When I was growing up, nothing seemed to come easy to me. I struggled to learn how to ride a bicycle, falling many times and getting many scrapes and cuts. I was not gifted athletically, and so I didn’t fit into many of the sports boys my age were playing. My father mounted a basketball hoop from our garage, but he couldn’t make my shots fall into the hoop. I even broke a tooth while playing tag with the next-door neighbors. I dreaded going to church camp for a week the summer my parents sent me, because I knew I would not fit in.

I wondered why God would make me this way. Surely, He could have given me the normal skills of boys my age. While comparison is natural to us at all ages but particularly as we grow up, I did not like being clumsy. In fact, when I started mowing the lawn the following year, I felt I was making a significant contribution in a physical way for the first time. All of this contributed to my being socially delayed in high school and college.

When we adopted our sons, I saw the struggles they went through. They were developmentally delayed, both physically and socially. Small for their ages, they played well with younger children. In them, I began to see myself and the struggles I had gone through. That helped me deal with the chaos that the first few years of adoption brought to our family. I longed to be a good father to these sons who had never experienced a father before.

More than twenty years later, I see the fruit of it in their lives. They long for affirmation, and we, as their parents, are the ones that can continue to give it to them. I am on the lookout for good things in their lives, rather than things to correct. Love, as it turns out, is something that is felt more than it is known. Both sons are well on their way to building their own marriages and families, and we rejoice in this. And we hope for more to come. Adoption has brought me full circle to how I saw life growing up and now.