Adopted into the family

The doctor was being inquisitive in the manner that doctors are. He asked me if anyone in my family has a history of heart problems. Assuming he meant physical problems and not problems of compassion or caring, I said what I always say, "I'm adopted. I have no idea." For (lots more) more than a half-century I've answered that way. Don't know. Can't tell you. No clue.

I have no memory of my first years. I know that I was adopted. I know a tiny bit of history without a name about my mother and nothing about my father. I know I had medical problems that required I come to the Oschner Hospital down in New Orleans. But that's it. That's the whole thing.

I don't know how I got to be me, as it were.

There have been few times I've actually thought about what might be my family out there somewhere. I believe I could have younger brothers or sisters, and sometimes that draws me to imagination. I believe some of what and who I am could be clarified if I knew something about them. I believe some of the, uh, nuttiness of who I am and how I act might be explained if I knew these things.

But I've never tried to find out. That's the weirdness of, I guess, me.

And it's the greatness of God's love.

I've been damaged by the fact I was let go by someone out there. That's the truth. But the damage is repaired daily by the fact that the creator of us all, particularly the Creator of ME, loves me so much. The bible says, "If I flew on morning's wings to the far western horizon, you'd find me in a minute -- you're already there waiting. ... Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother's worm."

Seriously, what is more wonderful a thought than that? I can't go back and BE that someone for those someones who gave up on me before they knew me. I can't. Finding out who they were would not help any of that. Though I've been way, way too prone to trying to gain approval from those unknown persons by everything I've done in my life, still I understand that they made their decision without knowing me, without seeing who I was or who I could become. Therefore they didn't reject me, they rejected a version of me that had barely been formed.

Somehow that helps.

However, God loves me, simply me, for who I am not for what I can do or have done. That gets me up each day and lets me plow forward.

"You know me inside and out; you know every bone in my body. You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit; how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you. The days of my life all prepared before I'd even lived one day."

And he still loves me. Ironically, Paul tells me I've been adopted by the Father. Seems I can't keep from that happening.