Welcome to Gateway Church's podcast. Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

When I was 17 years old, my best friend and I, this was 1981. How many of you were not born before 1981? That's hateful. You just shouldn't have raised your hands.

I was a senior in high school in 1981 and my best friend Cindy and I started a Bible study

with the fellowship of Christian athletes. Now we started it because we were hoping FCA would lure

football players in the Bible study. So we had an ulterior motive. But we started this Bible

study in our high school and it was just really cool how many people came.

And toward the end of that year, we studied the theme of adoption in Scripture, 17 years old.

But when I just kept seeing adoption in scripture over and over and over again, you see God himself

saying, you're my family, you're my sons and daughters, you sit next to Jesus, your co-heirs with

Christ. Both of us were really moved by that. And both of us as kids, 17 years old, tight skin,

high metabolisms, had no need for Spanx. We both made a vow that when we got

older and got married, we would adopt. Well, Cindy got married right after she graduated from

FSU, married an amazing man named Peter, and they went on to adopt two children.

Meanwhile, I was kind of always a bridesmaid and never a bride.

I was very, very, very afraid of intimacy.

In my 20s and 30s, I was very attracted to abusive men.

And so it took me a long, long, long time to believe that I actually could parent a child.

I actually had a woman in church tell me that I had sabotaged my shot at motherhood because she said, you've told our small group that there's sexual molestation in your

backstory, and just in case you weren't fixed in Christian therapy, you might unwittingly transfer some of the trauma you experienced as a child onto a child of your own.

So you should just go to the National Humane Society and adopt a dog. And I did that. I adopted

a chocolate lab with bladder control problems named Sally. And so it took me decades as a Christ follower to believe that maybe just maybe one of the 140

million orphans in the world as we know it today might be better off with a chunky

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