Ever since I was a young adoptee I’ve identified with Moses. Ironically, the fact that he had lived out an adoption journey—which included a reunion with his birth family—went mostly over my head. But on some level, I must have sensed certain similarities that endeared him to me … even if these, like most things around adoption, were left unexplored for years to come.

My affinity for Moses may have been rooted in the fact that he was abandoned as an infant. Or maybe, as I grew to adulthood and entered the workforce, I began to relate to various pressures on an adoptee leading through self-doubt. But deeper than that, I believe the biblical description of Moses as chosen is what I’ve unconsciously found most relatable.

For me, being “chosen” and “special” were a core part of my adoption story—at least as it was relayed to me. “We chose you. You are special because you were chosen,” my mom tried to assure me after a neighbor teased me for being adopted. My mom genuinely meant these words, but they came across as adoption propaganda—and in fact, they were. The Chosen Baby by Valentina P. Wasson was one of many books adoptive parents referenced in the era I was being raised. “The word chosen was meant to act magically on the child’s psyche, dispelling all curiosity about the missing parts of the story,” wrote psychotherapist Betty Jean Lifton. But “unlike those familiar fairy tales of our Western culture, which are woven through time with truths of the human condition, the chosen-baby story is filled with errors of fact, improbable details, implied horror, as well as gaping omissions.”[1]

Had Moses been told by his adoptive family that he was chosen, the story may have rung hollow for him, too. After all, as far as we know, he was the only baby floating down the river the day his prospective adoptive mother found him, just as I was the only baby available for my waiting adoptive parents in a private, brokered adoption.

But the Bible shows us that Moses was clearly chosen by God—to lead the Hebrews (his biological kin) to liberation after their 400 years of slavery. Growing up, I did not feel chosen by God. As I wrote in my spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom, “I couldn’t relate to the God I learned about—a God who seemed mad at me, a God I would never measure up to, a God who didn’t want me any more than my birth mother had.”[2]

Beginning in adolescence, I struggled with suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt. What’s more, I felt like an outsider in church circles, where unmarried birth parents like mine were often harshly judged, adoptive parents glamorized, and adoptees largely an accessory to showcase two sets of parents’ virtuousness—birth parents, for making the “right” choice and atoning for their “transgressions,” and adoptive parents, for “saving” “unwanted” children through the “gift” of “a better life.”

Looking for clues in Scripture, I wonder if Moses, too, spent his early years feeling an ache of divine betrayal and loss, as well as spiritual isolation. The Bible skims over much of Moses’ early life, aside from pivotal moments such as floating down the river in a basket as an infant to be adopted by the Pharoh’s daughter, and killing an Egyptian at the age of 40 and then fleeing into the wilderness for another 40 years. It’s not until Moses is 80 years old that he sees an angel of the Lord in a burning bush and finally grasps that God has chosen him. In the decades prior, did Moses, like me, wonder about his worth? Did he feel abandoned not only by his birth mother through the act of relinquishment (even if necessary), but also by God?

I didn’t have to wait 80 years to feel validated by God, but instead, a Moses-friendly number of 40 years. As my adoptive mother was dying, God spoke to me during an intense thunderstorm and offered me mother-love in exactly the way I’d always longed to receive it, balm for adoption’s scars and a lifelong, primal maternal void. It turned out God did want me and was nurturing me … and had been all along. But until that time, my heart had been astonishingly numbed out by adoption’s many losses, too rejection-sensitive to risk finding out whether God might see preciousness in me that I couldn’t believe in myself.

It took losing my adoptive mother—my second mother loss and one of the most significant emotional experiences of my life—to finally and fully grasp God’s presence. Just as God revealed himself to Moses in a burning bush, I needed God to show up in a dramatic way to reach my cautious, self-protected, insecure, steeled heart and truly feel chosen.

While not all adoptees are chosen to save our people in the same way Moses did, I do believe each adoptee is chosen—beyond the Church’s or Culture’s limited views on sanctifying our birth parents or creating a family for our adoptive parents. Foundationally, we’re all chosen by God, who can mother and father us like no mere mortal ever could. We’re also chosen to support one another.

The catalyst for me to start the Faith Collective for Truth and Healing in Adoption was learning of a completed suicide by an adolescent adoptee who had been raised in the Church. Tragically, adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than nonadoptees[3], and this adoptee didn’t make it to 40 or 80 years old for a dramatic experiencing of God in a burning bush or a thunderstorm amidst a parent’s death. But like Moses, and like me, they were a chosen adoptee, a beloved child of God. This adoptee didn’t deserve to die feeling alone and helpless, or, as I had once felt, too frightened of the vulnerability and potential rejection involved in looking up to, and depending upon, God.

Knowing that we’re chosen adoptees, we, too, can lead our people to liberation. Only we know adoptee pain firsthand and grasp the many ways its grief can reverberate throughout a lifetime. Only we know that journeying toward healing can sometimes feel as daunting as crossing a raging sea—and might even take a miracle or three to get there.

In the meantime, let us befriend fellow adoptees who may justifiably feel too hurt by adoption, adoption’s practices, or its players to seek out God. Let us radiate glimmers of God’s love—not to sell them some manufactured version of Christianity, but to emulate Jesus by offering genuine caring, practical support, and most of all, making sure they know they aren’t alone by normalizing our experiences. In the spirit of the Psalms of Lament, let us speak truth to heartache, making space for the sadness that’s been covered up for too long—knowing grieving is the only way to wake up from our numb state and experience the joys that God, and life, have to offer us alongside our pain. This is what liberation can look like for our adopted people.