*UPDATE* Thank you to all those who gave towards our #GivingTuesday $3,000 matching grant. Through your generosity, we were able to et that goal!

Recently, while binging through YouTube videos, an ad for a global child sponsorship program/ministry started to play. Maybe you’ve been at an event where you have been challenged to sponsor a child around the world by picking from hundreds or thousands of picture profiles. The ad was compelling. The ministry brought about a stunning reversal to the norm by allowing the children to choose their sponsors.  

This was a first in the ministry’s history. Yet, as we near Christmas and enter into the Advent season, I’m reminded that at Jesus’ incarnation God flipped the script long before. If Advent is new to you, it means to arrive or to come, marking Jesus’ arrival and birth into the world. If you were God, how would you arrive into your own creation? Military escort with the Blue Angels? Pomp and circumstance of a royal coronation? Enjoying the lap of luxury and rightful deference from your subjects?

Instead of any of those, let me take you back to that moment when God flipped the script… (Matthew 1:18-25)

¹⁸ This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. ¹⁹ Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.

 ²⁰ But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. ²¹ She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

 ²² All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ²³ “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).

 ²⁴ When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife. ²⁵ But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to a son. And he gave him the name Jesus.

You can understand Joseph’s frustration. His entire hopes and dreams around Mary and marriage have just been blown up. Until he does something that reveals his character and faith: He accepts the fatherhood of Jesus. The script had been flipped. This wasn’t his plan, but God chose Him.

As we worship Immanuel, God with us, this Christmas season, our ministry is at the precipice of beginning to give out grants to families seeking to adopt. There is no better moment for us to acknowledge that adoption isn’t a plan B after plan A failed, but to rejoice that Jesus Christ choose adoption as the means of his entry to planet earth! Over 2023, my prayer is that together we get to watch God choose couples for children and recognize that, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him’” (1 Cor. 2:9).

We are currently sending out Sustaining Church Partner Packets and accepting applications!