God Speaks

After we sign the adoption papers in Zhengzhou, China, in 2012, two-year-old Luo Minqiang cries non-stop for twenty-four hours. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. On the bus ride from our hotel to the ornate reception hall where we would meet our two newest sons and sign the papers, I’d overheard the Chinese escorts whispering to each other about one of the boys we would adopt.

哪个家庭？Which family?

公交车后座的一家人。The one sitting at the back of the bus.

他们知道吗？Do they know?

知道什么？Know what?

为什么以前的家人不收养那个男孩。我想这是因为他不停地哭泣。Why the previous family didn’t adopt that boy? I think it’s because he never stops crying.

They have no idea I speak Mandarin. I had no idea there might be a problem with our new son.

At the crowded reception hall, we meet both of our new sons. Crying Luo, who we have already named Joshua. And Ma Defu, who will go by Matthew in our family. Three-year-old Matthew is quiet and shy, clearly uncertain about what is happening. A white man and woman with two kids of their own are trying to make him smile, while another Chinese kid he’s never met sits next to him bawling his eyes out.

The adoption agency requires us to spend the night in a Zhengzhou hotel with our new sons. For the other adopting parents, this is expected. Their international flights aren’t scheduled until the next day. Our family is the outlier. I work at the US Embassy in Beijing, an eight-hour drive north in our Honda minivan.

Joshua refuses to lie in bed, instead wedging himself into a seated position between the bed and the wall, sniffling and crying throughout the night. Matthew sleeps. Max and Elizabeth, our two children who traveled with us for the adoption give each other nervous glances, as they wonder if this is the new normal.

Just after two in the morning, I wake to silence. I turn on the lamp next to our bed, illuminating wide eyes and the petrified stare of the newest addition to our family. He begins crying anew.

The next day’s road trip starts slow as we detour around countless construction projects in this city of ten million. I make a joke about not needing a horn when we have Joshua’s bawling to warn the drivers blocking our exit. No one laughs.

Finally, we enter the expressway north, sighing in relief at six lanes of pristine blacktop and hardly a car in sight. Our son Max, tired of trying to make Joshua stop crying, leans forward. “Can we watch Finding Nemo?” He almost shouts to be heard over Joshua’s wails.

Linda and I trade glances. We’ve asked our older kids to pay attention to our two new ones on the ride home. It’s only been forty-five minutes. A long forty-five minutes.

“Sure,” Linda says.

Five minutes later, the only sound from the rear of the van is the high-pitched voice of an exuberant clownfish excited about his first day of school. A glance in the rearview mirror confirms the familiar slack-jaw expression Max and Elizabeth wear when mesmerized by the screen. Matthew sports a grin I’ve never seen before. But Joshua? Joshua’s eyes are wide, not like the night prior, too terrorized to sleep, but unblinking as if he’s in awe.

He stops crying.

Linda twists in her seat to take it all in. “Thank God.”

She turns back and our eyes meet. I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing I am. Her words “Thank God” can be used as an expression. But the literal meaning of those two words—thanking a heavenly father—has a recency and poignancy that still staggers me.

###

Two years earlier we had decided to adopt again. Linda had given birth to our two oldest children in the late ‘90s. At the turn of the millennium, we adopted a son from Russia and two years later, a daughter from China. Neither Linda nor I were getting any younger. We wanted more kids and the stateside adoption bureaucratic process didn’t fit a dual military couple on the move every couple of years. Overseas adoptions cost more—the bureaucracy on both ends all collected a share for their efforts—but we were both officers and it wouldn’t break the bank. Our first two adoptions felt like we’d found missing pieces to our family puzzle. But not all the pieces. We were ready for another child.

Immersed in Mandarin language training in Washington DC in advance of the Air Attaché job in China, my role in the adoption process was to nod my head a lot and say, “Sounds great.” Linda dove into the paperwork and started the ball rolling. She also homeschooled our youngest three kids. The next-door neighbors homeschooled as well and “recess” on the backyard trampoline often lasted much longer than fifteen minutes. One of the neighbor’s children Sophie was missing an arm and a leg. Over the course of the eighteen-month overlap with our neighbors, we came to realize the young girl wasn’t missing anything. We were the ones who noticed she was different. Nothing about her handicaps seemed to bother her.

The first time we had adopted from China, we glossed over the options for adopting a handicapped child. Although we considered ourselves a caring family, our activities were centered around movement—school, sports, travel—and we weren’t ready to alter our lifestyle.

Sophie changed our perspective. We didn’t have to do anything special when she came to our house to play. Like the rest of the kids, she ran fast and hard. She laughed when kids fell off the trampoline and cried when one of my kids pushed her. We knew how to deal with this.

Once we dove into the options for adopting a handicapped child, we debunked the rumor that you could only adopt girls from China. Checking the handicapped box opened the door to a choice. We decided on a boy and carefully studied the detailed questionnaire, answering which handicaps we were willing to consider and which ones we weren’t. Before we left for China, we had a match. Ma Defu was a two-year-old boy missing his right arm below the elbow. We were ecstatic about Ma Defu joining our family. The bad news was a year-long wait for the bureaucracy to accept our application. The good news was that we’d be living in China when it came time to pick him up.

Four months after our China move, our match was approved. We only had to wait another six months for the pickup date. The frustration of knowing our new son lived in an orphanage only eight hours south of us seemed worse than if we were still separated by the Pacific Ocean.

Another two months passed. Linda received a phone call on a Friday afternoon while I was at work. The adoption agency asked if we would consider adopting two boys instead of one.

“One. We marked one on the application,” Linda clarified. “What’s going on? Why this phone call now when we’re only four months out from adopting our son?”

The agency worker explained they had an orphanage with a two-year-old boy from the same province as Ma Defu. He had a cleft palate and had already had one surgery to repair it. More would be needed. His name was Luo. Luo Minqiang.

“But why a telephone call? Why isn’t he available for adoption by others using the normal process?”

“He was,” the woman said. “The family came last week. Something happened. We don’t know whether it was something back home, or here in China, but they changed their minds.” The woman was quiet for a moment. “He already has a passport. There will be a discount if you adopt two children.”

“We don’t care about discounts. When do you need to know?”

“A week.”

Linda shared the news that night. We spent hours discussing the situation.

What does “needs further surgeries” mean?

Two more kids? It was already going to be a big step going from four to five kids. A half dozen?

We don’t know anything about him.

We circled around the topic the next day, both agreeing that it was tough to just say no when you knew a child needed a family. We didn’t know why the first family changed their mind. It seemed wrong to pass judgment. What if they had suffered a tragedy that changed their decision? The child was only two, so probably too young to understand that the family had come to China for him and left without him. So, there would be more families. It didn’t have to be us.

Sunday, we attended the non-denominational church that had assumed an important role in our lives since moving to China. Linda and I fell somewhere between C & E Christians (Christmas and Easter attendees) and the die-hards who spent more time in church than at home. We both believed in a higher power. But I was willing to skip a Sunday for a Seahawks game and Linda wouldn’t mind missing for a tennis tournament if the dates conflicted.

Instead of a sermon, the pastor turned the dais over to an older gentleman to give a presentation on an orphanage he ran outside of Beijing. He had been doing this work for over thirty years and provided tens of Chinese children with opportunities besides US adoption, raising them to be productive members in a Chinese society where family is of supreme cultural importance.

Ashe highlighted the successes of his labors, my insides tingled. My hands trembled. This man wasn’t putting himself on a pedestal. He wasn’t emotional about his 30-year mission to help these kids. He simply explained that he had the means to provide for these kids, he had the love to share, and these children needed both.

I grasped Linda’s hand. She squeezed mine. The rest of the talk was a blur. My heart pounded as I ran through his argument.

We have the means.

We have the love.

Two boys have the need. Not one.

After the service concluded, congregation members pressed forward to talk to the man with the orphanage. Linda and I found ourselves in the back of the foyer. I was still shaken.

“Did you—?” My voice trailed away. Even though we both believed, we didn’t actually talk about God very often.

“I felt it,” Linda answered milliseconds after I asked my question.

My adrenaline still raced and Linda’s answer was all I needed to admit what I thought had happened. “It felt like God was speaking to us. Telling us what to do. Did you feel that?”

Linda nodded. “We’re going to do it, aren’t we?”

“We are.”

God might have spoken directly to us, but we were still reticent about embracing in the middle of the church foyer. I reached my arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer.

“We are,” I repeated.

###

“Thank God,” Linda says, at the silence Joshua has gifted us, courtesy of Walt Disney broadcasting inside our Honda minivan. We trade that knowing glance but don’t discuss it.

I offer a silent prayer, rationalizing that if God spoke to us without using his outdoor voice, then certainly he’ll be able to understand my mental words of gratitude.

Thank you, Lord, for opening our eyes. For opening our hearts. And for providing us a chance to love these two boys. Thank you, Lord.

Amen.