Mt. Sophia Ideas

The O’Shaughnessy family are culture changers for sure. Angela’s story:

You’ve probably heard this old story, but it bears repeating because it sort of sums up the O’Shaughnessy approach to culture-changing:

A man is walking along a beach when up ahead in the distance, he notices another man picking up starfish, stranded on the shore by the retreating tide, and throwing them back into the water.

Curious, the first man asks, “What are you doing?”

“I’m saving these starfish,” comes the reply. “They won’t survive in the sun until the tide returns.”

Taken aback, the first man says, “Don’t you realize there are hundreds of starfish lying here, and that throwing a few back will make very little difference?”

The second man says nothing but remains unfazed. He picks up yet another starfish and throws it out into the waves. He hesitated for a moment, then looks back at the first man and says, “I just made a difference for that one.”

When Mrs. Tillman asked me to write about our family’s venture into culture-changing, I back-pedaled, because my husband and I don’t think of ourselves as culture changers.

We like to keep things low-key.  We aren’t demonstrators, protestors, or activists.  We’ve never built a school, a hospital or an orphanage, nor have we donated enough money to have our names on one.  When we die, it won’t be a high-security event.

We think of ourselves more as people who just get up in the morning and say, “OK, what needs doing today.”   Well, apparently five years ago, we got a Holy Spirit nudge that adoption needed doing.  It was just one of those, “we-can-make-a-difference-for-this-one” procedures.

After a family vote, we started out looking for one small girl to add to our family.  Turns out, we flew to Brazil in 2006, spent six weeks there and came home with two sisters, then 12 and seven.

It sounds all warm and fuzzy and noble.

It wasn’t.  Read Luke 17:10.

We know that our choices have made a difference for the girls.  They now have more opportunities than they ever would have had if they had stayed in Brazil.  They have a family and stability.

They’ve also lost their family of origin, their culture and much of their language.  They’re stuck with a family who looks different than they do.  They were disappointed to have to share our attention with our birth kids, and to learn that we aren’t rich and won’t buy them everything they want. They are sometimes confused by the language and culture.

We gave up a lot of privacy and money.  We opened up our family to scrutiny, not only through the formal process of home studies and such, but also because so many people wish to impart their opinions about adoption.  We learned that our belief that “love and limits” are enough, isn’t.  We learned that we can do the best we can, and sometimes it still doesn’t appear to change things.  We learned that spreading our money thin and doing without is by no means the hardest part. As much as we tried to educate ourselves, there were still things that about the girls and adoption that astonish us, stump us and amaze us.

We also experience the joy of hearing a little girl tell people she has the best family.  We get to chuckle at her not wanting people to know she is adopted, as if they can’t tell that her brown Latina face did not come from our pale Irish genes.  We learned that there is so much that is alike about people, no matter where they come from.  We get the fun of kids experiencing things that they never would have had the opportunity to experience.

We get the pleasure of knowing that we’ve done one thing to fulfill the scripture: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:27).  Most of all, we’ve learned a great deal about the love of God, who “while we were yet sinners, … died for us.”

Related posts:

• A Season of Pictures- Feb 10
• A Season of Pictures- March 12
• A Season of Pictures- Feb 21