Hope deferred makes us sick, doesn’t it? Our hearts long to be fulfilled. It’s a sign of being alive. And during this moment of being alive, there’s nothing we can do that doesn’t converge on the life of Christ. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
Understanding Resurrection and Life
Is there anything on earth that can separate Christ from the essence of being alive? It’s as if simply being alive is to be intimately joined together with Christ. Truth and Way, too.
The Story of Lazarus: Resurrection and Life
To live is Christ.
Lazarus was one of the few who got to experience that from a new angle. He died. Then, it was about four days until Jesus arrived. This all happened in the village where, a short while ago, people tried to kill Jesus.
Scripture leaves the story about Lazarus relatively open. It draws my attention to the extraordinary wonder of our lives here and now, specifically to the intimacies that are beautifully and profoundly possible even in the age of social media. Who knows what happened to Lazarus after this? His friends do. The neighbors and anyone who witnessed his change. Those who heard about it. His siblings. His time spent with Mary and Martha was undoubtedly never the same again.
Living Resurrection and Life in Christ
Navigating Life After Resurrection
After that kind of encounter, can you really go back to the way things were? But for a moment in time, they each had a story to tell and navigate. Even if a complete narrative ascends to the street someday, corroborated by multiple accounts and eyewitnesses, no one else but the brother and sisters who were there will fully know how it felt to live through it together.
But you can also imagine how their moments of unspeakable joy, reverence, fear, and amazement eventually gravitated back to their average daily routines, work, dishes, laundry, the modes of what most of us have to face in the grind from week to week. We’re mostly living in the median. However, for Lazarus and those around him, the mean changed. Because the range of life widened into a realm of death, the sum of his lived experiences processed through the totality of his one lifetime was surely moved from one place to another, either in meaning or intensity or both.
Adoption and the Experience of Resurrection and Life
Adoption and Spiritual Resurrection: A Personal Journey
And maybe it wasn’t completely pleasant. The testimony might even be harder to believe if it was. I wonder if the trauma of resurrection was something they had to work through together. The miracle of a new birth set next to seeing what (who) was once a corpse. And maybe even dealing with the conditions that buried him in the first place.
Living Daily in Resurrection and Life
Adoptees have lived through death together. Whether you like it or not, you’re part of the group who knows how that feels. And while there’s incredible diversity within our kinship, there’s something available to each one of us.
Before the foundations of the world, all the way to the fullness of time, Christ is the final image and the first. He lives at the beginning and the end: that’s the first part. We as image bearers live in the here and now, the middle, where Christ still lives in Spirit: that’s the next part.
The typography that buried us through adoption lends its shape to a social comeback.
A Crib. A Casket. And a calling to witness our own resurrections.
You can take off your grave clothes.
You can show your face.
You can live now.
Adapted from The Adoptee’s Journey by Cameron Lee Small. ©2024 by Cameron Lee Small. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Cameron Lee Small, MS, LPCC, is a licensed clinical counselor, transracial adoptee, and mental health advocate based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of The Adoptee’s Journey. He was born in Korea and relinquished into foster care at age three. He was then adopted in 1984 to a family in the United States. His private practice, Therapy Redeemed, specializes in the mental health needs of adoptees and their families wherever they may be in their own adoption journey. His work has been featured in Christianity Today, the National Council for Adoption, and the Center for Adoption Support and Education.
