Countdown to Thanksgiving Day 5: Grace

This is the fourth in a daily series celebrating the blessings I'm thankful for, leading up to Thanksgiving. While they will portray some of the many -- and random -- things I have to be thankful for, they will not be presented in any particular order by degree of thankfulness. Skewed priorities should not be implied.

Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving. -A.W. Tozer

Between day two's post and November being National Adoption Month, you probably saw this coming.

I'm thankful that I couldn't have more children, because if they'd come along as I planned, I would have missed out the great wonder that is a gift of grace.

I'm a very flawed human being. Yet twice I've been given a gift that cost the giver everything with no merit, no way to have earned this gift, on my part.

It's an awesome, overwhelming generosity that's been extended to me.

Our journey has been slow, initially falling prey to myths of insurmountable expense. There were starts and stops as job loss shoved plans to back burners and political unrest abroad closed options.

There were another son and another daughter held, loved... and lost to us.

But we held on. Kept pursuing. Continued praying. And finally, we made it.

And adoption is a gift for our children, too: a brighter future.  Adoption changes their destiny - and that of every generation that will come from them.  It removed them from the abject poverty and probable delinquency that would otherwise define their future.

I treasure the birth parents who gifted us with these children, despite their own yearnings and grief.  I'm thankful to have witnessed and benefitted from their sacrificial love, their grace.