The “three open” prayer is inspired by Paul’s request to God in Colossians 4:3-4:

“And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should.”

There are three doors that can be opened before a person receives the good news of Jesus Christ:

1. Lord, open a door of opportunity. “That’s a natural opportunity for me to bring up my relationship with Jesus,” explains Hutchcraft. “So, Lord, open the door. He’ll do that.”
2. Open their heart. “If You’re putting them on my heart to talk to them, would You get their heart ready for when I do? Open their heart.”
3. Open my mouth. “Give me the courage. Give me the words when it’s the time. Give me the tone.”

Open door (photo courtesy of Harrison Haines via Pexels)

When those three doors open, it is a time to share your testimony with honesty and vulnerability. Authenticity is key, as it helps to break down defenses and opens hearts.

If you doubt whether your testimony is interesting enough, Hutchcraft recommends writing a few thoughts on this subject: If it weren’t for Jesus, _____.

“Tell me about your lonely times, with no Jesus. Tell me about your depressing times, and there’s no Jesus. Your world’s falling apart, a relationship is broken. Tell me about bad news from the doctor, and there’s no Jesus, and there’s how about the funeral, and there’s no Jesus,” he says.

“Just begin to think: If it weren’t for Jesus, what difference is He making in your everyday life? That’s your story. That is your hope story!”

Once you’ve shared your testimony, you’re leading your friend or family to the One who changed you — Jesus! It’s His love in dying for your sins and His power in rising from the grave to transform your life.

But what if they aren’t moved? Hutchcraft says it’s not your burden to persuade, but to pray and share truth. God alone leads the rescue from beginning to end. Hutchcraft compares our teamwork with God to a glove:

“You are just the glove. He is the hand! Gloves can’t do anything unless they have a hand in them, and He will put His hand into the glove of your life, and your relationship, and your personality and deliver the good news of Jesus through you!”

To learn more about reaching out to others, visit Hutchcraft Ministries.

Girl holding an “Open” sign (Photo courtesy od Ketut Subiyanto via Pexels)

Ron Hutchcraft with Ron Hutchcraft Ministries knows grief. His wife, Karen, died suddenly four years ago. He had loved and lived life with her since he was 19 years old.

If you want to show Christ’s love to a grieving friend, Hutchcraft suggests the time you take to listen is just as important as the words you say.

(Photo courtesy of Lina Trochez via Unsplash)

“Let them talk to you about their memories of the person they lost,” Hutchcraft says. “I think there’s something helpful and therapeutic in just talking about funny things that happen in your life with them, hard things that you went through together. It might seem like, oh, that’s sad. But you’re helping them process this person’s life.

“We tend to focus so much on the circumstances of someone’s death and ‘what if’ — if only he had left five minutes later, if only the doctor, if only. And you just rehash the last days of their life. But they had a life that was a lot more than just the end of it. So help them begin to celebrate that person’s life and not just grieve their death.

“If they cry, if they speak doubts, hurt, anger, whatever, let them. That’s part of the process of not letting this go in where it morphs into anger and depression and a hard heart and bitterness. Get it out and let them talk about it.”

Also, go with your grieving friend or family member to Jesus — the “man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.” (Isaiah 53:3)

“When you say, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ well, thank you, that’s good,” says Hutchcraft. “But when I pray with you, there’s something that goes to your soul with that, that allows you to hear someone else representing your need and your grieving and your loss to a Heavenly Father.”

And even if you can’t pray with them in person, Hutchcraft suggests, “You can text a prayer! I’ve texted a prayer to many people. Email a prayer to them. What’s on your heart to pray for them? Go ahead and put it into writing if you can’t be in a position to do it verbally.”

(Image courtesy of Ron Hutchcraft Ministries)

Finally, you can get a deeper lens into the grief experience – and the hope Christ offers – through Gospel-centered grief resources.

Learn more about Hutchcraft’s new book, “Hope When Your Heart Is Breaking” here.

Header photo courtesy of Ben White via Unsplash.

For National Adoption Awareness Month, they shared their adoption story.

When the Schnyder’s decided it was time to start a family, they learned that they couldn’t have biological children. But this isn’t where their adoption story began. In fact, for Beth, it started several years earlier.

(Photo courtesy of Bethany Christian Services)

She says, “For me, that was just fine. [God] had placed adoption on my heart at a very young age and I had been open and willing to do that for quite some time.”

But Harold had a few reservations about the adoption. He explains that a lot of it grew out of a misunderstanding about what adoption, particularly open adoption, looked like in reality.

Reservations about adoption

Growing up, he witnessed at least one open adoption in his church. The adoptive parents invited the child’s birth mother to church, and she often joined them.

“It was always rather mysterious to me how that all worked,” Harold says. He wondered if there were any disputes between the parents and birth mother about raising the child.

His concerns seem pretty reasonable and are probably not all that uncommon.

“I didn’t know what to expect for some child that wasn’t mine because … I think we all have possibly an idolatrous view of what we would wish in a child. We would like them, maybe, to look a whole lot like us and I don’t doubt that was rattling around in my head as well.

“And it was the skepticism of my broader family and other people that I knew that surely got into my head as well. They had not been first-party to an adoption before. They had witnessed it from afar.”

Some of these people had strong opinions on the subject and it made Harold a bit hesitant.

But the couple decided to start the process anyway.

Everything changed…

Beth says, “We were both very excited about what God was going to do through this and our first daughter came April 4, 2000. And I would say—and Harold would probably say—definitely yes that once we brought her home, he had no hesitation about adoption at all after that.”

(Picture courtesy Bethany Christian Services)

As with any new child, there were some growing pains. Beth says they had to work through challenges specifically related to the open aspect of the adoption. With their daughter came new relationships with her birth mother, sister, and grandparents. But through these relationships, God opened their eyes to the struggles of other people and grew their compassion. Their child’s biological family became their family, too.

“And since then, we just felt, again and again, God calling us to just try it again,” Beth says.

And it turns out, adoption is contagious. Neither Beth’s nor Harold’s families had a history of adoption. It was unfamiliar territory for them. But now, a spirit of adoption has infiltrated Beth’s family. Both of her sisters and their husbands have now adopted.

“Altogether there are nine on my side of the family that have been adopted,” Beth says.

An unexpected blessing

More recently, the Beth and Harold adopted a baby girl. But unlike the other adoptions, this baby came as a total surprise.

Beth says, “This one, we were not planning on, and we actually hadn’t done any paperwork nor taken any steps. But the Lord knew. And what happened was our son, who’s our fifth child, he was three—had just recently turned three, and his birth mom told us that she was pregnant again and still in a tough situation, still feeling like she couldn’t adequately provide for this child.”

She asked the Schnyders if they would be open to “parenting another munchkin.” At first, they didn’t know how to respond.

“We just took time to pray for a couple of weeks and asked many people to pray for us. We are not young. We are 48. So that was in the back of our minds. And it was just amazing throughout that two-week period the Bible verses that came to mind or that we opened up the Bible and they appeared.”

She references Psalm 127:3 which says, “Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward.” Even the story of Abraham and Sarah having a child at their old age reminded them, they really aren’t that old. They also trusted in the teaching of Philippians 4:13 which proclaims that Christ’s strength makes all things possible in our lives.

So after those two weeks, they knew that the answer was yes.

“I wouldn’t say it’s been easy. We’re very busy but she brings us so much joy as well and we’re just so thankful,” she says.

Adoption through Bethany

The Schnyders were familiar with Bethany Christian Services because their church supported the ministry. They liked that it was a Christian ministry and after six adoptions through Bethany, they’ve never had any reason to look for another agency.

(Logo courtesy of Bethany Christian Services)

“We believe the help we received was competent and correct. And we also think that the birth parents received good counsel from there.”

Bethany isn’t just focused on the legal aspect of things, but they also counsel the birth parents who are struggling.

Adoption: a picture of salvation

We asked the couple how much their faith interplayed with their decision to adopt, and their understanding of it after.

Not without emotion, Beth says, “Before adopting, we knew that we were adopted, spiritually adopted, that we call God our Father, that we are his children.”

In other words, they knew that adoption was a picture of the Gospel. But after actually adopting their own children, this picture took on much more meaning for them.

Harold says, “We’re not naturally members of his household because we walked away from it and we’re received back in through Jesus’ work and given all the benefits of that household.”

Adoption didn’t just give them a deeper understanding of their relationship with God, it deepened their faith so that they adopted again and again when they felt God calling them to it.

Encouragement to those considering adoption

Have you considered adoption, but feel like you don’t have all your ducks in a row? Maybe you’re not sure that you’ve been uniquely equipped for adoption. Or, you are just scared to take a risk. Making the decision to adopt should never be done lightly. The Schnyders share some advice on how to navigate the uncertainty.

(Photo courtesy of Bethany Christian Services)

Harold says, “You can’t always discern what the end of something is from the beginning. In adoption, it’s well to not think too far ahead, but rather to be willing to take the first obvious step.”

He explains that if you’re waiting until you can see clear to the end of the process, you’ll likely never begin. Part of that is because we are only human and cannot possibly anticipate all the outcomes of a decision. The other part is that God has mysteriously and divinely orchestrated each adoption story.

“Now what holds a lot of people up perhaps is the idea that they have to be utterly sorted out on all the details. And I say that that’s never the way that you ever approach any challenge that’s before you. You always take the first step and you pray ardently about it,” Harold says.

That may mean scheduling your home for an inspection. They suggest you go for it and see what happens. By starting somewhere with prayer, you’ll know soon enough if God is opening or shutting doors. God has done both for Beth and Harold, allowing them to adopt the children they were meant to have, and keeping them from adopting children who are meant for a different family.

Beth says, “Bottom line … God is sovereign, and just take the steps as [Harold] said and God will either continue to open doors or close them.”

Now for the other issue: you’re convinced that you’re an ordinary person, unequipped for the special call to adoption. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Take it from Harold:

“We’re not superhuman. We collapse into bed at the end of the day. We perhaps wouldn’t have regarded ourselves as gifted specially for this and indeed don’t regard this being able to adopt these children as the ultimate act of service that anyone could do.”

He continues, saying, “We would like it to be well understood that this is an enterprise for average people because we don’t have an average God. We have a superior, supreme God. So I hope that that would be an encouragement to those who think that you need special characteristics to be adoptive parents. I would like to say that that is not the case. If special characteristics are required, they are given to you as meets the occasion and as they are requested from our all-knowing and fantastically rich God who can gift us with anything that is required.”

If you’d like to learn more about adoption, consider speaking to a Bethany Christian Services representative. To get connected, click here.