In previous notes I have shared about the adoption of your mother. Hopefully, it has given you a snapshot of how she has impacted our lives. I am happy to have an opportunity to share a little more in depth about the situation and circumstances leading to her adoption and how it felt when she became our daughter.
Your Grandmother and I were married in July of 1979. She had two more years of undergraduate school and I had one more year of Seminary. When she graduated, we moved to Jacksonville in June of 1981 to serve part time on the staff of Lakewood UMC and to further our ministry to youth and young adults as we developed Cross and Crown Ministries. Sassy was 22 and I was 28, so we were not in a big hurry to begin a family, but by 1985 we were ready. It was not a simple process for us. After two years we realized we should seek some medical advice. Not to go any to any great detail, but after two years our chances of getting pregnant seemed to be very slim. Around 1989, we began to consider adoption while we were still going through infertility treatments. As we learned more about adoption, it seemed as daunting as our futile efforts at getting pregnant.
These were dark and sad years for us! We sat on the sidelines as we celebrated the birth of our family and friends children! Probably the happiest and hardest days for me were baptizing the babies of families and friends. Your grandmother and I grew very close during those days. There was a point; we even started to become resolved to the fact we were just called to be aunts and uncles, God parents to friend’schildren and to continue to minister to the lives of teenagers and young adults. During the process, we never lost our faith in a loving God and learned a lot about trusting God. Up until then, it had been pretty easy to trust God. Things had been going pretty well. Real faith comes when you have to walk in darkness, through hopelessness and helplessness.
Through God’s providence, we received a call from an attorney friend who had adopted his first two children. We had mentioned to him our interest in adoption a year earlier, but nothing had materialized. We were surprised to receive his call informing us a woman had expressed her interest in putting her unborn child up for adoption and he remembered our conversation.
In a few previous notes I have shared about the birth of your mother Hannah, so it might be good to go back and review those. Even though we first held her two days after she was born, legally we were not her parents. Over the next few months we were in limbo while we went through the process of being evaluated as parents. It has always amused me how difficult it is to adopt a child. No one interviews or certifies you are able to birth a child naturally, though it probably would be a good idea. LOL! There is a waiting period during which a birth mother and biological father can actually contest the adoption reclaim a child. Those days were filled with a lot of mixed feelings of Joy and Anxiety. The real day of celebration was the day the adoption was finalized legally. Mostly family and few friends gathered together in a courtroom and declared Hannah Elizabeth Sprague was the daughter of Sandra and George Sprague. Even now I am tearing up a bit as I write this!
Six years of waiting! Six years of monthly disappointments! Six years of hopelessness! It was behind us! A new journey started on May 23, 1991.
In the judges office.
Don Kaltenbach was our attorney.
The judge gives out these gavels to the family to symbolize that the adoption is final!
Your mom, holding the gavel September 2022. She looks pretty joyful!
This is a great opportunity for me to share something very special with you. It would seem obvious your mother is a gift to us, but I have to acknowledge the anonymous giver, her birth mother. She made a choice to be responsible for the child in her womb! She made a choice to inconvenience her life and give birth to a child for whatever reason she was not capable of parenting. She chose adoption. Let this sink in, if she had chosen to end her pregnancy, you would not be here and I would not be writing this! Even now, my heart is over flowing with gratitude for a woman who didn’t put her Rights first, but accepted her Responsibility to protect the Right for your mother to live. For you to be born.
The value system I have as a follower of Jesus and was taught and practiced by my family puts Responsibility before Rights! This is how the apostle Paul described Jesus and his relationship with Him: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2:5-11 NKJV
Jesus had a choice to give His life for humanity. He could have claimed His rights as the Son of God and never came to earth. Instead, He gave up His rights! He became Human, taking on the responsibility to reveal the great depth of His Father’s love for humanity. He knew there would be suffering. He knew He would be sacrificing His life. He was obedient to His Father God.
My point is, God is glorified when we give up our rights and accept the responsibility for our actions. Certainly God will forgive when we hold onto our rights and don’t act responsibly, but it certainly pleases God when we surrender to Him.
The pictures I included in this note show the joy of Sassy, your great Aunt Linda, the Judge, the attorney who arranged the adoption and me. The missing person in the pictures, made all our joy possible. She actually made you possible!
Gee Sprague, September 26, 2022