that wasn't all. That morning in the orphange, we visited another building . . . There were several cribs crowded together, and in each was a child. . . . They had been alone so long . . . that they had closed up inside themselves. All that was left, or all that seeped out, was the groaning.

What is this groaning except, at root, a longing for heaven? A longing that no father on earth, no matter how attentive and affectionate, can quite satisfy?

We hear the groaning in all things. In orphans. . . . In housewives, in businessmen . . . In the sated. In the famished. We hear it in country-and-western laments. . . We hear it in the rocks beneath the earth's crust . . . in the wood joists of our houses at night . . .in the bones of our bodies. . . We hear it . . .

This is my eager expectation: that one day, the Father will come through the door, adoption papers in hand. And He won't leave without me.

Until then, homesick, I groan.

KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON

KAREN