Homecoming Day!

September 15 has become a day of great joy in our household since on that day we celebrate the homecoming of our son Dylan Carlos.  My husband Dan, my older son Grant and I traveled to Guatemala years ago to receive Dylan as our beloved child.  After a few hectic/crazy days in Guatemala City, we returned to our quiet, country home in Western PA on that day.  We remember such important event every year with presents, yummy treats and thoughtful consideration of the miracle of adoption. 

During the first few years, though Dylan enjoyed the presents and the festivities, he did not really have a clue of what the whole thing was all about.  It was not until he was around six years old that he began to notice that homecoming day has special significance because of the way he came to be our son.  I’m not sure he truly understands the nature of adoption yet; but I know he is starting to realize that it is a very special and blessed relationship.

We try to emphasize the importance of adoption in God’s heart, and how He has blessed the bonds formed through adoption so much that when He became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and was born to an earthly Mother, The God Incarnate chose to come as the adoptive son of a carpenter.  Thus Jesus became a righteous “shoot of Jesse” through the process of adoption.  Of course, rather than explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity and the Genealogy of Jesus, we simply tell Dylan that Jesus was adopted too!

We also tell him how adoption is very near and dear to the heart of God for it is adoption what describes our relationship to Him.  We are all adopted by our Heavenly Father which makes Christianity the largest adoptive family of all!  “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”  (Ephesians 1:4-5 NIV)

So, as we watch Dylan open his Homecoming Day presents and enjoy his favorite treats, on September 15^th our family celebrates the gift of adoption that our God has given to all of us.  Homecoming Day, therefore, has little by little become not only about Dylan’s entry into our family, but about our homecoming into the family of God, and the rejoicing that goes on in Heaven every time a lost soul is found.  (Luke 15:7 NIV)     On that special day we all “see what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”  (1 John 3:1)