Last Tuesday night, our adoption attorney sat in our living room. She’s been working on our behalf for more than a year with an obtuse judge (who told us our adoption folder has more documents than any other he’s ever seen). Sarah said she didn’t know why the process of our slam dunk case has met so much resistance.
I replied, “I do. Jesus loves the irony of me fighting to be a dad after eighteen years of actively trying not to be one.”
893 days ago, I was standup paddleboarding in the Canadian Rockies on a helicopter expedition. When I got back to civilization, I read a text message from my wife explaining that local law enforcement had placed a teenager named Deonnie in Crystal’s protective care. A few days later, a Department of Social Services representative determined that my wife was the best option as D’s caretaker. Two months later, a judge awarded Crystal full custody of the youngest member of our household.
Crystal and I had not been pursuing adoption. We weren’t certified for foster care, nor had we ever participated in the training or home studies that precede that. Years earlier, I took biological kids off the table. When the urologist asked me which of the three surgical variations of a vasectomy I’d like, I told him, “All three.”
I didn’t want to be a dad.
My father told me that he had to stop jumping off bridges and out of airplanes when Mom got pregnant with me. What I heard was, “You can’t have fun after you have kids.” He later told me my birth ruined his marriage. I didn’t want to give up my adrenaline rushes, my international travel, or my two-door car. I liked my autonomy, my freedom, and my disposable income. As an Enneagram 7, I run from pain and stress by stacking up trips, experiences, and releases of dopamine. I couldn’t imagine not being able to escape my monsters.
I was scared to be a dad.
Focus on the Family told my parents that I was a “strong-willed child.” Their Bible told them “not to spare the rod” in breaking my will. In a religious sect and a large family where conformity was valued more than individuality, I was a wild horse that had to be broken.
Like Darth Vader, my father choked me above his head while my feet dangled. My father used exposure “discipline” on me, sending me out into a night where I used scraps of carpet padding in the bed of his truck to ward off the -30ºF windchill. When I said the word “frickin’” aloud, the man with whom I share two-thirds of my name threatened me not to ever say it again. “You’ll be picking your teeth off the floor.” I believed him because he had recently thrown me through a door and into our bathroom vanity. He had also chest-passed me across my bedroom. I flew twelve feet, clearing my bed and breaking the drywall as my shoulder blades drove between two studs in the wall. When I told my father I would call Social Services, the former poker shark dared me to do it—to blow up our family. “Say goodbye to your brother and sisters.” I loved them too much to do that, and thankfully he spent all of his physical anger on me.
As my pastor, he crawled up on top of me and—with his red face and bulging eyes inches from mine—yelled that I was going to hell. He shouted this even though he had led me in the “sinner’s prayer” both in his New York bedroom when I was four years old and again at a Tennessee summer camp when I was twelve. On several occasions, I reflected that bullying into physical confrontations with a couple of my sisters. After walking away from that shameful violence, I was so scared of what I could become. I told Crystal early in our marriage that if I ever touched her in anger, she was free to divorce me. We’ve been married twenty-one years.
I was afraid to have a daughter.
After I left for college, my dad started sexually molesting teenage girls in his church and using Scripture to manipulate them into silence. Each new revelation of his debauched actions brought visceral anger. I’ve prayed so many times for forgiveness of the times when I’ve devolved to foul words and clenched fists. I’ve asked God for supernatural help to forgive the man who scarred the lives of people in my former faith community. I didn’t know of my father’s unprosecuted felonies until after I decided not to be a dad; but those revelations have in the past made me ask myself if I, as my father’s son, have that darkness in me too. Thankfully, the oblique answer to that introspection is that I’m a breaker of generational chains.
But Jesus.
I started therapy several months before our home held three souls. My counselor, Lindsey, recently told me that my biggest breakthroughs in her office have come through the filter of my fatherhood. Having sensed that being Deonnie’s dad was a sovereign calling, I’ve leaned into Heaven’s assignment. If I was going to be a dad, I wanted D to know that she was safe, that she didn’t need to earn love, and that Jesus redeems pain. That intentionality has forced me to wrestle with my wounds from the past and my wrong, inherited assumptions.
Throughout this adoption process, Jesus has demonstrated that his sovereign pursuit of my heart is gentle and patient but also relentless. While trying to convince my daughter that she is worth fighting for, the Holy Spirit and Lindsey have quietly stated that so am I.
That’s the underlying truth of the Gospel.
God wanted me to know what it’s like to pursue a child and their adoption in order to get a glimpse of his heart for me. He wanted me to unlearn my doubts, my labels, and my self-imposed restrictions. Heaven has sent voices into my life to correct my perspectives. Friends from my faith communities have supported me while so much of my life has stretched with the growing pains of new fatherhood. My inner circle has affirmed the big and small surrenders inherent in sacrificial parenting. My wife has explained contexts and offered counsel, as we fast-forwarded through the adjustment process. Deonnie has staked a large, fenceless homestead in the open plains of my heart, where wild horses run free.
I’m proud to be her dad.
The fight is part of the gift.
Today, for the first time in my life, there’s a government document that says I actually am a dad. Not the husband of a woman with custody. Not a temporary guardian. Not a benefactor. Nope. Today, I’m officially D’s dad. (Apparently, that will even be documented on her new, retroactive birth certificate. What!?)
Jesus knew an easy adoption wouldn’t have accomplished as much as a difficult one. The Father wanted me to experience an ironic and redemptive path to understanding more of his infinite heart. The Holy Spirit shaped this process so that my daughter could see that God, her mom, and I permanently love her. Incredibly, Jesus is redeeming the trauma and pain of both my youth and my daughter’s childhood—at the same time and through our shared relationship. Heaven has flexed so many of the aspects of God’s character on our behalf, that I am left to worship in gratitude.
For decades I’ve been a child of God. But today, I know better than ever why he wanted to be my dad.
