I always knew I was adopted.
As the youngest of five and the only child with blond hair and blues eyes in my family, it was common for my older siblings to tell me that I was adopted and how they had found me on the doorstep. So when I told my sister I had submitted my DNA for testing, she laughed and teased me by saying “do you still believe everything we said about you being adopted?” I told her no and that “I just want to find out a little more about our heritage.”
When the results came back, we were all quite surprised. We have always been told stories of our heritage and how our first ancestor in the Americas had came from France and settled in Acadia, and his name was Pierre Cyr. Come to find out we have no male Cyrs in our DNA, but we trace back to a Jean Côté, who arrived in Acadia several years before Pierre.
At this point we don’t know for sure what happened. My daughter has come up with a story about my grandfather much like the story of Great Gatsby, but I believe that one of my forefathers in the last three or four generations was adopted. Which means that my siblings and I are adopted. We believe ourselves to be Cyrs. We act like we believe Cyrs should act, and when we have met Cyrs we believed to be distant relatives, we have seen a resemblance between us and them, but truth is (because DNA does not lie), we are Côtés. At least that is who we were.
This is much like what Paul was saying when he said of believers that God has “predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph1:5). We have been adopted into the family of God as children of God. We are to believe ourselves to be children of God. We are to act like children of God, and we should see a resemblance of Christ in us.
While it is true that in our pasts we were all sorts of different people. Some of us are so far away from God that our friends and families still struggle with the change in our life, but now we are children of a Holy God. “Children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:13). We are followers of Christ and as followers of Christ we become more and more like Him each and every day, and it should be our hope that when people see us, they see Christ in us.
Let this be your goal this week as you go about your business — that your friends, family, all those that you come into contact with, see you as you are: a child of God.
Lt. Mark Cyr is the pastor of The Salvation Army in Carson City.
