Our Miracle Boy

World Adoption Day, A Mother's Story

BY MIMI GREENWOOD KNIGHT

When our son, Jonah, was eight, a tropical storm dropped a pine tree across two of our cars. The next morning, my husband, David, struggled with the help of three teenage boys to lift the tree. As the sun beat down, their frustration mounted, and the tree refused to budge, Jonah mused, “Too bad I’m not under that tree, Mom. Then, YOU could lift it.” There was no doubt in that boy’s mind that his mama could and would lift that tree off him — and he was absolutely right.

Jonah is our fourth child. Although the birth of any child is a miracle, the way God brought Jonah into our family is one of the great miracles of my life, and I’ve never gotten over it. That’s because the same God who sang the Psalms into King David’s ear, commissioned Moses with the Ten Commandments, and stayed Abraham’s blade on Mount Mariah, took the time to speak to my husband and me and give us this precious child.

Two verses come to mind when I remember that time in our lives. Psalm 37:4 promises, “Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” God gave us a desire to adopt when adoption had never been on our radar, even during the years we’d struggled to conceive. The second is Ephesians 3:20, which promises God can do “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think.” That’s precisely what He did when He ordained David Jonah to be ours.

We chose to adopt through the foster care system, completed a ten-week training, then waited and prayed and prayed and waited. Every morning, as I drove the kids to school, we prayed for their little brother. (We’d requested a boy to balance out our family of two girls and a boy.) Then, one very average morning, the home phone rang. A woman I’d never met told me a one-year-old boy was entering the foster care system. She asked if we wanted him. My first thought was, “You did not just call and offer me a human being!”

It was surreal as was the trip to Walmart, where I walked in with three children and walked out with four. (We’d met our case worker there with Jonah so we could stock up on baby supplies.) What followed was the longest year of my life while we waited to see whether we’d be allowed to keep our precious boy. I knew God had started this and would finish it, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t frantic most of that year. Now, our family celebrates two special days each September. There’s the 5th, which we call “Walmart Day,” the day Jonah came into our home, and the 20th, the day he became our legal child. But he was ours long before that. This mama knows that before God spoke the world into existence, He’d already chosen Jonah for us and us for Jonah.