A Conspicuous Family!

"Red, Yellow, Black and White they are precious in His sight" 

Since I was a little girl, I've loved learning about different cultures and ethnic groups.  Today,  I'm so blessed to have a multicultural family of my own!  We're excited to add even more diversity into our growing family with the addition of our Chinese daughter.

  While we are journeying the path of our first international adoption, we have needed to take training courses.  These courses are designed to help prepare an adoptive family.  One of the courses we needed to take was entitled "Conspicuous Families".

We already are one of those "conspicuous families"!  Yes, we get "stares" and have had a few "glares".  But I have to remind myself that sometimes the glares are being given because of a lack of knowledge or because we're "different" then the average Lancaster County, Pennsylvania family.(and that's a.o.k. because different is not bad!)

Our family also chooses to be "color aware" and NOT color blind!  Ignoring differences doesn't make them any less there. Instead we choose to embrace our different ethnicity's.  And embrace our "sameness" too!!  After all didn't God create ALL mankind and loves them equally?!  We love to bring different artwork, books and music into our world to "color our world".   I want all of my children to understand that our good and perfect God has created each and everyone of them in HIS image!

Our adoptions are very obvious and thus very public.  Because of this, every once in awhile we've been asked what I'll call and "intrusive" question that's answer is personal/private.  So we have to chose immediately to answer in a way that is a.)  informational  b.) humorous or c.) privacy guarding.  We're trying to equip our children with answer's to pull out on the spur of the moment when asked one of these intrusive type questions.  You see a little person needs to have something to pull out of his back pocket when a question is thrown out to him that is private.  We're in the process of helping them decide how they want to answer - in one of the a., b. or c. methods above.

One question that I've gotten is ....."Where is he from?" (now seriously, would we even think of asking this question to anyone else other than a conspicuous family??)  Why would one think it's ok to ask of a conspicuous family??)    If my son is standing there when I'm being asked, I can ask him if he wants to answer or if it's been a day in which I know my boy probably doesn't want to be in dialogue with this stranger about his personal history, I might just answer for him.  Honestly, it may depend on my mood as to how I answer, whether I chose to give a limited amount of information and move on or whether I'll use sarcastic humor to avoid answering the question or simply say "that's personal family information".  Some well meaning people may not even think about the question as being intrusive.  A good rule of thumb maybe this, would you want to answer the very same question in a public manner to this person?  Or if I ask this question, could it make the person I'm asking in any way uncomfortable?