The Other Side Of Adoption

If you don’t want to cry, don’t read After They Are Yours: The Grace And Grit of Adoption. What a powerfully moving, deeply personal, and transparently realistic story about the challenges of adoption.

With the permission of his now 18-year-old adopted son, Alex, Pastor Brian Borgman narrates the struggles and successes of adopting Alex as a young child with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

The beautiful glory and grace of adoption is present throughout; but so is the grit and grime that the devil often throws in and stirs up in adoptive families. It reveals “the other side of adoption” that some adoption advocates and some adoption books ignore, minimize, or gloss over.

But this book is not just for families considering adoption or those struggling with adopted children, it’s also useful for pastors and Christians to better understand the needs of adoptive families in our congregations. Indeed, any parent who struggles with unruly children would find this a helpful book as Brian so honestly describes both his painful parenting failures, but also how God led him to wiser and more skillful approaches to disciplining his children.

This book will move you to prayer, not just for Brian, his wife Ariel, and Alex, but also for all adoptive parents and adopted children everywhere. Above all, it will move you to praise for the God who adopts children with far worse conditions than Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and who so patiently and perfectly disciplines us every day of our rebellious lives.