FROM THE SHEPHERD’S HEART

Robert Fulghum is the best-selling author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. In another of his books, though, he tells the tender story of his own family secret. Forty-three years ago he was in love, and his passions got the better of him before the appointed time. Growing up in Waco, Texas, in those days did not leave you feeling you had many choices of what to do with a premature pregnancy. Remarkably, they hid the four-month-old pregnancy until after the wedding and headed together for graduate school on the West Coast. She had a baby girl, and they immediately put her up for adoption. Robert and his wife had two boys of their own before adopting a little girl. Not hard to figure out why. For years they suffered secretly the shame and loss of the child they let go. They would celebrate her birthday together, and then after they divorced years later, Robert would continue to remember her with tender rituals. He longed to know what happened to her, wondered how she was doing, marked the dates she would be starting school, reaching puberty, getting her driver's license, graduating from high school. Even as time and social theory opened adoption reconciliation, he knew he could not reach out to her. She would have to find him.

When this book put him in the headlines, his daughter's adoptive parents recognized the name and asked her if she would like to meet her father. The day they finally met was the closing of old wounds with a band-aid of love. In the awkwardness of the moments before they parted, his grown-up little girl took a piece of paper and put his hand on it. She traced the outline of his fingers, and then she gave him the pen to trace her hand over his. The two hands overlapping on the paper, they wrote their initials on the thumbs together, as if to tie them together. She left the paper with him.

My beloved friends, only the Christ Child can save and heal whatever in you is lost or wounded. He has come in the flesh and placed His hand on top of yours. Your destinies are forever tied. He has written His name next to yours forever.