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An adoption story.

Cindy Boyer was browsing through online profiles of children with no families when she stumbled upon a little girl from Russia. 

An adoption advocacy organization, Reece’s Rainbow, had named the girl Adalyn. She is a year and a half old, has short hair, dark eyes, and a bilateral cleft lip, gum and palate. 

Cindy stopped scrolling. She stared at the picture. 

Adalyn’s situation was all too familiar to her. 

“Immediately, I knew,” she said. “This is our baby.”

Click here to read the rest of the story, my latest feature for the paper. It’s online now and in print in tomorrow’s Hernando edition of the Tampa Bay Times.

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Should older, single adults still save sex for marriage?

There’s an old article on CNN’s Belief Blog about how young Christians aren’t saving sex for marriage anymore. In it, the writer also says the average age at marriage is much older for today’s people than it was for the people of yore.

“Today,” he writes, “it’s not unusual to meet a Christian who is single at 30 – or 40 or 50, for that matter. So what do you tell them? Keep waiting?”

Frankly? Yes.

Perhaps it strikes the average adult in our culture as unreasonable to expect older, unmarried adults not to have sex, even if they’re Christians. My hunch, however, is that this ultimately only strikes the average adult as unreasonable because it’s the norm for older, unmarried adults to have sex.

It’s the status quo, in other words. It’s business as usual. Which is like saying “the reason you can’t expect older, unmarried adults not to have sex is because older, unmarried adults have sex.”

Which is kind of like saying “it’s a good idea to do the stuff that most people do.” That the reason it’s ok to uncritically do the things that are normal is because they are normal.

But are the normal things normal because they’re good, or are they normal because we’re keeping them that way?

It’s parallel to and an example of this:

“We see that people don’t save sex for marriage.

We see that many men and women lack integrity, or are selfish, immature or dishonest.

We can continue not to date them, or we can lower the bar.

Most people lower the bar.”

It’s normal, in other words, to encounter people who don’t save sex for marriage, or who lack integrity, or are selfish, immature or dishonest. It’s so normal that some people believe that’s as good as people get. And when other people believe that’s as good as people get, they are uncritically content to date them (and when we are content to date them, they date are content being selfish, for instance, or immature or dishonest, lacking integrity or living like it’s impossible to save sex for marriage.).

So it’s normal, in other words, to date people who don’t exactly meet reasonable standards.

But it isn’t normal because it’s good. It’s normal because we’re keeping it that way. And I’m of the opinion that we don’t have to.

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Click here to read the CNN Belief Blog article.

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Why parents are important.

I write tonight with tight lungs and tired eyes.

I am a month into the four and a week that make up the fall semester. Part of it is my second counseling practicum. For that, I work at a residential facility for minors who are ordered to be there by a judge, for instance, or are in foster care but between placements, or have run away from home or have been kicked out by their parents.
Despite my flaring asthma and the go-go-going from which there is rarely a break, I like this. 
I like this a lot.
This work requires creativity. It tries your patience, and (hopefully) refines it. It widens your comfort zone and your perspective.
Some days you laugh. Other days you lock yourself in your office. Other days, you shoot hoops like an 11-year-old, with an 11-year-old, during a counseling session.
Every day you’re grateful.
Grateful for home, and good parents.
Every day you’re challenged.
Challenged to listen to young people who’ve mostly never been heard. To stay calm during crises. To model the behaviors and coping skills the center hopes kids will learn before they leave.
You realize why parents are important.
Why good parenting is important.
Why what I do now – while I’m single and have no kids – is as important as what I’ll do when I’m married with children.

“Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.
If we want to teach our chilldren to dare greatly in this ‘never enough’ culture, the question isn’t so much ‘Are you parenting the right way?’ as it is: ‘Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?’ -Brene Brown, from her book Daring Greatly

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The morning-after pill: the solution, or part of the problem?

I listened to the news tonight while I ate dinner.

Popular today is the story about a set of New York City schools that are part of a pilot program in which girls 14 and older can receive Plan B, or “the morning-after pill,” without parental consent (and without parental notification, according to some sources).

One guy included in the news coverage spoke from behind a podium. He said the pilot program provides a solution to a problem that has lifelong consequences: teen pregnancy.
Indeed any pregnancy, let alone one in a teen, makes a lifelong impact on all involved.
But I can’t agree with what the guy said from behind the podium. The pregnancy isn’t the problem. What the world says about sex is the problem (and unwanted pregnancy is a consequence). The morning-after pill can’t solve that.

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Hands and feet (A Repost).

I squinted at the screen and punched away at my keyboard. School lunch menus. Somebody’s got to type ’em.

The police scanner on my editor’s desk crackled. I kept typing. Crispy chicken salad or tuna plate. Choice of veggie sticks, fresh seasonal fruit —

Vehicle overturned.

Vehicle overturned? I stopped typing and started listening to the scanner.

Two ejected. Block the road. Re-route traffic. Send the helicopter.

Of course. Something big always happens while I’m alone in the newsroom.

I interrupted an editor’s lunch with a head’s up phone call. I pulled up the Florida Highway Patrol Web site to find the intersection. The TV news reporter who shares our office called from the road.

“This is massive,” she said. “The worst single accident I’ve seen in my career.”

I made a second call to the editor. She called a photographer who called me for directions. A reporter met him at the scene.

The rest is history.

Another tragedy. Add it to the list.

The two Tampa police officers shot to death during a traffic stop.
The toddler killed in the care of his father.
The church destroyed in a fire.
The man who died when he drove his truck into a pond (the six kids and quadriplegic wife he left behind).
This fatal crash.

While we – humans – sort through them, we ask questions. It’s natural.

What happened?

How did it happen? How could it? Why?

There are other questions.

Why did God let this happen? Or, more usually, why did your God let it happen? How could a God be good who allows this?

My response is rough around the edges.

“You think this is His fault? You leave Him out of this!”

Shane Claiborne says it better in an old radio interview:

“And I can remember a comic in Philadelphia that was in the paper. There were these two guys that were asking that very question. It was — and one guy said, ‘You know, I wonder why God allows all this poverty and pain and hurting in the world?’ And his friend says, ‘Well, why don’t you ask God that?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, I guess I’m scared.’ And he says, ‘What are you scared of?’ He says, ‘I guess I’m scared that God will ask me the same question.'”

We ask why God allows sickness, but we won’t take care of ourselves.

We ask God why there’s poverty, but won’t make eye contact with the homeless guy who stands next to our cars at red lights.

We ask God why there’s murder, but we won’t love our neighbor.

Why?

In Shane Claiborne’s words…

God’s “going, ‘Hey, you’re my body. You are my hands and my feet.’ And, you know, that this is something that we are entrusted with. And I think, probably, one of the most difficult things that Jesus ever did was sort of leave this idea of transforming the world or the kingdom of God coming in the hands of such a ragtag bunch of people that goof it up over and over.”

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This post originally appeared on the blog on Aug. 14, 2010.