Growing up in the Evangelical Christian expression of faith, I am no stranger to the classic characters in Bible stories. Story after story of the “Heroes of the Faith” are ingrained into my memory, archived from the earliest age: Adam and Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshuah, Jonah. I can feel the felt board characters under my fingertips that my Sunday School teachers used to illustrate key scenes! 

I’ve sat in the Moses story, learning from conversations and beautiful pieces penned by my fellow adoption awareness educators. I’ve been reading and rereading Exodus, knowing I had committed to contributing my thoughts on this narrative as it pertains to Evangelical, modern-day adoption parallels. But I find myself stuck. In one regard, I can easily identify with Jochebed, Moses’ mother. I see that the author of the text doesn’t differentiate her relationship to Moses as “birth/first/real parent.” She is simply Moses’ mother (vs. 8). I can understand her desperation to save her child from being slain by Egyptian guards versus releasing him down a river in a basket and into the unknown.

When I really step back, and stop trying to over-parallel our experiences as mothers who have released children into the unknown, Jochabed’s “why” for making her choice is far removed from my own choice. Her boy Moses, she held to her breast those three months before weaving him the basket. He is a child she bonded to and kept hidden all those months. (I can’t imagine how, on a practical level!) Her oppression is so different from what I faced as a teenage girl … if I even dare attempt to reframe my privileged childhood to be anything close to oppressed. (Shocker, it wasn’t.) Yes, I was doused in purity culture my entire life, and given no pathway to parenting when found pregnant at 16, but I have also experienced blessing upon blessing my entire life. I was no infant-hiding, Israelite slave, a woman who faced the difficult decision for my son between death or relinquishment.

It is futile to try and squeeze my unique experience into Jochabed’s story in an attempt to discover a stand-out gem-of-a-revelation that reframes the popular adoption narrative, beguiling the reader to inquire more about what the Bible really might have to say about adoption. While I could delve into the ways the modern Church (generally speaking) interprets scripture as pro-adoption, at best, and, at worst, weaponizes those passages and stories, what I really must do is take a step back and look at what God is revealing about himself through the stories and characters the biblical authors have chosen to include in these narratives.

What keeps striking me is that God’s heart was, and still is, to rescue the oppressed. He hears the united cries for deliverance. Through oppressed, enslaved Jochabed, Moses was born. Through exploited, enslaved, assaulted Hagar, whose name literally means “immigrant,” came Ishmael, whose name means “God hears,” who became a significant prophet of Islam and half-brother to the nation of Israel. Through Mary, an unmarried, displaced, teenage girl, came our Redeemer, Jesus.

Throughout the Bible, God hears the oppressed and holds accountable the oppressor. Abram… Pharoah… Herod… each oppressors in their own ways. 

The story is so much bigger than the basket release at the Nile. It’s bigger than who Moses grew up to become: a legendary leader of faith. It’s bigger than the freedom he negotiated on behalf of a nation. It is bigger than the red sea parting. It is bigger than the inscription of the Ten Commandments or the provision of manna (a small, non-hoarded portion of blessing). It is bigger than the years of confused, desert wandering. It is bigger than the eventual entrance into the Promised Land, a place of refuge for the wandering shepherds of Israel and a picture of the Kingdom that is to come, flowing with milk and honey (resources for all). It’s an integral fruition of God’s original covenant with Abraham; promises of land, descendants, protection, and blessing, peppered throughout the book of Genesis. There is always more to a story when you’re looking from 10,000 feet; it’s not a one-stop mark in time. It’s the overarching, unifying truth.

I am now reintroduced to the Moses story, no longer at Sunday school, playing with felt characters. I am approaching my forties and have spent 22 years apart from my first beloved, and released, son. I wonder why I didn’t take a different path? Why did no one show me a pathway? I look at Jochebed, in her trauma, and I see a God, looking down at the oppression, heartbroken over her plight and angered at the empowered oppressor. My own experience, and those yet to come, are seen by God and sacred to Him. Not a tear has dropped that He hasn’t seen and holds. As Psalm 56:8 says, “You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”  His heart broke when mine did as, just a child myself, I released my son down the Nile in his basket, into all of the unknown.