As my mom put it earlier today, "Adoption is kind of the worst but really the best thing ever."

Which pretty much sums it up.

I remember the day we adopted Varsha. I waited at my grandma's house with my three younger siblings, my best friend, and her little brother. We were playing on the swingset when my parents pulled the van up to the house. Then, out stepped my parents, and an itty-bitty, tiny Indian child. I swear to you, Varsha maybe weighed 35 pounds and barely broke 3 feet tall. Best of all she didn't speak a word of English.

In the next few years, Varsha would learn English, but the years weren't without trouble. It's one thing to have a baby. A child that wouldn't know anything else, except the life they had been born into. It's another to introduce a five-year-old child into a family that has been plugging along for a long time. Varsha would write her name on everything because she had never had anything that was actually hers. There would be ugly fights between myself, Varsha and the other three siblings, trying to hash out the hierarchy. They don't tell you when you sign up for the adoption process that it will be hard. They don't tell you that sometimes you want things to go back to normal. They don't tell you that change is hard.

They don't tell you that when the dust settles, the hardships will have made the good times better. You aren't told that that the struggles are forgotten and a different kind of love takes its place.

Ephesians 4:2 says, "Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love."

If you have siblings you know that bond of love you share. It's a love that I previously thought was not possible to replicate. I couldn't have been more wrong. Adopting a child saves you because you learn what unconditional love is all about. Adoption teaches you that even in hardships you can love a person who was once a stranger so much that it is as if have always been a part of you. It teaches you that you have something more to give to every person you meet.

They tell you that the child becomes a part of the family. They don't tell you that you will grow to love the child as much as your other siblings. You aren't told that you won't be able to remember the old "normal" or that you don't care to remember it.

You are told that you are saving a child. You aren't told that the child will save you, in more ways than you know.

"And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love." -1 Corinthians 13.13