Parents adopted a baby, but when they met his biological mother, they were shocked. This couple wanted to meet the biological mother of their adopted baby. When the husband opened the door and saw her, he almost collapsed. Walt and Annie got to know each other. As children, they lived just a stones throw from each other and their families used to hang out together.
And when they got older, Walt and Annie fell in love and got married. But it was only when they started to talk about having children that the couple realized they were meant to be together. Both dreamed of having a daughter, and both had already chosen a name for their future child, but neither could have guessed how their journey would turn out. As the old saying goes, God works in mysterious ways. While this phrase has a decidedly religious bent to it, it refers more generally to the fact that there are things in life that we simply can’t explain.
Because we spend so much of our life looking for meaning and significance and patterns in different circumstances, it’s hard to shake the feeling sometimes that larger things are happening outside of our awareness and out of our control. For the religious and non religious alike, we can all agree that there are moments in life which seem to transcend rational explanation. Today we have one of those stories. It begins with a young man named Walt Manus. Walt grew up on his parents’one hundred acre property and says he refused to stay inside.
His favorite activity was to walk through nature and explore talking to God the entire time while he was praying and lost in thought. He says he never really thought about what he was doing, as usual or strange. Even more unusual, perhaps, is that God would sometimes talk back to him when he would least expect it. I was about ten or twelve years old. In the middle of the day, God gives me a very vivid picture of a little kid and I’m holding her swinging around in my parents yard, and she’s just laughing like crazy.
In the picture that I had in my mind, she’s dark skin, dark eyes, and God says, this is going to be your daughter. Her name is going to be Chloe. In the meantime, Walt was growing up next to his neighbor Annie. Annie was just a little girl who knew of Walt because their families were close friends. When she was only ten years old, she moved across the pasture where he lived and developed a bit of a soft spot for him.
My whole life I was like, I think Walt Manus is amazing, and I always thought when I grow up I want to find someone just like him who is in my age group. Despite whatever crush she may have had, Walt says he never noticed before because they were so young. Despite that, the two were intertwined in one another’s lives. When Annie went to College, her school was only about 30 minutes away from where Walt was living. The two got to know each other better when Walt helped her get settled in.
As the two spent more time together, they began to talk about the future as well. One night when they were in Walt’s car, Annie told Walt that she had always felt a calling to be a mother. Annie said she even had a name picked out already for her future daughter, Chloe. Needless to say, Walt couldn’t believe that they had the same name picked out. Still, the vision Walt had didn’t make sense in light of this new information.
She was in the same place as I was. We couldn’t believe it. You know, she can’t have a browneyed child and I didn’t know what to do with it. Regardless, the two still felt very early on that they were in love with each other and that they might get married. After they finally got married, the conversation turned immediately towards children.
Though the pair of them had decided to missionary work abroad, they still thought that the time was right, so they had trouble conceiving when they thought the process would be straightforward. Months turned into years when they found themselves four years into their marriage without kids, while Walt still had faith, things were beginning to become difficult. I don’t know. I think I struggled with questioning God’s goodness in that time because I just felt like it was so mean. Such a mean thing to do.
Yeah, sorry. And every time we’d hear about someone getting pregnant, we would feel devastated because we were thinking, this isn’t going to happen for us. We were just fools. We’re fools who want kids and it’s never going to happen. And then I would say somewhere I feel that God shifted something in me so significant.
There was a point where I started to realize, actually, no, I can live a really full and happy life and experience so much with God and know him so deeply and be satisfied in the deepest way. A human can be satisfied even without having children. It sounds like a simple concept, but for me that was a big change, a big shift in my perspective. Walt said, Annie is like, well, maybe we’re supposed to adopt. And I was adamantly against it.
I had this thought of like, I don’t want. I called it a bandaid baby. We’re struggling, we’re hurting. And I didn’t want just a fix. I didn’t want just some kid.
I wanted the kid that we were supposed to have. And God, he progressed me from being adamantly against adoption to be, I just want the kid that God wants. Maybe it’s not supposed to come through biological means. Maybe it’s supposed to come through adoption. I had always clung to this promise that God had given me about the daughter.
So I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but it was starting to get hard to wait. After all the waiting, they finally decided to look into adoption. Despite their inability to have their own children, they never let go of their dream to raise a little daughter. After doing all the paperwork and still with some resistance, they finally heard from a birth mother who wanted Annie and Walt to raise her child. Still, by that point, they had given up on the idea of Chloe.
Finally, they came to meet the birth mother in Wichita, Kansas. When they finally got to the door, they were surprised at what they saw. It seemed as though Walt recognized the mother because she looked exactly like the little girl he’d seen when he was twelve years old. When they all came together to discuss a name, the birth mother suggested a name of her own, Chloe. At that point, Walt and Annie started crying.
In that moment, all of Annie and Walt’s doubts disappeared. There was no mistake. I am the father of this child, just like God had always planned it to be, and I’m just amazed at what God has done. It’s a constant struggle to just sit in his sovereignty when everything’s falling apart in your mind, just to wait. And there were so many people that got to celebrate with us.
I can’t even count the number of people who came and said that they had prayed for us or that they’d waited for this baby with us, or that our story had somehow spoken to them. Like this wasn’t just about me and Walt and this baby. It was about all these people that God wanted to touch and encourage and bless through this story. He just doesn’t leave anything to chance and it’s not random, it’s just amazing. It’s a miracle.
Now, Annie, Walt and Chloe are a happy family, just like Walt had seen as a child. No matter what your personal beliefs, the story of this couple’s love and their faith that things would work out is enough to touch anyone. Their full story was turned into a mini documentary which details a 20 year adventure full of faith, doubt and love. If you were moved by the story, check it out and be sure to look at Moving Works channel for related stories. Within a few years, they adopted another daughter, Naomi.
What an amazing way to experience the circle of life, to see an Oracle from childhood come true. And the dream a couple shared so fervently be fulfilled and beautiful for these children to find parents who want them so much. We both knew even though we were embarking on a scary, difficult and long journey, we were doing exactly what we were meant to be doing and we were so excited to get started. We completed all the documentation part of the adoption process relatively quickly. Thanks to lots of late nights and sheer willpower.
We were determined to be an active waiting family by the summer and we were we became an official waiting family which is a family who is legally cleared to adopt a child shouldn’t expectant family choose them. Each person has different abilities and there are different roads for everybody with an inability with their talent for art, for example, one person can design billboards and earn money to feed a family.
Another person writes and illustrates a story to make a children’s book. Other people design cars, churches, wheat bags. But nowadays, with an unsettled job market, People can go down many roads successively in life with a single talent.
The purpose of life has its chosen by yourself alone. Outside of mind, there’s no such thing as purpose or meaning. Therefore, any rational approach to the subject must need take into account their inseparability. This question is entirely other than the question of whether or not a personal God exists. It’s not dependent upon either position.
So God has a destiny for all humans, which is to become love. A detailed plan is highly unlikely and given the impressions gained in two out of body experiences. We’re love beyond our ability to comprehend love just as we are, just as we are definitely includes a powerful built in need to both love and be loved.
Once you get to the point where you understand that we are eternal spiritual beings Having a series of expendable bodies made of Stardust perceiving God. As love becomes much easier, Adoption can be the most unselfish thing a human can do.
You’re giving another person’s child a chance at a good and happy life. Being able to teach a child about life and influence them in a positive way So they can achieve their potential Is unfathomable. You’ll know unconditional love and learn things about yourself that you Wouldn’t know otherwise.
Watching this amazing little person grow into an adult Will give your life a purpose you wouldn’t have otherwise. I’ve never felt that it was necessary to give birth to a parent.
