I didn’t take it hard when my wife and I learned that we wouldn’t be able to have children of our own. In my mind, kids were a general threat to life and freedom, and 18 years of parenting wasn’t at the top of my to-do list. But my wife wanted kids. She really wanted kids. I’ve never seen her so heartbroken, always the healthy one when it comes to family and friendship.

We had two choices: pursue adoption, or enter the bizarre (for me) world of in vitro fertilization (IVF); hormone injections, test tubes, frozen embryos, masturbating in the doctor’s office, etc. It felt like an uncomfortable intrusion of technology, and a high dollar roll of the dice, but there was a good chance we’d end up with a kid – our kid.

Ultimately, it felt more redemptive to try for an already existing kid, so we went the adoption route, but were convinced, like so many others in our predicament, that someone else’s kid could never feel like our own.

Our first adoption was a little rough, taking almost three years to finalize. But once the paperwork went through, we were whisked away to Hunan Province to take charge of an 8-month-old who had been left swaddled at a train station in Yueyang City. Within a few months, she would steal our hearts and warm me up to the idea of being dad.

Adoption #2 was brutal. We were matched with a little Ethiopian girl living in Awassa, a small city located five hours south of Addis Ababa. Now “seasoned” parents, we quickly fell in love, named her Amara, and prepared to help a child, who’d suffered abandonment and institutionalized care, slog through the grueling process of trusting us. To our shock, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs put the process on hold, offering no clue as to when we might be able to move forward. We advocated in vain, cried, pounded our fists, wondered how God could allow such a thing, and finally gave up, adopting another little girl from an orphanage in Addis instead.

In the early spring of 2013, three years later, I got a call from our adoption agency. Amara was back on the grid, and we had first dibs. I packed my things, bought her a pinwheel at the dollar store, and boarded a plane for Ethiopia’s capital city. Amara and I spent the next 7 days together, shuttling around to different administrative offices while she clung to me like nobody’s business in the hot Ethiopian sun, slapping me in the face with her pinwheel every time I tried to put her down.

We are now 12 years into a parenting journey that we never dreamed of; our original fears about adoption completely debunked. I can’t imagine any other kids, biologically derived or not, feeling more like my kids than these kids.

18 years won’t be enough.

Closer to Us

How is it that someone else’s kids feel like my own? Why do I feel like I’ve known them forever? When I look at them, I see a piece of myself in each of their faces.

What’s happened here?

My Western mind is tempted to dismiss this as “love,” a phenomenon that comes around whenever we commit to a relationship, sacrificing our time and resources, developing a fondness as time goes by, etc. If we stop investing, it goes away, back from wherever it came.

Happens all the time.

But what if love isn’t something that appears out of thin air? What if it’s something we uncover, something that’s always existed? Could it be that I didn’t “fall in love” with my kids, but instead stumbled into something that’s been there all along? Crazy, but might there be a connection between us, all of us, that we fall more deeply into when we fall in love?

Cambridge professor and famed Christian thinker C.S. Lewis proposed such a connection in a series of BBC lectures that were later compiled into his 1952 work, Mere Christianity:

“If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing – rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.”

If this is a thing, I’ll feel more human as I draw nearer to “us.” I’ll see myself in the people I love, feeling like I’ve known them my entire life, because… well… I am them, and they are me. That would explain why our isolationist “me first” culture is driving us crazy, or why it hurts to lose someone we love. We were created to be close, impossibly so, and when we muster the courage to labor through love’s tribulations, it feels wonderful, like coming home after a long journey.

It doesn’t matter who I love, or whether I deem them worthy of my time and attention. The more I tunnel through the fear, doubt, hatred, anxiety, betrayals, and emotional garbage hell-bent on keeping us apart, the more my loved ones will feel like me, and the more I’ll feel like myself.

Human.