Before the beginning of Sharing Their Story (STS), when our family of four lived in Spain, we heard a story we couldn’t forget. And we became a family of six. 
Of course, that sort of thing doesn’t usually happen overnight. We were strangers in another land. We had plenty to keep us occupied from learning enough Spanish to not accidentally insult our neighbors, to putting our pre-school-aged kids in a half-day school where they learned Catalan. Not to mention attempting to create short films and utilize “el estudio” where we worked, or navigating public transportation in and around Barcelona since we didn’t have a car.
The one time I drove in Spain, I couldn’t figure out how to get my friend’s Renault van into reverse. It’s actually quite a story, but my misadventure with Renault is not the story we couldn’t forget. The story we couldn’t forget is about children without parents, communicable disease and abject poverty, about people who have lost everything except their will to live. We had actually been hearing it, or snatches of it, all our lives, but it somehow became real to us while we were in Spain.
We arrived in España looking for a new adventure, at least as much adventure as a middle-class and reasonably well-traveled American couple with two small children can expect — you know, learn a language, meet new people, see cool things, eat great food. (Spanish bread, hot out of the oven, smothered in butter — a taste of heaven!) I think what we were really looking for, though, was a new language for life, though we couldn’t have articulated that very well back then. I had yet to fully recover from a crisis of faith/dark night of the soul/really crappy time that I had up to then mostly experienced as a vortex of betrayal and, to use a currently fashionable but nonetheless appropriate noun, deconstruction. But I got tired of wielding cynicism like a Toledo broadsword (think Mel Gibson’s sword from Braveheart). Over time and through the presence of a counselor-turned-friend-and-mentor, I started to consider reconstruction, a journey just as painful in its own way as, but far more hopeful than, deconstruction.
Somewhere between the de- and the re- (though who can say either process is ever fully completed for any of us?), I came across an idea that was certainly not new, but somehow, it was new to me. Really it was more of a reality embedded, but often overlooked or subordinated by me, in the very text by which I had been living my life. The more I considered it, the larger it grew in my mind and heart, and the more I began to see its urgent applicability to the world in which I lived. It and the hope it offered is why we couldn’t forget the story we heard about orphans, sickness and deprivation.
So what is “It”? I hesitate even to attempt to express it here, because my words, and words alone, can but do it an injustice. Without it, however, I can’t unlock the door to the rest of our (unfinished) story, so here goes. “It” is the kingdom of God, birthed with a breath long ago, mapped by the desert wanderings of a far-away people, extolled by prophets in what their people reverently referred to as “the Scriptures,” then embodied, and in an important sense, inaugurated, by the rabbi Jesus of Nazareth. It is a drama unfolded yet still incomplete, its present-world pages blank but meant to be filled.
Others who have understood that Americans (of every nation) have some baggage when it comes to the idea of a “kingdom,” have helpfully translated it into other word-pictures, including “reign,” “revolution,” “dream,” or “dance.” I like to think of it as a “reality” or (wink) a “story.” Substitute whichever word you like best; the idea is that where the kingdom is present, heaven and earth meet. And by heaven, I mean at the very least, everything made right, everything as it should be, everything as it was created to be. The potentiality of the kingdom reverberates throughout history, at times a faint echo, at others a resounding shout, reaching all the way to our world in 2010.
I had heard Jesus’ essential message (if words can be said to be such a thing) hundreds of times before — “Now is the time…The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent and believe the good news” — yet as I became intrigued enough to look into the deeper context of those words, they began to reach into the deepest parts of my heart, even to places I had long hidden from view. I discovered, not a wild-eyed and bearded fanatic condemning passersby who parted around him like the Red Sea, but a prophet heralding the arrival of a new age on earth, a new chapter in the continuing story of the ages. Suddenly, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” took on a new, already real (though in some ways “not yet real”) meaning for me. What happened to people during their sojourn on this beautiful, battle-scarred planet mattered. The earth became more than a waystation to a better place. I had a part to play in the whole grand story of reclamation. I had a responsibility to put these dangerous thoughts and convictions into action.
That last realization took the longest. It’s one thing to think differently about something. You can do that from your couch. It’s another thing to live differently, to open your life to the possibilities born as a result of dangerous thoughts.
And we became a family of six.
Believe me, I was more than happy, even adamant, to remain a family of four. I couldn’t begin to fully catalogue the “infinity of traces” that prompted us to adopt our two youngest children. I still can’t pinpoint exactly when that changed for me, though Angela, who is more in touch with her memories and feelings, has a better handle on when things changed for her. Angela and I considered adopting individually before we ever broached the subject with each other. It was a change of mind here, a Scripture verse there, an email from a friend, a few presentations from a remote conference, a growing awareness of generational plagues and titanic suffering in places I had only seen on television. But what I remember most was the story.
Until we heard the story, adoption was more a willing intention for us than a purposeful calling. Who knows if we would have really gone through with it otherwise. Angela might have wanted to, but I might have backed out.
After they learned we were considering adoption, some friends of ours recommended we read a book called There is No Me Without You, which tells the story of Haregewoin Teferra, a middle-class Ethiopian widow who accidentally ended up running a refuge for AIDS orphans. Angela and I had been struggling with where we might adopt from — there were so many needs in Sierra Leone, Haiti, Guatemala, China, the list went on an on. But that book imprinted itself and Ethiopia on our hearts. Now we know why. Our kids were there.
Before reading There is No Me Without You, we had only a cursory knowledge of Ethiopia or its people. For me, Ethiopia conjured up memories of famine and walking skeletons, which found their way into our elementary school vernacular in the form of putdowns directed toward kids like me with slender frames. I didn’t know that Ethiopia is the only African country to have escaped (thorough) colonization, despite the best efforts of Mussolini’s Italy, or that some Ethiopians have dimples, or that many Ethiopian people suffer through perennial famines. I remembered the haunting images of children wasting away, but somehow they never seemed to correspond to real people who lived in my world. In a sense they didn’t. Then we read Haregewoin’s story, and from that summer on, I think there was no turning back for us. I traveled to Africa for the first time later that summer, spending a little less than a week in Accra, Ghana. Besides a few brief glimpses of abject poverty during trips to Mexico, that was my first experience of life in what’s called the “developing world.” We had spotty electricity and no running water where I stayed, but I experienced extraordinary hospitality there. I also got to ride the street-signless, pot-hole-filled dirt roads of Accra in what I now know to be the quintessential African mode of transportation — “taxis.” They take the form of 12- or 15-passenger vans that haggle their shockless frames from unmarked stop to unmarked stop . Africa definitely left its mark on me.
After my trip to Ghana, Angela entered research mode, which means she ate, drank and slept Ethiopia, adoption agency websites and adoptive parent message boards. One day while I was walking from my language class to our studio in Barcelona, Angela called my cell. I remember pausing in the doorway of a Gothic-looking church, hearing Angela say one of her adoption agency contacts had just told her they had a waiting boy and girl who were found orphaned on the street. Siblings. I’m not someone who experiences the mystical very often, but at that moment I heard, “Those are your kids.” I still get chills when I think about it. For me, that’s when we became a family of six. That’s when the story of two toddlers, previously separated from us by a sea, a continent and a language, became our story.
We returned to the States sooner than we had originally planned in order to start our official adoption paperwork. The next nine months were a blur that we survived rather than patiently endured. One application, evaluation, security clearance and fundraiser after another, until we finally set off on our twenty-some hour marathon flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to meet our kids. Two weeks later we brought them home.
They’ve been home now for 18 months and it seems like they’ve never not been a part of our lives. All four of our kids have a brother and a sister now, two boys and two girls, two chocolate and two vanilla. 
We’ve become a family of six, ordinary people with an extraordinary, but unfinished, story that is actually far bigger than we are, far bigger than adoption or the AIDS epidemic, even. We founded STS in 2009 to help tell that story. We want to tell it through the lenses of stories like ours, of ordinary people who begin to look at life differently and who write themselves into stories of need as a result. It’s our hope that STS will be one word in an epic story of ordinary people who begin to care, and who write their caring into the very soul of their lives and their world.
Through STS you will hear about a young woman who helped start and now helps run an orphanage in Uganda, of an airline pilot who started a non-profit to provide clean water in “developing” countries, of a middle-aged physician and his wife who decided to move their family to Niger to help operate a mission hospital, and of a retired mechanic who runs a food pantry that gives away a million pounds of food per year. Multitudes of stories like these are waiting to be told, potentialities waiting to be unlocked and released into our wonderful, hurting world. Our hope is that through STS we can help unlock and release as many of them as possible in and through the lives of “ordinary” people like us.
Through STS, you will also hear the stories of people who have no voice, at least no voice we can effectively hear, who get lumped into paralyzing statistics that widen the chasm between their desperate needs and the resources it will take to meet those needs. The stories of the nameless.
Whew, that was a long, short story. If you’d like to keep up with the day-to-day adventures of our family, check out Angela’s blog. Otherwise, please stick around and browse through our site. We are certainly in the business of telling stories, but we also work hard to put together tangible resources, tool kits and connections to help turn the best intentions into realities. Join us as the whole big story gets written!
