In the year 2016, a white American woman named Rachel Halbert gave birth to triplets. Confusion could be seen on the doctors’ faces as they observed the three infants, each of whom had skin tones drastically different from those of their parents. Do you believe she is cheating on her black lover or that she is being used as a surrogate for a black man? Neither.

 

I’ve struggled to understand how our family ended up together as I’ve walked the short distance between my wife’s hospital room and the neonatal intensive care unit over the past few days. This is because no one can describe or tell the story better than someone who lives it.

Our gorgeous African American triplet children, who we had adopted as embryos, were born this past Sunday to my lovely wife, who is also a white evangelical Christian like myself. These sweet little sisters, who were both adopted as babies by their parents from Ethiopia, will hopefully soon be reunited with their three-year-old African American brother and their two-year-old mixed sister. However, what seems to us to be the obvious conclusion that being prolife is something that people frequently find difficult to understand and require extra explanation is something that I have come to embrace the normalcy of this paragraph as something I should have anticipated.

I was born to evangelical missionaries and raised in Honduras, where I was painfully conscious of racial variety because I was the blue-eyed, white kid with the cotton shirt who stood out like a sore thumb. Despite this, and despite the fact that we were physically unlike, I felt a profound connection to the Honduran people.

My wife, on the other hand, was born and reared in the Mississippi Delta, and it wasn’t until she visited Haiti that the veil of racial prejudice was finally lifted from her eyes for the first time. Since God is calling people from every tongue, tribe, and nation to come to him and follow him, this is one of the fundamental ideas of Christianity.

The world will be a better place if diversity is acknowledged and valued. Our diversity should be a source of pride rather than scorn as we marvel at God’s creative genius as it is exhibited in his people’s different skin tones, personalities, and abilities. We were pulled together by our desire to adopt children.

Rachel and I were both interested in adopting children while we were still dating. Despite the fact that we were both fertile, we had a strong conviction that participating in adoption is one of the best ways to support life. In Mississippi, where we were residing at the time, we went to an adoption agency.

Mom left her infant alone in her bedroom before she heard her husband screaming.

After several years of marriage, even as we looked into the possibility of serving as missionaries with the Presbyterian Church in America in Honduras at the time, we also tried to get pregnant naturally because we were aware of how challenging it can be to place non-Caucasian children in adoptive homes in the US. We informed the adoption agency that we were open to adopting any child, as long as they were not entirely of Caucasian descent.

My wife and I made this choice in the clear conviction that she would be able to conceive if the Lord wanted us to have a child who was exclusively Caucasian. It goes without saying that we did not view child protection as a humanitarian undertaking or as a part of a political agenda, but as something that is dear to God.

Every human life has inherent dignity and worth, regardless of how young or old it is or what stage of development it is at. since he is the source of all human existence. The Scriptures demonstrate how God has pleaded for the safety of his most defenseless and exposed image bearers throughout time.

In addition, a recurring theme in the Bible is that God adopts Christians into his own family. We are pursuing a humanitarian mission through adoption, giving the rest of the world a glimpse of the goodness and beauty of the gospel. We had to think about what a racially diverse family would look like because we knew going into the adoption process that race would play a big part in our family dynamics.

We believe that this is the case because when you stare into someone’s eyes, you are doing so into the face of a Godbearer and into their immortal soul. Even if mankind as a whole shares a common thread, this does not mean that our variances in race are insignificant.

The human family’s unique physical characteristics serve as our inspiring reminders of God’s creative might. We think the problem isn’t that we think race doesn’t exist or that we don’t see it. On the contrary, we are conscious of it and fervently welcome its presence.

It’s a delightful and enlightening experience when I’m the only white person in a room full of African American friends while my son gets his hair cut on a Saturday morning. The bond that develops as my wife asks a black friend on Facebook for guidance on how to properly take care of the hair of our tiny, multiracial daughter is another good thing.