Last week, I saw some old friends and got to tell them the good news of my third (unofficially adopted) child. She’s engaged to be married!
The man she’s marrying is an honest-to-goodness answer to prayer—a lot of prayer!
On this blog, I think I’ve told the story of all my other children, but not T’s story. I get choked up whenever I tell it because it reminds me how intimately interested God is in our lives.
I met T the day after I moved to Nashville for hubby’s fellowship at Vanderbilt. I was juggling my two-year-old son and my six-month-old baby when T sidled up to me at our new church. She said in her confident Nashville twang, “Can I hold your baby? I’m good with babies.”
She was a little thing, stick thin with wispy blond hair, and I assumed she was about 11 or 12 years old. I was mistaken—she was 15.
T was a bus kid. Each Sunday, she toted a carry-on suitcase with almost all her worldly possessions to the church van that picked her up from various places. At the end of Sunday morning service, she would go home with one of the church families to come back that night or even to stay the week with them. Most days, she wasn’t certain where she’d lay her head that night.
Hubby and I grew very fond of T. I soon found out I was expecting surprise baby #3, and I knew I could not bring T in to live with us permanently. Friends of ours across the street from us knew her story and asked to be her guardians. She moved in with them and our two families attempted to homeschool T.
I’m not going to lie: T was challenging to teach and at times difficult to love. She’d had no consistent home life nor academic career, and she struggled to read aloud the children’s books to our little ones.
Hubby and I returned to Mississippi after two years, and T remained in Nashville. On her 18th birthday, she moved out of our friends’ house and lived with a family from church. After a little while, she moved again. And again. And again.
We kept in touch. She came to visit us in Mississippi. We had bought a house with a bonus room and full bath over the garage just in case T needed it, but the drama we heard about kept us from offering it to her as I had my hands full, homeschooling three little people.
One night at church, hubby went to the altar as is his custom to pray, and the Lord spoke clearly to him out of the blue. He said, “It’s time to bring Tiffany home.”
Hubby and I talked about the word he heard on our way home from church that night. It was late, but he decided he needed to call T. Typically, she’d be giddy and silly and rambunctious on the phone, but that night she answered her phone quite solemnly. You see, she’d gone to church that night in Nashville. At the altar, she told God that He would have to make a way for her; she was done trying and was ready to end her life.
When hubby called, he said, “The Lord spoke to me tonight. He said it was time to bring you home.”
Her response: “Ok. When can you come get me?”
That next weekend, T moved into the bonus room over the garage. She brought a ton of luggage with her, physically, psychologically, and emotionally.
She lived there for four years, from two weeks before her 21st birthday until a few months after her 25th birthday.
At first, she called us Mom and Dad for the sake of my littles, who were 8, 6, and 5 when she moved in. After just a few months, she called us Mom and Dad because the Lord had made us a family.
Those four years were some of the best years of this family’s life and some of the worst. Through it all, God has been faithful, and He’s provided just what we needed when we needed it most!
I hope T’s story blesses you today. There’s a lot more to it, and I hope to share that soon. Have a wonderful weekend!
