It probably doesn't surprise you that as an adoptive mom

one of my favorite passages in scripture is in Psalm 68,

where it says, "Father of the fatherless

and protector of widows is God in His holy habitation.

God sets the solitary in a home."

One translation says He sets the orphans in families.

And so you can imagine I love that passage as an adoptive mom

to a 7-year-old from Haiti.

But y'all, I didn't used to love that passage.

As a matter of fact, that passage

used to be like salt in my wounds.

Because even though I didn't grow up

as a quintessential orphan, I grew up in a divorced home.

My father left us when I was five years old.

And I thought, like many kids who go through a divorce,

I thought if only I'd been sweeter or kinder,

maybe used my inside voice more, dad wouldn't have left.

And then my mother remarried my stepfather two years

after my dad left.

And I so hoped he would be a daddy who loved me well.

And he was not at all the daddy I hoped for.

So even though I came to know Jesus when I was a kid,

even though I was always in church, even though I ended up

going into vocational ministry and even seminary,

there was a corner of my heart that

always felt like an orphan.

I definitely felt fatherless, even though the promises of God

are that He never leaves us, never forsakes us.

Really wasn't until mid-life for me

that I began to believe that promise.

I think it's so sweet that God took a woman like me,

who knows God's word but felt like an orphan,

and allowed me to become a single mom to a little girl who

so many people would call an orphan.

But my kid is not an orphan.

My 7-year-old is convinced that God is

absolutely besotted with her.

She told me the other day that Jesus was talking about her

and that Jesus said, "I love that Missy."

How sweet, how redemptive, of our Heavenly Father,

that He took a woman who felt like an orphan

and allowed me to parent this little one

that many he would call an orphan.

But she's not.

She is a beloved child of the most high King, and so are you.