A Saturday Evening Post

The phone rang, a woman refusing to identify herself, said she heard a baby and a two-year-old crying in the park. She told Ted Skiles (Uncle Ted, as I always referred to him) which park, and where she heard the children, but left no more details. It was always believed that the tip came from the mother, but it could never be proven. One of the boys grew up to be a medical doctor and is now training other medical students, and the other serves those who were recently admitted for substance abuse, he helps them get reintegrate into society, and finds resources for them like jobs, and education.  

There is a little bit of a story in between though. Growing up, when I heard that a baby was found in the park, or by the dumpster, or left at the front door, I was never surprised. I thought this happened all the time, because for me, it did. I had heard about these two boys, but I had never met them because their paths brought them to America 4 years before my family moved to Taiwan. I have recently been able to catch up with one of the boys, Chris.

The Home of God’s Love put out notices, alerts, advertisements on TV all over the island, hoping his family would surface and take Chris and his brother Mike home. No one ever responded. Which meant the boys were immediately available for adoption. A family in the States adopted them quickly and brought them to Missouri. Mike, the older child, had cigarette burns all over his body, though there were no reports of Chris ever being abused.

                His adoptive family didn’t know how to approach the topic of his adoption, they told the boys when Mike was seven and Chris was five. Chris felt like his adoptive family didn’t want him to know about his heritage, but just wanted him to be American. He felt his Asian heritage was kept away from him. This caused a bit of an identity crisis for him.  He has since spoken with newly adoptive families to prepare them for problems arising specifically from international adoptions. It took him some time to come to grips with understanding who he was, and being ok with that.

                 Often, when people hear the word ‘orphanage’, they picture Oliver Twist and starving, dirty children, and they don’t want their adopted children to identify themselves with that. Another fear that many adoptive parents have is a fear of rejection or losing their children as they naturally search for their roots. These are truly difficult conflicts to deal with. Personally, I never associated the orphans with embarrassment or shame. It may be due to my own experience with an adopted brother, but it is also because I witnessed this process numerous times at the orphanage.

                 I remember an adoptive family coming to the home to get their baby and I saw the joy on the mother’s face as she held out her arms to hold her baby for the first time. The family stayed at the home for a week before returning and I remember how she clung to her new baby the entire time they visited.  My experience was that no child was unwanted.  Someone’s loving arms were always open.

                Chris returned to Taiwan in 2018 for a big reunion of the children raised at The Home of God’s Love to find out about his culture and heritage and take a second shot at finding his family. They didn’t turn up, but he was glad to know more about his country of origin, and to learn more about his birthplace.

                Chris discovered his love for medicine when in middle school his dad let him skip school instead of going on a field trip with his class to a baseball game. Chris didn’t like baseball so instead Chris went to the fire station with his father, Chris was hooked on emergency response, he later volunteered as a fire fighter. This led to a job as a nurse’s aide, which led to med school, and brought him up to his current career.

                He says God’s timing is always perfect. “Where I am at now, and looking back on how I started out, I realize it was all for the better.” In the medical field, he has found purpose, but he has also found mentors that have established him deeper in his faith. An opportunity that would have never been held out to him had he not been left in the park that day so many years ago.

                Not only does Chris work in family medicine, but also serves as the vice president of MAOPS  https://www.facebook.com/msacofp/ , a society of Osteopathic family physicians in Missouri which trains medical students and advocates for the medical field in Missouri, encouraging more students to join their growing network. In June he will be president elect. He also serves as the immediate Past President to https://www.msacofp.org/page/MSACOFPStrategicPlan.

                We all encounter circumstances in life that are not ideal. The challenge is how to use it to better ourselves and those around us.

“Thus says the LORD of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.”  – Zechariah 7:9-10

                Chris says he took a long-time healing from those wounds he definitely went through a grieving process when his biological family never responded to his searches. These days, his two boys and daughter keep him hopping between music lessons and basketball practice. His own family requires attention, and he is there for them.

He believes that though the struggle he went through was hard, it was also necessary. He hopes his testimony will speak to others with similar struggles. He also hopes to bring clarity to adoptive families in how to deal with international adoptions. Chris has fought some very difficult battles, but he doesn’t let the hand he was dealt define him.