“God . . . who calls those things which do not exist as though they did.”
We were all packed in, beginning our cross-country trip back home, the home the children had now known for months. Out of the blue, the one most emotionally steady among them burst through the comfortable silence created as six sets of eyes fixed on the landscape outside of the windows.
“Why did she leave me?” she sobbed.
I tried to absorb the shock. This was a first for her. What had triggered this?
“Why did my birth mommy leave me?” she bellowed. And then she began to wail.
While my mind was running through potential responses, the one behind her joined in, wet-cheeked already himself (whether from sympathy or empathy, I wasn’t sure).
I was still floundering to respond while the third, beside her, chimed in, “Why did my birth mommy have to die? Why didn’t I ever get to know her?”
By that time I was crying too, just as I am now, as I type. How could one car, one family, hold all this pain?
Finally, the fourth found her voice, through whimpers. “Why is God letting my birth mommy die?”
I was stunned.
Though our goal was to raise wholehearted children, I didn’t expect we’d need to discuss their severed places this soon — with all of them.
Who are we to walk them over this glass?
If my impression of Him came through the lens of me, I would fold underneath this calling. We would never get from here to wholeness. Walking with Him, for their sakes, meant walking with a firmer grasp on the Unseen — a tighter grip on His Word and who He is. Partnering with Him, for their sakes, meant walking in a hope of what we’d not yet seen during their lives.
God put four in our back seat to whom He would show Himself good, even in all their pain.
I would relearn this as I relived it.
Like Adam, I would get to partner with my Maker as He remade my children’s hearts.
The scene was familiar. As our house became a child’s home, all that was buried in those four young hearts rose above ground.
When I came upstairs, Nate had been holding her for nearly an hour, my child birthed on another continent. She scratched his arms and resisted his hold, full of shame and fighting the very thing her body most craved. She wanted to reject him before he could reject her. She was her mother’s daughter.
These are the days Nate and I are learning to celebrate, not avoid. These are the days we have the opportunity to tell her, again, in her weakest moments, that we will never leave. These are the days when we verbalize His unnatural love.
“I love you,” Nate whispered, again and again. Quiet truth against loud lies.
His hands stroked her hair away from her long forehead as if they’d known that smooth skin when it was baby fresh. Love works every angle to make itself familiar.
“No matter what you do, I will always love you,” he said, his strong arms unrelenting against her writhing, familiar with what the strength of this hold could do for a weak heart.
No one wiped your tears, little girl, when they were innocent. And here they are now, aged but not mature. Though it appeared that only Africa’s dust received your pain, wet and crude, there was Another, bottling each drop.
Someone saw you.
We started praying into her the opposite of what we perceived from her behavior. We weren’t looking to oppose what we saw, but as we asked God to help us understand her heart, we realized that much of the whirlwind around her was born from many long days patterned in the same direction. She had made a habit of living in anarchy, fending for herself. Now here she was with a dormant beauty that had never been given permission to flourish under all those years of street life.
I was tired of too many years taking gulps of worst-case scenario expectations. This time, I tried God’s perspective first. We prayed it, said it, spoke it over her and to her. We spoke it to ourselves too. He was bringing forth beauty, refinement, and gentleness.
All the things one might say she wasn’t were who, we believed, He was saying she is.
One morning, her sister crawled into my lap and confessed yet another grievance. This sibling we’d been praying for with such intention was “hurting her heart.”
It was not a surprise; I’d witnessed some of what she referred to. One learns to bully while living on the slum streets, as she did her first four years of life. She survived by putting others underneath her finger.
We talked it out. God was clearly using this to develop compassion for the broken in my child’s heart. As we wrapped up our conversation, I said, “Let’s pray and ask God how He sees your sister. Let’s ask Him to give us His eyes for her.”
We prayed, waited, listened.
My daughter broke the silence: “Elegant. The word elegant just came into my mind, Mommy.”
Though perhaps found in a book we’d read months ago, elegant was certainly not part of our everyday vocabulary. God spoke through the mouth of a six-year-old babe to confirm the course we’d charted in prayer. He was making my child new and even telling her siblings about it.
God initiates beauty, and it was that beauty that He saw when He looked through the skin of her past into her heart.
He had another word to speak over her life. A better word. His love wasn’t seeking to label what she wasn’t; His love was calling forth who He had made her to be, through the mouth of her sister.
His love for her was unnatural, and we would join Him in loving her unnaturally.
I don’t know her first word. I don’t know when she rolled over or started to crawl. I didn’t see her crack her first smile.
Those hours that babies study the creases on their mothers’ faces aren’t wasted; they are foundational.
She feels it too. I watch her brood over new mothers and their babies as her eyes become darkened corridors into years she’s never had with me. Her understanding of her pain can, some days, be like a long, lonely hallway.
So we adore, as a family. When healing is working its way in but isn’t yet ready to be a conversation, we adore the Healer. Their hearts need to learn to look up just as much as mine does.
On one night, as they wrapped their jammie-clad selves around each other and us for our adoration, we adored Him as the God who remembers. We were on the letter R as we worked our way through the alphabet. Each letter, assigned to a different attribute of God and an accompanying verse, had become our little family guide for adoration.
That night I saw again that to children whose pasts seemed unwitnessed (because isn’t so much of parenting making yourself a witness in those day-to-day moments?), having a God who remembers unlocks something inside of them.
His four-year-old words reminded me: “Thank You, God, for remembering me when my Ethiopian mommy wasn’t around.”
He had words for concepts too big for his young mind to fully conceive.
Then my girl followed.
“Thank You for remembering when I got my ears pierced, even though I don’t remember.”
I caught Nate’s eyes and he gave me the look that said, We just stumbled onto something holy. Her words, too, were too big for her.
An initiation that most girls anticipate for years and then treasure in memory was lost to her. Another unwitnessed mile marker.
But wait, there was a Witness.
He was big enough to send us across the ocean to get this child on the day she’d asked Him to have us come, and He was big enough to remember the day she got her ears pierced.
He is the God who remembers.
To her, He is the God who remembers not because He remembers her birth or her adoption or the skills He has given her to use for His kingdom one day. To her, He is the God who remembers because He remembers when she got her ears pierced.
He remembers the first word we didn’t hear. He remembers when she emerged from her biological mother’s body and when her moist eyes first opened to the world outside the womb. He remembers her infant toes. He remembers when she rolled over for the first time, and when she took her first step. He heard her baby babble. He knows, intimately, every small moment of her grand life.
We learn to search by learning the One who searches us, the One who remembers.
Every adoptive parent longs for secure attachment with their child, but its absence can be easy to miss. We did.
He was plump and happy. We assumed he was finding security in our home and schedule.
As we walked into our first mommy-and-me children’s music class, I relished feeling tiny hands clasped around my fingers for safety.
I wanted to be their safety.
But like many firsts before and after, the day was more layered emotionally than I thought it would be.
We passed an acquaintance on the way in, one who knew our story but hadn’t yet met the children. Caleb moved from a polite hello to a warm embrace. It was odd enough for me to notice. He must really sense a receptivity in her, I thought. Or maybe she’s just good with children.
The music started in the room crowded with mommies and children and strollers and carriers and sippy cups. Then during one of the songs, the children were allowed to run to the stage, grab an item to dance with, and “return to your mommies.” I held my arms open to Caleb after he retrieved his item, waiting for him to find himself back at home in my lap. Then I watched as my son bolted toward a friend sitting beside me and affectionately clasped his arms around her neck.
Something isn’t right, I thought.
The chorus repeated, the children ran forward again, and Caleb retraced his steps.
Nate and I had read books about this phenomenon — attachment, or the lack thereof; we just hadn’t witnessed it yet. Envy took over any inkling toward understanding in my mind that day. He wants her more than me. My brain got put on hold while my heart boiled.
His generous trust in others, beyond us, continued.
I supposed that seasoned moms weren’t as susceptible to all the emotions that can come from a child who responds to his mail carrier the same way he responds to his mother, but I wasn’t that mature. It hurt to watch my little guy find safety in people not yet classified “safe.” Wet kisses on strangers’ faces, no matter how enamored those strangers were with him, made me feel sick.
So Nate and I hunkered down.
We guarded Mommy-Caleb time fiercely. I attached him to me through all of my daily tasks. I spoon-fed him, this one who could feed himself. I scooped food and brought the spoon close to my eyes in an effort to bring his eyes to mine before tenderly making a game out of something you normally do only with babies. We brushed skin-against-skin at night with his face tucked into my neck. I wanted him to learn my scent, for it to be as familiar to him as his own.
I fed my boy a bottle (this one who was too old for it) and gave him nighttime lullabies from tight within my grasp.
We prayed for God to attach his heart to mine.
For me to love a child who couldn’t — who wouldn’t — love me discriminatingly required me to believe God’s unseen love for him. To love him in the uncertainty of when that love might be reciprocated required me to choose hope over fear. If I lived the fear that this child might never love me back — that he’d forever be an orphan, dressed as a son — my movements toward him would mean nothing.
He was learning love, and so was I.
Months after this intense hedging-in during our typical bedtime routine, he spread a grin wide across his face and said, “I get to cuddle with Mommy.” Our bedtime habits had moved from routine to desire.
Minutes later, he said almost in a whisper, as if he wasn’t convinced he should make this request, “Don’t leave, Mommy.”
He had a tie to me. And my tie to him was hope imparted.
I found her holed up in her closet. She’d scooted the stool from the bathroom into it to use as her chair and had folded all of her lanky legs and arms between the clothes and shoes.
She was hunched over her Bible.
When I asked her what she was doing, she said, “Mommy, I just want to be with Jesus.” This, after her previous night’s bedtime prayer: “I want to know You more than I know You now.”
She hadn’t lost that deep connection to God we saw in our early days with her.
I once feared that the only love she could muster would be directed upward, toward Him, the One who had been her protector. Now, even as she drew closer to Him, I could see her softening to human embraces.
She was coming alive.
She shed tears over her sin, sewed clothes for the baby doll that wasn’t hers, hugged the sister she hurt with unkind words, and trumpeted her little brother’s successes over her own.
“Mommy, you hurt my feelings,” she confessed after I had inadvertently said something embarrassing to her.
She could feel. Hollow eyes were beginning to fill with light.
God wasn’t done with her when He brought her into our home. He’d only just begun to restore.
My weak voice, coming from my weak understanding, was part of His work in piecing her back together. Even now, in the daily activities and relationships of our family, He made me her prophetic voice. Even now, when my words trembled and the understanding behind them was like fresh paint. I spoke what I didn’t yet know and tasted change in me as I saw my words take shape in her.
God was grabbing my hand, across her story, and calling me up and out of where I had been and into who He was making me to be, just as I was doing for her.
“I think my heart is growing, Mommy.” She said it quietly against the hum of the washer and the spray of the kitchen faucet on soiled dishes. She didn’t pause for my reaction. She was thinking out loud as she clumsily worked a broom twice her size underneath the lip of the kitchen cabinets.
“How so, sweetheart?” I asked when her words sank in.
“What?” She was startled that I had entered her realization, which to her wasn’t that significant. “Well, I thought in my head, ‘Oh, I don’t want to sweep tonight,’ but I didn’t say it out loud; I just started sweeping,” she recounted. “And I think my heart grew?” Her declaration was now a question.
“Oh, baby girl, it did!” I declared it for her as I scooped up that girl who was too big to be held but was starved for a mama’s clasp.
This was the child who, not too long before, went low when the sun went down, night after night. The one who unraveled at my feet every evening as we did our nightly routine. The one with the melting countenance over which I prayed daily as I looked for snail-like signs of improvement.
We rarely shared stories with others of this emerging one because we knew that while we, as her parents, had grace and hope for her story, others often reacted with pity. They didn’t know what to do with her inconsistent behavior.
But she was finding a new identity. She was walking out the fulfillment of our feeble prayers.
Her heart was growing. Pain had made space.
I still had on my sweat-stained workout clothes and sneakers when her interruption became that day’s agenda. We laid, nose-to-nose, on my bed and I stared into eyes that weren’t hazel like mine and I saw myself in them. She fumbled to find the right words to ask: Why? Why all this pain?
She’d inherited her mama’s question.
She began to tell me stories. Nate and I had held space for those words, for whenever they would come. But now, pouring from her lips, they sounded like echoes in a cave. In a tomb. Their noise reverberated within me — sadness, grief, anger. Her American counterparts had been learning to ride bikes in the summer while she had lived dirty under the sun’s burn. Glimpses into her everyday life, so recent, felt like horror to my Western existence.
Moments before, I had walked through the quiet haze that rested on my neighborhood and asked God for her heart. Even so, I felt unprepared to know how to respond as she plopped that heart into my lap.
I prayed while she spoke: Help. How do you teach a child — who has lost more in a lifetime than I can understand — a whole new way of seeing life and God?
This is what I said: “Since the beginning of time, He intended you for me, and me for you.”
She asked me, skeptically, “How do you know?”
Sprawled on my bed — same comforter but different home — I told her about the vision I’d had all those years ago of her crawling on my bed toward my arms.
“He told me about you early,” I said, and my words were like balm to the questions that had become her oozing wounds. “He knew, baby girl. Even then. I saw you. He saw you. You were not forgotten.”
Many spend their whole lives, even within the safety of a family, wondering whether God notices them. The pain of my little girl’s story brought forth a vision — years earlier — that answered the question she hadn’t yet asked.
He is near to the orphan. He is sweet against her brokenness. He saw her. He knew her. He noticed her, then.
Every dark place has its redemption in Him. Every single one.
For Your Continued Pursuit
2 Corinthians 4:18 | Deuteronomy 31:6 | Psalm 56:8 | Romans 4:17 | Hebrews 12:24 | Psalm 136:23 | Jeremiah 17:10 | Psalm 71:5 | Psalm 139 | 1 Corinthians 4:5