• He will leave the only house he has ever known.
• He will say good-bye to his foster mon and dad.
• He will move to a country on the other side of the world.
• He will begin to hear and learn a new language called English.
• He will be surrounded by more toys than he knew existed.
• He will be introduced to Christianity and be taught the difference between it and Buddhism.
• He will be surrounded by white people (and he most likely has never seen a white person before).
• He will go from a small town to a city.
• He will no longer be an only child but he will have a brother and sister.
• He will no longer live in a one room house but a house with many rooms.
• He will no longer share a bed with the rest of his family but he will have his very own bed.
• He will change from a Thai dominated diet to an Amercian diet.
• He will become a American citizen.
• And I am sure there are many more.

Because of our adopting Caleb, his world (and ours) will radically change. Now I don't mean any of these changes are bad, but they are very real. By the end of our trip, Caleb will have a new identity. And as radical as these changes are, they pale in comparison to the changes that take place when we are adopted into the family of God.

• We go from slaves to sin to slaves of God.
• We go from sons of the devil to sons of God.
• We go from under the wrath of God to being at peace with God.
• We go from condemned to glorified.
• We go from unrighteousness to righteous.
• We go from no family to an eternal family.
• We go from separated from God to united with God.
• We go from citizens of a temporal world to citizens of the eternal Kingodm of God.
• We go from broken and shattered to made new and built on the cornerstone of Jesus.
• We go from unholy to holy.
• We go from spiritually dead to spiritually alive.

Because of God's adoption through Jesus Christ we are given a new identity and are radically changed. The doctrine of adoption is one of the greatest gifts we receive from God.

I thank God for adopting me into His family and I thank God for allowing my wife and I to participate in an adoption process. Even though I have not yet held Caleb or even touched him, God has already used him to increase my love for Him. Praise God for adoption.

My prayer as my wife and I continue forward is that God will help us be good parents to Caleb, that he will use our adoption to testify of how He adopts us, and that our love for Him would exponentially grow because of the family He has given us.