This is Part One in a series about our adoption story and the book Alongside.  You can read Part Two here.

Recently, I had the privilege of reading the book, Alongside: loving teenagers with the Gospel, written by my friend and our church’s youth pastor, Drew Hill.  It is now available on Amazon!  You can order your copy now using this link.  If you are a parent of a teen or pre-teen, or if you work with teens in any capacity then I strongly recommend that you read this book.  And even if you don’t have any direct relationships with any teens right now, I still encourage you to read it.  Drew pulls from his years of experience working with teens to explain that all teens need the adults in their life to come alongside them.  He uses real life stories to give very practical ways on how to love them with the Gospel.  He speaks about directly applying this to teens, but the reality is, we all need to be loved with the Gospel from the people alongside us.

This book has come to me at a very sentimental time for me.  This Saturday, August 24th, 2018, marks the second anniversary of our son’s adoption day or “gotcha day.”  We will be celebrating as a family and reflecting on how God called us to come alongside our incredible son.  I would like to take this post to tell our story and show how this book is such an amazing resource for parents and anyone with teens in their life.

I wish I could go back in time and give Alongside to myself 9 years ago.  Instead, I had to learn the hard way of how to truly love teenagers with the Gospel.

Our Plan vs. God’s Plan

When we got married 10 years ago, we had our life planned:  we were going to China to work with orphans, teach English and raise a few kids of our own.  We believed that this was God’s plan for our life and we were excited!  At the advice of some wise, seasoned missionaries, we did not pursue going our first year of marriage.  Instead, we began to invest deeply in the community that God placed us in.  We joined the church that Ben’s dad was planting and started the children’s ministry.

The next summer, Ben was asked to come on staff and start the youth ministry at the church.  This felt a little weird to us, because we only had experience working with little kids.  But as we prayed about it, we realized that this where God was leading us, so we post-poned our plans for China for two more years.

Alongside: No Experience

We had no idea what we were doing!  How do you start a youth program that teens actually want to come to and bring their friends to?  Ben had the right idea.  He started to invite the teens into our home and into our lives as much as possible.  He delved into life with some of the older boys and was able to speak into their lives in big ways.  I was a little more slow about letting these teens into our lives.  I knew that Ben was making an impact, but I was a new wife who was pregnant with our first daughter and I liked my space and privacy.

God busted this wide open the next year!  We invited one of the teens to come live with us.  He was 18 and he had no where to go.  Again, we felt helpless and did not know how to go about having an adolescent roommate. So we treated him like an adult and try to help him figure out his life.  In hindsight, we should have taken more of a parent role with him by coming alongside him more.  After he left us, he walked away from the Lord and we lost touch with him.

As our third year of marriage rolled around, we both began to feel the call to go.  We were sure that it was time for us to go to China.  But as we prayed and started applying to places in China, the doors all started to close.  We were so confused!  Wasn’t this God’s plan for our life?  Why were we being called to go if it wasn’t to China?  So we kept praying and talking to people and we finally ended up moving to Falcon, NC, to work at Falcon Children’s Home. We knew without a doubt that this was where we were supposed to go.  We became house parents to ten boys, ages 13 to 16.

Alongside: The Hard Way

Even though we had worked with teens for two years and had one live with us, we had no idea what we were doing!  How do you love on kids who push you away and refuse to let you love on them?  How do you show them that you really care? How do you teach them to trust you?  Drew says it best in his book: love them with the Gospel!

“Sharing the gospel is far more than sharing information. It’s opening up our very lives, giving away our very souls. It’s unveiling our longings, our fears, our joys. It’s inviting others into our mess and being willing to step into theirs.”

Many times, we tried to love the boys on our own and in our own strength.  We would forget that God was their ultimate Father and Lover.  We would try to win their affection for us.  This led to disappointment, hurt, betrayal, and depression.  It was in those dark moments that God would meet us and remind us that the main thing the boys were seeking and needing was His love.  And it was His love that needed to shine through us.  They all wanted parents, but they needed the Father, because only He was able to love them in their mess unconditionally and fully forgiving.  He knew their pain way better than we could.

Yet, we were the tools that He had chosen for that time to display His love to them.  God started to show us that all of the boys were desiring the same thing from us.  They wanted us to come Alongside them.  Not in a judmental, let me fix you sort of way, but in a “love me just the way I am and even with all of the junk in my past” sort of way.  Drew points out very clearly that the deep cry of every teen is “Chase me. Pursue me. Reach out to me. Notice me. Rescue me. Save me!”  The longer we were there, the more we were able to look through all the walls and barriers they put up and see the little boys that they were, crying out for love.

Alongside: Beginning of Love

I will admit that I am a little biased towards Drew’s book, because he talks a little about my son.

It was a normal week in January 2013, when we got notification that we would be getting a new boy on our hall.  This always brought some trepidation and stress as all the boys adjusted to having a new person on the hall.  I will never forget that day.  The day I met my son.  Tyler was 14 years old.  He was just a little taller than me, which meant he was one of the shorter boys on the hall.  He still had his little boy chub.  At first, he was very cocky, but he quickly proved himself in basketball and it did not take long for him to fit right in with the rest of the boys.  It also did not take long for him to start growing and become one of the tallest boys on the hall!

Tyler was one of our best behaved boys on the hall.  He followed most of the rules and was very respectful.  He had gone through hell as a child, but he did not wear it on his sleeve like some of our other boys did.  It was very obvious that he was eager to be loved and accepted by everyone.  His first summer there was rough.  One night, I found him sitting on his bed crying.  I saw for the first time the little boy that had been yearning and crying out for a family to love him and accept him as their own.  My mother’s heart went out to him and he let me hold him and speak the Gospel into his life.

Good-bye…For Now

A few months later, we left the children’s home and moved back to Greensboro.  It was hard to say good-bye to all the boys we loved and had cared for, but it was especially hard to leave Tyler.  We knew that he needed a family to come alongside him to love and care for him, but we knew that we were not the family for him…or so we thought.  To be continued…

At the end of each chapter in Alongside, Drew has a section for parents and a section for youth leaders to stop and reflect on the material in each chapter.  He also has a prayer written out to use to pray for the teen in your life that is facing the difficulties and struggles that Drew discusses in that particular chapter.  It is also a way to apply these topics to your own life.  His first chapter is entitled “Broken Heart.”  The prayer at the end of that chapter puts into words what we felt for Tyler as we said good-bye:

“Jesus, You are the One whose heart was pierced on the cross. You understand how it feels when a heart breaks.  Would you come alongside Tyler and tend to the wounds that can be found there?”