Randy buried his face in his hands and groaned. A hot check
was not acceptable. How could we overcome this fatal financial mistake with our
adoption agency?
I raised my head and grasped the receiver as the phone rang.
A cheerful voice on the other end greeted me. She identified herself as a case
worker with Holt Children’s Services. A cloud descended over my crushed heart.
“We were just about to call you. We discovered this morning
our check was insufficient, and we feel terrible.”
“Mrs. McCauley, people who have money are generally not the
ones who adopt our children. You’d be surprised how often this happens. We’ll
run the check through again. No problem.”
Stunned, I fell silent.
The following weeks we busied ourselves with the application
process and its endless bundle of questions about our character. We were asked
to explore our marriage, our parenting skills, and our racial prejudices. Trusting. How simple
and how hard. We would need over five-thousand dollars to adopt our
daughter. God reminded us His yoke is
easy and His burden light, but too often we tried to carry the load and found
ourselves rushing ahead of the Lord, obsessed with every detail.
One night, drained from the paperwork’s self-examinations
and written responses, Randy and I prayed. Randy felt led to read the account
of baby Moses. At first this seemed trivial to us both. I pictured myself as a little girl in Sunday
school class. The teacher illustrating
this story with felt bulrushes added a basket of reeds to a blue board. Why would
God have us read this? I’d heard this story my whole life. But when Randy read
Exodus chapter two aloud, and I visualized the Hebrew woman leaving her child
by the water’s edge, it hit me. Moses was an adopted child.
We had been told this child would be younger than our
youngest, and Jarred was two. Was she safely being knit in her mother’s
womb? Or was she a toddling one-year-old?
The next day the squeak and groan of the backyard see-saw
clashed with the boys belting out songs they learned in Children’s Church. I
quietly slipped away while contemplating the story of baby Moses. When my shoe slid
inside the kitchen threshold, I felt compelled to turn on a certain Christian
television show. I glanced at the clock. The show was over. I believed God for
a baby half-way around the world, but I wouldn’t turn on the TV? I stepped into
the living room, laughing at myself, and hit the power button.
When the beam of light burst into a full screen on the set,
the host of the show said they were extending their broadcast by one hour. I
hunkered on the edge of the sofa. The minister they were interviewing had just
returned to the states from Seoul, South Korea. A camera zoomed in, and the
minister said, “God has shown me something in a new light. While in Korea, I
saw Pharaoh’s daughter in my mind’s eye. She was standing at the river’s edge,
Moses in her arms. Pharaoh, her father, had been murdering babies, and perhaps
his daughter could no longer sit in her royal palace, oblivious to the
slaughter. Perhaps she could not look into the eyes of this Hebrew child and
run from the truth any longer.”
My hands trembled, and my knees knocked. The screech of the
see-saw in the background faded.
Look for Segment 4 of Megan's story in October 2013.
Listen for His Whispers
