Steve Jobs Changed the World; Adoption Changed His.

By Ryan Bomberger, The Radiance Foundation

The news hit me in the gut. I couldn’t believe I was seeing those few numbers, communicating his passing, beneath his photo: 1955-2011. Steve Jobs has, literally, changed the world. I’m typing this on my Mac, will check my emails and Twitter status on my iPad, and will stay in touch with everyone I love through my iPhone.

As a creative professional, his visionary work has helped my own visions become reality.

But his vision, his destiny and his ability to affect people, globally, may never have happened.  Jobs was adopted as a baby and loved by his parents, Clara and Paul Jobs. The baby they took into their hearts and home had a purpose in life that would be unleashed by the powerful act of adoption.

He began today’s revolutionary Apple company and has departed this world with a professional legacy that is awe-inspiring. The partially bitten apple represents the temptation that millions of us have been unable to avoid…waiting in day long lines for shiny objects that proved to us science fiction could be made reality by a creative genius. Jobs’ minimalistic approach delivered a multitude of near-perfect electronic devices.  From amber screens to full-color high definition, visually we’ve been changed by the adoption of Apple’s technology.

In his biography, Steve Jobs, visited his birth mom and felt grateful for the opportunity to be adopted and loved. “I wanted to meet my biological mother mostly to see if she was okay and to thank her because I’m glad I didn’t end up as an abortion,” Jobs shares poignantly. Well, the world is glad, too.

It’s amazing to me how foreign a concept adoption is to many Christians. Adoption is the essence of salvation. There is no Christianity without adoption, in the spiritual sense. Yet, in the physical sense, it is rarely considered as an option. For those who are so passionately prolife, it is often the challenge thrown before us in our opposition to abortion, and rightfully so.  We have an opportunity to unleash purpose in a child waiting to be loved. I was one of those children. Steve Jobs was, too. The beauty of possibility is that we all can play a role in helping to foster and encourage it.  Who knows what my children, both adopted and biological, will become? All I know is that loving them, unconditionally, will allow their God-given purpose to flourish.

The nation’s largest abortion chain, aborting 340 children for every 1 woman that is referred for adoption, is the antithesis to this purpose. Planned Parenthood celebrates their founder who believed that “we are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” Contrary to Margaret Sanger’s warped mentality that children are “marked when they’re born” as “diseased, delinquents, and felons”, none of us know the beautiful potential that every life possesses.

The Radiance Foundation celebrates human triumph over the seemingly insurmountable.

There are so many well-known adopted individuals who have impacted many of our lives in one way or another: Charles Dickens, George Washington Carver, Nat King Cole, Babe Ruth, Dave Thomas (Wendy’s founder), Bo Diddley, Kristin Chenoweth, Dan O’Brien (Olympic Decathlon Gold Medalist) and Faith Hill, just to name a few. Steve Jobs is among this list of beautiful possibilities. But these individuals don’t have worth because of their perceived “success.” Every human life has equal and irrevocable worth simply because he or she exists. Jobs’ life proves that adoption is a loving act that transforms not only the life of the child but the entire family. Sometimes, it even changes the world.