Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [37]
After they left, Terri had tears in her eyes. She kept thinking about the orphans . . . what would happen to them? One of her other daughters, Carrie, was traveling with her. Seeing her mom’s tears, Carrie said, “Why don’t you think about adopting one of them?”
“Oh, Carrie!” Terri said. “I’m too old!”
“Well, let’s think about that,” said Carrie, who was sixteen at the time. “Is it better for an orphan to have an old mom . . . or no mom?”
When Terri got home, she and Dan felt God tugging on their hearts to adopt again. They started their paperwork . . . and within a year, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, baby Daniel – the same little guy Rachel and I had met in the foster home – was placed in their arms. His cleft palate had been repaired in China, but he would still need many more surgeries in Nashville.
It was a tough road. Daniel had recurring infections, hearing loss, eventual speech therapy . . . and several of the Coleys’ other seven children had tough needs and difficulties.
Now, on this Sunday morning, I felt teary as I looked at our friends. Terri and Dan were – and are – my heroes.
They were in the front of the church with Christi, Rachel, Carrie, and Johnson (their biological children), and Josh, Katie, Michael, and baby Daniel (their adopted children, who are, respectively, Caucasian, biracial, African American, and Chinese). (Later they would adopt Anna, who was named by Christi, and who also had a cleft lip and palate and many medical needs.)
We’d walked with Terri and Dan through many struggles. They had adopted Josh at age six out of the state system. He had suffered neglect and abuse, and he’d brought hard issues to the Coley family. They had been through so much . . . and now, as I looked at the Coleys up in front of the church, they looked like a picture of God’s family: children from all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of suffering, joined together by love.
Love isn’t easy. It’s hard. And the Coleys were doing hard, swimming against the current of the brokenness of their children’s past, as well as against the flow of our comfortable culture, which so often encourages the wide, easy road.
I looked down our row and saw my husband, tears streaming down his face, scribbling furiously in the front of his Bible. I didn’t think much about it because he often writes lyrics and other ideas when things are triggered in that creative mind of his.
He must have a song idea, I thought.
After church, as our Land Cruiser pulled out of the parking lot on our way to get some lunch, Steven announced sort of formally that he had something to say. It caught our attention, which was hard because everyone was hungry and talking all at once about where each person wanted to eat.
He cleared his throat.
“I have an announcement,” he said. “This morning when we were on our way to church, if someone had asked me if we were going to adopt, my answer would have been no.”
Everyone groaned.
“But as I was watching the Coleys today,” Steven continued, “God spoke to me so clearly.”
We were afraid to get too excited yet. Maybe Steven was just processing his thoughts, or preaching a second sermon of the day. But we had a little bit of hope. Could this be the burning bush Steven had been praying for?
He handed me his Bible, since he was driving. “I want Mom to read you what I wrote down about this.”
I opened to the page where Steven had been scribbling.
Daniel, Michael Ray, and Katie Coley were baptized this morning at Christ Community Church. As I watched these great friends and faithful servants celebrating their children’s entrance into the covenant and being received into the community of those who stand under the waterfall of God’s grace, God’s Spirit spoke to my heart and said, “Go and do likewise. Somewhere there’s a child that I have plans for to know my love and grace and take his or her place under the waterfall. Will you trust me with the details