They begged me to read, clearly frustrated that I’d paused in the middle of the story. But I couldn’t see the words because hot tears blurred my vision. It was just a kid’s story from our homeschool curriculum but it wrecked me.
We’d followed the story of a homeless orphan boy who’d experienced such great loss to him finding an unlikely friend. The two shared a physical space under the bridge, two homeless males, one old with a single leg and one young, both legs intact. They shared an emotional bond, one as a father figure and one a son figure.

The boy spent his life wishing he were a potter and one day he finally had the opportunity to work for a potter, the best in the city. Every day he showed up and worked his tail off but never able to sit at the glorious seat of the wheel and form a creation of his own.

After some time passed, he asked the potter for a chance to make something himself. At this time in history, potters could only pass down their legacy and lifework to their sons. And this boy wasn’t his son.

More heartbreak followed the rejection.

The boy journeys through the land on a mission for the potter where he encounters yet more hurt and a robbery.

When he finally makes his way home, bringing good news from the emissary, he races to tell the potter. When he isn’t ecstatic over the news, the boy realizes something is wrong. While he was gone, there was an accident and his dear old friend died.

That’s when the tears started. 

Turns out, the potter welcomes this homeless orphaned boy into his home adopting him as his own, gives him a new name, and gifts him with his own potters wheel. He is fully welcome, accepted, loved and now has a place to call his own. 

I bawled.

Adopted by God

Maybe it’s because I’m studying Ephesians and how we are adopted into the family of God when we trust Jesus as our Savior or maybe because I know too well the overwhelming hurt of losses heaped on. Whatever it was, through this story of fiction based on truth, I saw the love of Jesus in a whole new way. 

How he takes us, bruised and broken and exactly like we are, dusts us off and gives us a new name. He calls us His children and gives us an inheritance only received once we’ve accepted Him as Lord.

Man, don’t you feel that way sometimes? Hurt upon hurt heaped on, rejected, disappointed, never measuring up? Our heart literally breaks at the pain of it all.

But there’s someone who desperately wants us, who wants to call us His own. Who wants to gift us with an inheritance we have no right to. Who fully knows and fully loves us in spite of all we’ve ever said or done.

That’s some kind of love there. That’s the kind of love we can only experience through Jesus. 

Do you know Him? 

I wasted so much time calling myself a Christian, confident of my security yet unsearching to discover the character of this one who gave his life for me. When I fully trusted Him and set out on an expedition to find out exactly WHO He was, I was in for the shock of my life.

Find out the rest of that story later this week on the blog.