Last weekend we drove to Kansas City to see a boy that Clara took care of when she first became a nurse. She fell absolutely and entirely head-over-heels, over-the-moon in love with this boy. His parents were deadbeats, lazing about the hospital room, refusing to change the boy's diapers because the nurses were paid to do it, leaving the room to smoke pot and do God knows what else. So Clara was his mom for the first seven months he spent on earth.
We had been married about six months when she asked me if we could adopt him. I did not know what to do with that request. We had always talked about adoption down the road, but certainly not within our first year of marriage when we were still paying off school debt and enjoying the coveted freedom of the newlywed. Moreover, his parents still had legal custody and CPS was dragging their feet. But I did think about it. I even went to the hospital to meet him, which I am quite sure is not legal.
The cynical part of me thought that this was just Clara's mother instinct kicking in, like some girl who sees a Sarah McLachlan commercial and wants to adopt every dog at the pound. But her love for this boy has been unmatched by any of her patients since then. It should go without saying that we did not adopt this boy. But the state did rescind his parent's rights and he was adopted by a military family in El Paso.
After his last deployment, the dad was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, just outside of Kansas City. Clara had met the boy's adopted mother before and she reached out to us through Facebook and we set up a time to come see him.
We went to a place called the Trex Cafe, which is a place you scoff at until you have kids, in a mall/sporting complex structure on the periphery of Kansas City that looks like a place where capitalism threw up. We walked in and a gigantic T-rex animatronic dipped down as if to eat my toddler son. The bottom lip started to quiver. I assured him that the dinosaur was not real. Every time he saw him the rest of our time there he would say to himself as much as anyone else, "He's not real. He's just a machine."
And then Clara got to see her first little boy, so to speak, for the first time in four years. She got to watch him hold Owen's hand and play with him in the archaeological dig area of this restaurant and lead Owen through a cave and just play quietly side by side. She got to talk with his mom, an incredible woman who with her husband has adopted two other children, including one of Clara's boy's half-sisters. She got to hear about his teeball and his guitar lessons and his cousins. She got to see the miracle of redemption lived out.
If this boy had stayed with his birth parents he might well be dead. He was highly special needs for his first few years and they had neither the intelligence nor the resolve to care for him. Instead he gets to be a normal kid and eat at places with animatronic dinosaurs and take karate lessons and play teeball and be raised by parents who love him and discipline him with kindness. He gets to have a sister and a brother. He gets to pray before meals.
His parents bought him back from the grave, just like my Father did for me. That is the glory of adoption. We all, as believers in Christ, have been adopted. And as much of a mess as this boy was when he was adopted by his parents, I was far more of a mess when God adopted me. In moments like this, the beauty of this world becomes almost too much for me. And the only thing I can feel is gratitude. We have all been given so much.
"The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me." Psalm 50:23
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