All about the Watchtower 

An adoption story, featuring Bob Dylan and the color yellow

I have two sons and a daughter. I love them all exactly the same.

Except my eleven-year-old daughter, Miranda. I love her the most.

She’s my only girl, so she’s special. Also, she’s not from ‘round here. She’s a Guat-baby: born in Guatemala and adopted by Gringos.

But she’s not just a Guat-baby. She is one of the most exceptional human beings I’ve ever met. I know that using lots of adjectives is lazy writing (or so I was taught by Dr. Osburg in high school), but I am not a good enough writer to describe the glories of my daughter without an effusive, extensive, and elaborate string of adjectives. Miranda is intelligent, happy, kind, creative, thoughtful, energetic, fun, generous, curious, and lovely. She is also beautiful, with golden brown skin, fine dark hair and deep, dark brown eyes that you could fall into. And she is friendly. She socializes with anybody and is liberal with hugs, kisses, and compliments at home.

Plus, she is funny. She is always making us laugh.

A few years ago, for example—when Miranda was about eight years old—she was getting her nails done with her cousin Lucy and her Aunt Allison. Miranda knows she is from Guatemala, and rather proud of it. While chatting with the nail technician, Allison told Miranda to tell the nice lady where she’s from.

“I’m from St. Louis,” Miranda announced, with appropriate civic pride.

“No, not where you live,” Allison replied. “Where you were born.”

“Oh! I’m from Guatemala. But I love America.”

So Miranda is also patriotic.

Of course, she is not perfect. Miranda has her lesser qualities. She can be pouty, messy, disobedient, selfish, and so talkative that we have to turn the car radio up to drown her out. Sometimes I have to tell her for the love of Jesus and all that is holy please just shut up shut up shut up.

But on balance, she is an amazing little person with wonderful, adjectival qualities. And, most importantly, God gave her to us.

Here’s how.

* * *

After our boys were born my wife, Michele, and I had a miscarriage. I’m a pastor at a church in St. Louis—a church with lots of young families—and plenty of my congregants have had miscarriages. I’ve sat with them patiently as we talked through their grief. In my pastoral counseling classes in seminary I had read about and “studied” (for lack of a better word) miscarriage. But none of that prepared us for the agony of losing our own, third child. After the doctor confirmed the pregnancy loss, I went on a walk in our neighborhood to process the news, thinking it might help. But it was Christmastime and all the nativity scenes in my neighbors’ yards just rubbed salt in my wound. I couldn’t stand walking past Joseph and Mary adoring their newborn child without feeling pangs of jealousy: why did the holy couple get their miracle-baby while Michele and I didn’t get ours? I finished the walk with frozen tears on my face.

My parents were living with us at the time, so when I got back home I did what crying kids do: I went to my mother and sobbed on her shoulder. She sobbed with me. My mom told me, “Matthew, miscarriages are God’s way of taking care of a baby that wouldn’t have made it.”

“Well, I wish God had taken care of this another way,” I spat out, through snotty tears.

It sucked, but we got through it. As I had learned in my “studies,” miscarriages are fairly common. Apparently anywhere between one-in-ten to one-in-three pregnancies end in miscarriage. It’s kind of a parental rite-of-passage. We had ours. So, done.

But then we had another one. It was a year later, and worse. (However you determine what “worse” is.) Michele was 16 weeks along, so we had started sharing the good news and dusting off baby furniture in preparation for the arrival. But then things went south. I was at the hospital visiting a new mom when I got the call from Michele that she had started bleeding. I had to finish the visit pretending to be excited for this new mother while my own heart was crumbling inside.

When we arrived at Michele’s doctor to see what was going on, the ultrasound showed a dark, still form where two weeks prior had appeared an energetic pre-born child full of life and hope. The doctor wisely left us alone in the room for a few moments. I’ve never, ever cried so uncontrollably hard in my life: rage mixed with pain mixed with confusion, all creating a powerful cocktail that left me drunk with grief. Months—now years—of anticipation and hope all suddenly dashed. On the way home from the doctor’s office, I could barely see through the shaking and the tears and had to pull over to the side of the road. I didn’t know what to do or how we would make it home.

So there in the car I called my mom, again. She cried with me, again.

This miscarriage required surgery, after which we found out the baby had a genetic disorder called Trisomy-18 and would not have survived outside the womb.

We also found out it was a girl.

What’s kind of weird is that both doctor's appointments happened one year apart, on the first Monday of December. For a while we called this day “Black Monday,” and lived in fear of future tragedies happening on that day of the calendar. (“It’s Black Monday, Michele. Let’s stay inside today in case we have another miscarriage, or get hit by a truck.”) I even thought of starting a social media campaign on which we could honor pregnancy loss on the first Monday of December—calling it, “National Miscarriage Day.” (I have since learned that Pregnancy Loss Day is a real day and takes place on October 15th of every year. That date works fine for us, too.)

It was a rough stretch. Being the male-softie that I am, for months I walked around on the verge of tears and whimpered softly at diaper commercials. It was my first real bout of suffering, and—for that matter—my first real religious crisis. Why would God bless people with the promise of children only to let them die in the womb? Why would God promise to answer prayers for the sick while ignoring my desperate pleas that he keep and protect my unborn kids?

Of course, good did come from all this. Having a couple miscarriages is one of those unfortunate notches on my belt that allows people in my church to trust me as someone familiar with grief. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been able to counsel grieving would-be parents more effectively because of my “credibility” as a suffering dad. When I say, “I’ve been there,” people know it. And I also learned how not to counsel people suffering the tragedy of miscarriage, as so many good-natured people tried to counsel us. I’m sure she meant well, but the church member who told me that we shouldn’t feel sad about our miscarriages because we already had two healthy children…well, that well-meaning church member needs to rethink some things.

So good came out of this. And eventually the pain subsided. Black Monday soon became just another day on the calendar. As I’ve learned over the years, you can get through an awful lot in life if you just keep getting up in the morning.

And if you call your mom when you need to.

* * *

After these miscarriages we were at a loss. Literally. We wanted another kid, but the pain of repeated pregnancy loss was such that we weren’t that excited about trying again. “Try, try again” does have its limits. We had already lost two years of life trying to get pregnant, which meant that we were two years closer to the end of our lives and had two years less to spend on earth with another child—if and when we ever had one. (These are weird things that grieving parents think about in bed at night.) The risk of further delay and heartbreak were too great for our tender souls to bear. As my sweet wife Michele put it, “I’ve had enough of this shit.”

At which point I realized there were other ways to acquire children: adoption, cloning, kidnapping. My wife patiently explained that cloning and kidnapping were not “live options.”

Which left us with adoption.

Michele was adopted by her step-dad when she was six. Long story for another time. (It’s a good one, though.) I’m not adopted—at least I don’t think I am. In fact, growing up I can’t remember having any adopted friends. For most of my life adoption was some strange, foreign concept I read about in library books and heard about at the animal shelter during Cub Scout field trips.

I knew it was a good thing, though. I had read enough of my Bible to know that, as James writes, “true religion is taking care of widows and orphans.” What better, more Christian thing in life is there to do than care for people who cannot care for themselves?

And I knew people who had adopted—like my new friend David, who had welcomed two beautiful kiddos into his family. David found out we were thinking about adoption and took me out for roast beef sandwiches at Lion’s Choice, patiently answering all my naïve questions:

How much does it cost?

How long does it take?

What if the kid ends up not fitting in?

Can we really love a child we didn’t give birth to?

Is adoption just some trendy fad?

How will my other kids handle it?

Can you return a kid you don’t like?

(On that last question, “Not really,” he explained. “Although people have tried.”)

Suddenly I had adoption on the brain, and couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities. I saw everything through adoption-colored goggles. I read books and articles and asked everybody what they thought of it. I wondered if random people on the street were adopted and asked them what it must have been like. (Most of them weren’t and were oddly offended by the question.)

It was all adoption all the time—although in a deeply spiritual way. As much as one can sense these things, I felt God opening up this door as an option for us to consider walking through. Once, while working at a coffee shop, I had to stop and close my computer because I was having some weird, spiritual adoption-vision. In my mind, little kids not-my-own kept running playfully around my legs in some sort of grainy, old home-movie-like scene. I started tearing up thinking that one of those children might be mine. I wanted to pluck one out of the vision and take her home.

As soon as I told Michele I was up for it, I knew she’d be game. She was game. And she played hard. Before I got the words out of my mouth, “I think we should ad…,” she had flown to the computer to do research. She was writing down phone numbers and requesting information and ordering books and sending emails and bookmarking blogs and websites.

It was exciting, but overwhelming. And also kind of weird. “Picking” the kind of kid you want isn’t how these things are supposed to go. Should parents get to choose whether they want a boy or girl, older or younger child, special-needs or not? It felt like buying a car at CarMax.

But we knew this was part of the process. And we gave ourselves permission to want what we wanted: a healthy baby girl from a Spanish-speaking country. Why that? Well, I really didn’t think we could handle special needs. (I’ve got enough needs of my own for my wife to deal with.) We wanted a baby girl whom we could watch grow up from the earliest days. And we both speak some Spanish and liked the idea of inviting another culture into our world. (To be sure, Michele can actually speak some Spanish. I know enough to order at Taco Bell.)

That was the dream, at least.

Only time and providence would tell how this dream would end.

* * *

To help us coordinate the adoption, we hooked up with a good friend in our church named Anne who worked for an agency that specialized in Guatemalan adoptions. (For complicated international reasons, Guatemala had become a popular destination for adopting parents.) Anne got us set up with all the paperwork. My very-gifted wife was made for many things, one of which is to navigate the insanely complicated bureaucratic world of international adoptions. She had stacks of forms and manuals and files and documents to complete and mail in at precise moments along the way.

Me, I had two things to do. I had to come up with $20,000 to pay the legal and administrative fees. And I had to paint the bedroom.

The $20,000 wasn’t that hard. We took out a home equity loan. (In meeting with the banking representative, he asked, “Are you planning a home addition?” “Kind of,” we chuckled.)

No, the real challenge was painting the bedroom. I am an exacting man and will confess that I spent waaaay too many hours browsing the paint aisle at the hardware store, selecting the perfect color for our adopted daughter’s bedroom. This color would wake her up in the morning, it would set her mind for the day, and would craft her little soul in a way only colors can. It had to be just right.

While Michele was filling out paperwork and I was debating color options, Anne flew down to Guatemala to meet some children. She came back and said that she had met a baby girl but didn’t get a good “vibe” and we should not adopt her. I’m not much for vibes, but Anne’s the expert and we went with it. (Although I do think about that little girl and wonder how she’s doing as the daughter we almost had.) The next month Anne came back and called to say she had another baby girl she wanted to show us. On Halloween night she appeared on our doorstep (Trick or Treat!) with the file of a newborn. The girl’s name was Daniela. Anne sat on our couch and showed us the file and pictures of a precious one-week-old baby girl with crazy, jet-black hair. Her birth mother was young, poor, and already had too many children to care for another while she in such a state. Anne told us she had no reservations, and we should think about adopting this little girl.

We didn’t need to.

Slowly but surely the adoption rolled along. That winter we took our boys to Guatemala for a week to meet their future sister for the first time. We stayed in a hotel along with other adopting American couples, many of whom we got to know pretty well under our shared circumstances. We were all living parallel lives, working our way through the adoption process, visiting kiddos we hoped would someday be ours. We’d swap adoption anecdotes, take pictures together, exchange email addresses, and give high-fives as we pushed our strollers by each other in the hallways. It was like a little adoption club.

And at the end of our visits, when we all had to leave our children and head back home—which usually happened on Fridays—it was a terrible thing. There was great weeping in Ramah. Couples were strewn all over the lobby tearfully handing their children back to their Guatemalan foster mothers. Guests checking into the hotel had to wonder what was going on with all the middle-aged white people crying in the lobby.

But eventually we got the call that everything had been approved. It would take a month to finish up, but Daniela was ours to adopt. We all flew down for a few weeks to pick up our new “home addition” and complete the process.

And then on some very special date in 2008 that Michele knows but I can never seem to remember, the five of us flew home. We had some diarrhea on the plane (not mine), and an unfortunate incident in Atlanta customs in which I maybe-might-have lost some extremely important legal documents that delayed our arrival home. But other than that, we got home safe and sound, a newly expanded family of five.

My mom and dad were waiting at the airport to greet us, ready with a hug.

* * *

Our adoption journey was just that—a journey—with some incredibly memorable and entertaining experiences along the way. Like when friends would meet our daughter after we had brought her home and ask how her English was coming along. (We patiently explained that six-month-olds tend to struggle with language in general.) Or when we thought that our baby girl might be cognitively impaired because she was so pleasant and laid-back. (It didn’t occur to us that she was just, you know, happy.) Or when we thought she might be deaf because she didn’t cry a lot, and we tried slamming the hotel room door as loud as we could, to see if she could hear it. (She could. So could the other guests.) Or when our social worker came to inspect our house to make sure it was suitable for a child. In technical terms, this is called the “home visit.” I had spent a week cleaning the house from top to bottom in preparation for this inspection. I had double-checked the smoke alarm batteries, scrubbed shower grout with a tooth brush, and cleaned bugs out of light fixtures. I was going to nail this inspection like I had definitely not nailed my SATs.

On the day of the visit, the social worker came in the front door, glanced around the living room, asked a few questions, and left, satisfied.

This would not do for me. I nearly insisted she inspect the house before leaving: “Don’t you want to see the grout in the bathroom? Or test the smoke alarms? Or check for bugs in the light fixtures?”

Wisely, I decided that I would quit while we were ahead. I let her leave, unmolested.

And then there was living in Guatemala. Guatemala is warm, beautiful, mountainous and friendly. (Sorry for all those rotten adjectives.) If the country weren’t so damn poor and corrupt, it’d be perfect. We stayed in a small tourist town named Antigua, which is known for its colonial architecture, robust coffee beans, and warm hospitality. The town sits in the middle of three volcanoes, one of which is active and sends up a constantly shifting plume of smoke which you can smell if the wind is right. Every morning I’d get up and get tasty Guatemalan coffee and take the boys up to the roof to do schoolwork and watch the sunrise over a smoking volcano.

I mean, geez, who gets to do that with their kids?

I could go on. The entire experience was filled with excitement and drama. I have rarely felt so blessed.

It was not without incident, though. Adoption can test your patience in some excruciating ways. There are unexplained delays, unsympathetic bureaucrats, impenetrable red tape, and complicated birth-family situations that leave adopting families anxiously wondering, one day to the next, whether the child they are trying to adopt will ever be theirs.

Midway through our adoption, for example, we considered backing out of the process for fear that things were getting too complicated. You see, people around the world were stealing babies from new mothers and selling them to unknowing adopting families. As a result, the United Nations—which I seriously doubt had ever affected my life before this moment—created new rules for international adoptions. To comply with the rules (and for other political reasons), the Guatemalan government was threatening to shut down their adoption system. They didn’t like that American families were coming in and leaving with Guatemalan kiddos.

The government was shutting down the system right when we were getting into the system. We didn’t want to get stuck in between, with the file of a baby we had agreed to adopt but no way to get her out of the country. We prayed and talked about withdrawing our application. But we stuck it out, trusting our best instincts that we were following God’s plan.

Thankfully, we had no problems. The system shut down a week after we got out with our daughter.

Other families weren’t so fortunate. It took them months and even years to finish their cases. Some of them fell apart. Happens all the time, in fact. Some friends of ours, for example, were recently adopting two young boys living in a dusty Ethiopian village. They had already flown to Africa to meet their new sons. Halfway through, the government stopped the adoption dead in its tracks. It was a ridiculous policy of “forced reunification,” in which parents were required by the government to care for their children—something the parents had already said they could not do, given their poverty. Our friends put on a brave face, but after already meeting the boys they were supposed to adopt and completing much of the process, they were devastated.

I’m sure it was painful as any miscarriage.

* * *

Thankfully, our adoption wrapped up without any major hiccups. (Except maybe the diarrhea on the plane.) Miranda is now a perky eleven-year-old and a happy, fully-integrated member of the Herndon clan. I cannot imagine our family without her. Sure, she doesn’t look like us. She’s super-short and dark-skinned and looks kinda funny in family pictures, standing next to her two, tall, pasty-white Gringo-brothers. But we’ve never felt in the slightest that she is not, in any meaningful sense, our daughter and my sons’ sister. As Naomi says to her adopted mother Ruth in one of the great adoption stories in Scripture, our people are Miranda’s people and our God her God. She’s a Herndon in every way.

There is much more I could tell you about our adoption, but among all the great memories, two stand out that I’ll leave you with. The first requires some odd background. Bear with me for the payoff.

Sometime early in the adoption process, my friend Will invited me to a Bob Dylan concert down at the Fabulous Fox in Midtown. You know Bob Dylan—Like a Rolling Stone, Blowing in the Wind? I didn’t know much about Dylan but went anyway.

Towards the end of the set, Dylan played a song I recognized: All Along the Watchtower. A couple weeks later I was illegally loading some CDs I borrowed from the public library onto my iPod (don’t tell) and noticed that the band U2 had done a cover of the song. So had Jimi Hendrix. So had Pearl Jam. And The Grateful Dead. I actually learned that All Along the Watchtower is one of the most commonly covered songs in modern rock history. I looked up the cryptic lyrics and discovered that they came from the imagery of a watchtower in the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. In the book, God calls the prophet Ezekiel to be a watchman on a watchtower, announcing to his people that in God there is hope to be saved from the wrath of their enemies, who are lined up against them. (The Israelites were barricaded up inside the city of Jerusalem at the time.) Ezekiel—this watchman on a watchtower—warns the people that the sword is coming, and they must repent.

A few weeks after that, I was preparing a sermon for church on a passage in Acts, when the Apostle Paul is speaking to the Corinthians. Paul quotes the same story in Ezekiel, calling himself a watchman on a watchtower.

Soon after that, I was talking on the phone to an old friend who pastors a church in North Carolina. The church was having some struggles and my pastor-friend was frustrated. But as he told me that day, he just feels called to be a watchman. On a watchtower. Like Elijah, he said.

Interesting.

I remember sitting in my office and wondering if this was just one long series of weird coincidences involving watchtowers—because, you know, those are common—or if God was trying to tell me something. If he was, I told him he needed to be a bit clearer, because I was thoroughly confused.

Several months later, our adoption coordinator Anne was heading down to Guatemala to check on our baby girl Daniela. She told us that we were adopting this child early enough that we could change her name. The baby wouldn’t know the difference. We wanted to do that, because we have this odd thing with the letter “M” in our family: Matt, Michele, Mitchell and Max. “Daniela” deserved a strong Hispanic “M” name that would help her fit in but honor her Latin heritage. We considered everything: Mirabella, Maria, Marianna, Marisol, Methusalita. But even after months of searching, nothing fit.

Anne was getting a bit concerned that the name “Daniela” was starting to set. She told us we needed to pick something soon or Daniela would be Daniela forever.

So we sat down one night to make a decision. We went to some baby-name website and scrolled through the options. I saw the name “Miranda,” and told Michele I liked it. She did, too. Good cadence and feel: Mir-an-da Hern-don. It worked. Just for kicks, I clicked on the name to see its meaning.

It means “watchtower.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “It means watchtower.”

“Miranda” comes from the Spanish verb “mirar,” which means to watch, to look. A miranda is a watchtower. (At least on the baby name website.) Michele was confused by my sudden cursing, even though this is not uncommon around our house. I explained to her how I kept running into this word, “watchtower.” She said, “That’s crazy.” We both knew it was settled. In God’s mind, she already had a name. We were merely discovering it.

I think about this all the time, because it reminds me that we are all orphans here on this impoverished planet, born to parents who cannot take care of us. Even I’m an orphan. My parents are certainly lovely people—lovelier than most—but not even they can save me from sin, which has wracked my life and destined me for judgment. We are all orphans, alone and uncared for in a world that will soon be overrun by the fire of smoldering volcanoes waiting to erupt.

But God, our heavenly Father, is not satisfied with such a state. By the sacrifice of his Son, God rescued us from orphan-status, like he rescued my daughter. He gives us a new hope, a new family, a new future.

He gives us a new name.

The Bible actually says this in the book of Revelation, that all of God’s adopted children will receive a new name in heaven, written on a white stone. It’s a name which will symbolize our status as adopted children of the Father. Miranda got her new name early, I suppose. I will receive mine later, at the end of my life. And my new name may or may not start with the letter “M.” But I will be glad to have it, knowing that it symbolizes the new family of faith of which I am a part.

* * *

I said two incidents stand out from the adoption, and here’s the other. It took place many months after we had brought Miranda home.

One night I was putting her to bed in her brightly painted yellow bedroom. (I say “yellow” but the color I had actually settled on was “Wild Daffodil.” It worked a bit better than “Buttercream” or “Charming Marigold.”)

On this particular evening, as the sun was setting and warming the room through the glowing mini-blinds behind me, I was rocking Miranda in the glider, hoping she would fall asleep. She wasn’t much interested in sleeping, though. She was playing with sunbeams, awake and alert to the world. She was grabbing my nose, scratching at my gotee. On that night she was feisty and friendly in the way only a precious nine-month-old in her footsie pajamas could be.

Miranda had only been my daughter for a few months, and in purely biological terms I had nothing to do with her. (In fact, we don’t even know who her bio-dad is. The birth certificate lists him as a “man of no consequence.”) But I could not believe how much I had already come to love and adore this baby girl. Like I said, I am absolutely nuts for my two boys, but daughters are different. It is my firm conviction that God gave daughters to the dads of the world to melt our hearts and keep us from blowing up the planet in our petty masculine rage.

Daughters are special. In fact, at that particular moment on that particular evening, Miranda seemed too perfect for the world. The earth was not fit for her. The company of men and boys who would come calling to court and date my little girl could never have her. They were not worthy.

I told her so. As I looked at her playing with sunbeams in her expertly-painted yellow bedroom, I whispered under my breath, “Miranda, no man deserves you.”

Without a second’s hesitation, I heard a voice respond. The voice was not hers. It was from Above. The voice was direct, divine, and clear.

“Matt, you do.”

That’s all the voice said: Matt, you do. You deserve this little girl. You are worthy of this baby girl. She deserves you, and you deserve her.

I’ve only heard the voice of God a handful of times in life. When He speaks, His words (to me, at least) are short, few, loving, and right to the heart—just like those words were.

And I needed to hear those words.

You see, one of the crazy things about miscarriage is that it leaves you feeling worthless. It leaves you thinking that you don’t deserve to be happy. All along the way, in fact, I was half-expecting the adoption to fall apart because that’s just how things had gone for us. We lose children. We must not deserve anything better. That, of course, is a terrible and cynical way to approach life. But deep down it had become my reality. I just figured we were the lead character in the Old Testament book of Job who had been chosen to suffer the great tragedies he did, because we didn’t deserve any better. We were sinners who merit only pain followed by death. Why would God care about our happiness?

Well, yes, we are sinners, but in Christ we are also God’s adopted, royal kids. (With new names waiting for us!) And as God’s highborn children we deserve nothing less than a full portion of his goodness.

That’s what God was saying to me in that yellow bedroom that evening: as his adopted son I deserve his very best. He was telling me, Not every tale is a tragedy. Not every story ends in miscarriage.

Even the story of Job has a happy ending. During the book Job loses his health, his home, his livelihood, and his children. He never loses his faith in God, though—although he does have his doubts, poignantly expressed—and in the end he is doubly blessed by the Lord. The writer says that he receives three new daughters who are the most beautiful in the land. His new daughters stand as a testament to the power and mysterious goodness of God.

From her watchtower, my daughter reminds me of this, too. Through her beautiful little life God stands as a pillar of joy and hope in a cruel and violent world.

Of course, this does not take away the pain of loss. I still think about the children we lost on Black Monday, and I long to meet them on the other side. Nor does it explain why things happen the way they do. Not even Job got an explanation for his troubles, and I haven’t received an explanation for mine. Job admits that such knowledge was “too wonderful” for him, and I’m sure it would be too wonderful for me.

But while God doesn’t give explanations, he does give gifts. He gives life. He gives joy. We are his children—we always will be—and we deserve nothing less. In Christ alone he found Michele and I worthy of his love that he would finally give us the child we had been hoping for. We have been enjoying her ever since, marveling at the way she has healed our hearts and completed our little M-family. I know our family will not live happily under the same roof forever. I know, for her part, that Miranda will eventually move out of her yellow bedroom. I know there will be a time in the future when some boy, some man, some undeserving college loser will knock on my door and ask to take my daughter out, or ask to marry her, ripping her from my hands and my heart.

But that will not happen for a very long time.

For now, and for always, she’s mine.

She’s my watchtower.

-MRH