Adoption

Never in my life had I thought I would end up adopting a child. I knew one family who had adopted a few, but I never looked at them and thought that my family might look like that someday. I always believed that life would take its typical course, few variations if any. So I guess you could say that that the adoption process that I now find myself in the middle of constitutes one of life’s good curveballs.

I can’t even remember when the talk started, but I’m certain it came from April. I’ve benefited from a wife who was raised by an adopted father. Adoption must have been talked about as normal in their family. Because it was never spoken of in my family, my resistance to adoption at first could be expected. I always thought of fatherhood as biological.

Slowly, my resistance began to wear down. It’s not that I was ever flat out anti-adoption, but I needed some convincing. My wife started to think about Ethiopia early on, gathering bits of information over time. She started watching adoption videos to see how other families experienced it. A while after that started, my sister adopted a baby from Tennessee. Not so suddenly, it became acceptable and even desirable to me. It was no longer about giving up and settling for an adoption. It started to be about giving a disadvantaged child a chance. Then it became more a question of children’s equality in God’s eyes, and our responsibility to start a family no matter the method. It’s really a mix of both those things. Now when I think of adoption versus other methods we could have tried with a fertilization specialist, all I know is that there is 100% certainty that we could bring a child out of a poverty-stricken nation and give him a better life here.

I’ve been at this point for a while now. We won’t be a family who couldn’t have “our own”. We will have our own. Like I wrote above, parenthood isn’t about DNA – it’s much more than that. I hope people get that. My sister who adopted last year has told us of people who don’t. They stand in grocery lines, seeing the attention that the little black girl gets, and feel they have to make snarky remarks about how Brangelina has made adoption trendy now. I’m sure we’ll get a few of those, but you can bet I’ll speak up if I need to. It’s just one of those things not everybody understands fully, but that’s ok.

My wife and I will be posting updates throughout the process at TheRealBlairFamily.com.

Work it out

It’s funny how things just work out.

You can anticipate what you think will happen, maybe justify why you want it to happen, and then it happens in an entirely different way.  You can tell yourself that certain things shouldn’t have happened, but then you see that they actually happened for your good.  You can puzzle and puzz, till your puzzler is sore, only to one day realize that the pieces fit together like you never had imagined.

All these “you cans” are pictures of my experiences, of course.  All too many times I’ve found myself wondering why something had to happen the way it did.  Why was I supposed to learn that the hard way?  Did I learn anything at all?

I’m beginning to change the questions I ask because I want an answer that is forward looking.  Those other questions dwelt too much on the past, too much on the why’s.  I am beginning to acknowledge that things happened the way they did because…well, just because.  The fact that I know something more about myself now, because of what happened, is enough for me to move forward.  So what do I know?

I know there’s something to be said for playing to my strengths.  I have been given certain talents and abilities.  Others I was most emphatically not given.  Why, I don’t know, but I really no longer care because my strengths are enough to take me precisely where I want to go.  So maybe I still feel this occasional need to prove to myself that I can do something whose gift to do so was so generously bestowed upon everyone except me, but that doesn’t mean I have to pursue it.

I know that others know better than me.  Most of the time, April.  All those ideas, certainties, and pieces of ‘undebatable’ knowledge tend to jumble around so much in one’s head that the dust clouds one’s vision.  Sometimes you need  someone to rain on your dust cloud (in a good way of course), and identify what should have been obvious.  There is untold value in an intelligent second or third party in one’s life.

Finally, I know that things will work out as designed.  Thankfully, I know that they have been designed by a Master Architect, and now I just need to follow the drawings as best I can.  None of this “what might happen if I go that way instead of this way”.  Just more of “this seems to be the best way, now I’ll make the best of it”.  Wow, it sounds so easy.  What might have happened if I had always thought that way.

Wrongo.

I was about to fall into that trap again,see.  What matters now is that I knows what I didn’t knows, and that’s good enough for me.  So here’s to the knowledge that things will work out, that they have worked out, and that I can make them work out if I stay true to myself and the Designer.

Word.

Generation Me

This will be a short post. I want to post a few links to some articles that touch on the ‘me generation’ and the the related problem that is the oversexualization of young girls. I thought the articles were good enough themselves but it was even more interesting to read the comment sections, especially on the generation diva article.

There is a lot of argument going on out there as to what causes these problems, what we can do, and so on.  I don’t think anyone will debate that there is a huge problem though.  It’s so bad that some mothers  are dressing their daughters like prostitutes for the sake of pageantry, some kids think that teachers and professors exist to make life easy, and some Hollywood stars’ plastic surgery has turned them into something akin to disfigured Marvel comic villains.

I’m not the kind to worry about how bad things are out there, but the articles do serve to show where our society is going with its standards.  I read them more as a case in what not to do and what to try to protect my future daughters from.

Ok, I’ll admit that the plastic surgeries make me laugh a bit.

Here is the one on “Generation Me”.

The one about “Generation Diva”.

Plastic faces that may or may not make you cringe.

Tags: plastic surgery, generation me, generation diva, superficiality

Expelled

Every so often I’ll see this advertisement floating around on conservative news sites, showing a picture of Ben Stein and a movie called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed“. I stopped to read a little about it once, and the prospect of a movie about the intelligent design vs. Darwinism debate seemed very interesting to me. I saw the movie a few nights ago at Blockbuster and decided to rent it.

This one goes right to my list of recommended movies.  Ben Stein (he’s the teacher on Ferris Beuler’s Day Off who calls Beuler over and over in his monotone voice) narrates this movie about how intelligent design has come under attack in the academic community.  He interviews a few academics who were either denied tenure or forced out of their schools for daring to even mention ID in their scholarly work.  He also interviews some atheists and proponents of Darwinism, asking questions about their beliefs.  Ben Steins question is why, if the theories of Darwinism are pushed so much in universities, can’t ID receive the same chance to be analyzed in the classroom.  A legitimate question, I believe, since a university education should be about discussion, debate, and critical thinking.

The problem that exists now is that we are only allowed to think critically about Darwinism when inside the classroom.  The “well educated” apparently fear that the mentioning of the words intelligent design to a student would be the same as imposing a religious ideology on him or her.  Students are not given the credit that they can think for themselves and decide which theory makes the most sense.  Instead anything that even remotely insinuates God is kept as far from campus as legally possible.

What it comes down to for me is this: there are two sides to every argument.  In this case, the Darwinists may be right, or the proponents of ID might be right.  The important thing is that each side be given a voice, especially at a university.  Darwinists will say that there is no evidence of ID therefore they cannot teach it.  That’s nice until you ask any Darwinist to prove that ID didn’t happen.  They cannot do it.  That alone means that there is a base for discussion.

I am a religious person so I believe in God as the Creator.  No matter what I say to a Darwinist, they will not take scripture as proof.  That is fine with me.  But on the other hand, not one of them can show me that God did not create the heavens and the earth.  They must live with that.  Whether you believe God was the intelligent designer, or you don’t know who or what designed all things, the fact remains that it cannot be discounted and should not be excluded from scholarly discussion.

The prominent atheist in the movie said it best when he first suggested that life began on the backs of crystals but then conceded it was possible that somebody could have created those piggy-backing organisms.  Even this big bad atheist couldn’t look Ben Stein in the eye and tell him how life started.  Why?  Because he doesn’t know.

When you don’t know, you can’t attempt to silence the other side for proposing their ideas.

Tags: Ben Stein Expelled, Creationism, Darwinism, Expelled Movie, Intelligent Design