Belinda

Friday, June 25, 2021

Belinda

The first time I saw her, we were at our first adoption conference.

I was a brand new Christian with two children, and we were considering the idea that God was leading us into adoption. She was standing in the back, with a baby whose head was severely distended from hydrocephalus strapped to her chest in a baby carrier.

She rocked from foot to foot, patting the child’s back, listening with passion and intensity. I had seen her at church caring for many of her medically fragile foster children, and I knew that I wanted to meet this woman.

A few weeks later, Paul and I were publicly baptized at church and announced in our testimonies that we would be adopting two children, because we felt it was a picture of what God had done for us in salvation.

As we were leaving church that day, she caught my arm and shared her passion for adoption and foster care. It was an instant Sisterhood. For the next four years, Belinda would be one of our greatest supporters, and at times my “partner in crime”.

This woman would drop everything to go after the one.

That’s Belinda. She will drop everything she had planned for the one child who needs a Foster home and is being released from the hospital TODAY, or the one friend who needs help, or the one child that goes wayward.

She will chase you down. She will find you in that hospital and carry you home, despite having too much to do and not nearly enough support or resources.

She will find you in your crisis and be the one with the meal, she will sit on your bedroom floor while you are on bedrest, she will take your kids to give you a break when she is already stretched to the breaking.

And if you are a child who has no faith in God, she will pace outside your door and prayer walk with your name on her lips for years.

And she will not stop.

This was our friend.

Adoptive mother of 5, foster mama to an endless stream of medically fragile children for decades, and the constant voice of exhortation reminding the Body that we cannot ignore the orphan crisis.

Cancer shipwrecked her body, but her heart and soul were anchored and thrown on the Rock that is Christ.

Even as she was physically crushed and broken, she continued to praise Him. She continued to preach the Gospel in her writing, reminding us that in the end we all need a Savior!

She used adoption as a platform for evangelism, calling people to repent and believe that Christ died for our sins on the cross, defeated our death in his resurrection, and that salvation is found in trusting in Him alone.

This sure and steady trust is why as Christians we say with the apostle Paul,

“I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance, as it is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be at all ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” - Phil 1