A few days ago, I heard a podcast in which a woman was being interviewed about her experience adopting a special needs child from China. As I listened to her story, and the honesty with which she expressed not only the joy but also the difficulties of this experience both for herself and her family (they already had two children of their own), I could not help but relate what I was hearing with my own experiences. And as I listened, a part of me wished that the resources she had available to help her and her family through the adjustments had been available to me twenty-one years ago when our first Ecuadorian child, Blanca, came to live with us. As it was, I was completely unprepared, which led to challenges I wasn’t sure I would be able to overcome: challenges that left me wondering, time after time, if God had made a mistake in choosing me for this task. But God knows each of our own unique “learning styles”, and for me, recognizing my need for utter dependence on Him was only going to be learned through hard lessons.
We met Blanca shortly after arriving in Quito. She was tiny for her age (15 months)– and still crawling, with braces on her legs to deal with a problem in the formation of her hips due to fetal alcohol syndrome. She lived at an orphanage in the city, and they were looking for a type of foster care situation for her. We began praying about the possibility, and in early December, only weeks after arriving in Ecuador, we agreed to bring her home for the weekend for a “trial visit”. Much to my surprise, when we picked her up, they had packed all of her things. Clearly, they had more in mind than a weekend stay. And I was completely unprepared for the long season of struggle that followed.
Today, many years later and much more aware of how God meets us in our limitations with His own unlimited power and how His grace covers us when we fail to embrace that empowering, I can be much more forgiving of myself for the difficulties I encountered in embracing this little girl into our home and family. I know now that many of the struggles I faced in accepting and adapting to her, especially with her unique set of needs and peculiarities, were normal for adoptive families, especially children with special needs. So much about her was outside of my experience and ability to understand or relate to, and I simply didn’t know how to handle the mixed feelings that kept surfacing in my heart. I was filled with guilt and shame for not being able to love this little girl the way I thought I should. I didn’t understand her, wasn’t sure I had what she needed as a mother – and sometimes it seemed so hard that didn’t even want to try. But once again, over the many months that followed, God began to change my heart. It was a painful season involving some difficult lessons, but God does not seem to be much of a fan of easy lessons, at least in my experience. And I have learned to trust that He does know best, even when it hurts.
But despite all the things we may have gotten wrong, Blanca continued to grow and develop. Because we did not know, in her early years with us, just what fetal alcohol syndrome involved or what the limitations it created in a child’s development were, we had much higher expectations for Blanca than we might have had we been “better informed”. But that, too, was God’s plan, and as a result, she has exceeded all expectations for a child (now adult) with her condition. Fully bilingual, able to read and write in both languages, Blanca works full time at the school and on the weekends at a veterinary clinic. She is a very independent and capable young woman: a great cook, a lover of children and animals, has a delightful sense of humor and we cannot imagine the world or our family without her. Was it hard? YES! But was it God? Absolutely.
Blanca was just the first of Ecuador’s lost children to come to live with us. Over the next three years, in the midst of finding and buying the property where Montebello Academy stands today and building and settling into our home here, God brought us two more very unlikely candidates to care for: Lorena and Boris. The idea of bringing teenagers into our home was something we had not even considered. Our own son, Nathan, was just entering adolescence, and we still had a lot to learn about how to raise a teen of our own, let alone kids whose experiences included the kinds of things these two had faced in their young lives. Lorena, at 14, was the victim years of sexual abuse by a stepfather. A local pastor began calling us, telling us about this young girl who desperately needed a safe place. We struggled with the idea for a week or two, not certain at all we were up for this kind of responsibility. But the thought kept coming to us: If God brought us here to rescue kids, who were we to decide what those kids were to be like? We finally agreed, and Lorena came to live with us. Warm and affectionate, Lorena was easy to love – but she was also a very, very wounded young woman, and time would show us just how deep those wounds went.
Boris, also 14 when he came to us, was a street kid who had found his way to Quito from Colombia after being kicked out of his home by his mother. In Quito, he’d become part a gang of boys and girls who lived on the streets – literally. From breathing fire to selling candy to helping relieve unsuspecting people of their material burdens — phones, money and other such things — these kids fought to survive in any way available to them. Having lived on the streets for two years, Boris had learned the lessons well. But he was also a charming kid, and after winning Ron’s heart when they met at a ministry event for street kids, he began trying to “sell” me on the idea of helping Boris. I’d heard a lot of stories about street kids in Colombia, and I wasn’t having any of it! I wasn’t about to put my own kids at risk by bringing the street into my home. But God knew how to get through to this rather cynical and distrustful heart, and when I met Boris in the hospital in Quito after what he told us was a hit and run that left him with a broken skull, his charm won me over, too. Soon, Boris was moving into our home and becoming a part of our family. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I learned that his injury was actually incurred during a robbery when someone he and his friends had attempted to accost decided to fight back – with a 2×4! I’m fairly sure God was smiling when I heard that news – He’d known when I met Boris that this information would have sealed his fate – which was most certainly NOT coming to live with us!
Over the next several years, these two young people brought us challenges we were not in any way prepared for. If Blanca was hard, these two were much more so: just in very different ways. Kids who have been broken by life are simply that: broken. BUT GOD. Ever faithful, and despite both of them having to leave us several years later as a result of poor choices they were making, God, in His time, showed us that bringing Boris and Lorena into our home was the right decision. By saying “yes” to God’s invitation, He allowed us to participate in a process that would eventually bring each of them, now adults, into healthy, happy, productive lives. Lorena is married with a young daughter and has a genuine relationship with Christ. Boris, also married with three children of his own, is a follower of Christ and has founded a ministry to help girls who have been victims of sex trafficking. Who would have – could have—imagined what God had in store for these two when He first offered us a chance to make a difference in their lives.
As parents, we could not be prouder of any of these three – the first of many more children that God brought to us, imperfect as we are, to play a part in the transformation of lives that would otherwise not know the “hope and the future” that God has for them. But again, this was just the beginning. If raising five children, three of them “adopted”, was tough, imagine bringing fourteen more into the equation! God was just getting started.
