‘My baby brother loves me,’ says youngster

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TAMPA (FBW)—Doug and Cally Walters prayed for Joshua while he was still in the womb. Shortly after Cally was handed her blond, blue-eyed newborn baby boy she felt the same sense of humility and almost overwhelming gratitude that shook her when her firstborn Abigail made her debut five years earlier.

Courtesy photo

Doug and Cally Walters with their children (l-r), Joshua, 3; Abigail, 8; and Emily Rose, 1. The family attend Idlewild Baptist Church in Tampa and adopted Joshua through Bethany Christian Services.

A short time later, Doug knelt at the hospital’s nursery window and introduced Abigail to her new little brother. “Abigail, this is your baby brother,” Doug recalls telling the wide-eyed youngster.

“Daddy, my baby brother loves me,” Doug said Abigail told him. She and her parents had been praying for their newest family member who was born “in their hearts” and adopted through a semi-open process with Bethany Christian Services, a non-profit organization which places babies into permanent adoptive homes.

Doug and Cally, members of Idlewild Baptist Church in Tampa, told Florida Baptist Witness they met in 1989. He was a new Christian who flew EF-111’s for the U.S. Air Force in England and headed a chapel program for youth in his spare time. She was a local British woman who had dedicated her life to Christ after reading a book by Joni Erickson Tada at age 17.

Both were committed to growing closer in their relationships to Christ – and at the same time they began to grow closer to each other.

“It wasn’t until I met Doug, who was really fired up for the Lord and running a youth ministry - that I became closer to the Lord,” Cally said.

Cally said Doug proposed to her at the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Italy and they were married in a “beautiful English wedding” 17-months after they met. Doug barely missed being shipped out for the U.S. military’s Operation Desert Storm the day of the wedding—but left for the war front shortly after returning from his honeymoon.

After an assignment to the Air Force Academy in Colorado in 1992, Doug said he and Cally began to try and have children, not anticipating any problems. After four miscarriages and finally finding others who had similar experiences, Cally said she and Doug sought out the services of Bethany in Colorado, but stopped the process when they found they were expecting again, thinking they might give other families wanting newborns a greater chance to adopt if they were out of the picture.

Ironically, years before, while watching youth ice-skate in England, Doug and Cally, both members of large families, looked over the ice rink together and began talking about how much they loved children—and decided then that adoption would be an “option” for them.

“We knew we had the love for the children,” Cally said. “Our hearts were already prepared at that point to adopt. Adoption was definitely something we would love to do.”

And although they stepped back from the adoption while awaiting now eight-year-old Abigail, who was their “miracle” child born Feb. 19, 1998, Doug said Bethany had taught them adoption is not limited to people who cannot have babies, but instead is a ministry.

“What are we doing as a church? What are we doing as a community to provide the solutions and the answers to when these young girls make a decision to not have an abortion?” Doug asked rhetorically. Adoption, he said, needs to be promoted through the church as a “positive event,” a ministry, and not whispered about in the darkness.

Although Cally said she “knew in her heart” the Lord would bless her with another child after Abby, it took five more miscarriages for the family to return to Bethany. By this time Doug had left the military to go into business and the family moved to Tampa to be closer to their extended family.

Filling out mountains of paperwork, Doug equated getting permission for a child to be placed into their—or any other—home by Bethany to getting a Top Secret security clearance in the Air Force.

“When the (birthparents) come to Bethany to place their child, they know it will be raised in a Christian home,” Doug said.

Describing a thorough process of screening for both the birth parents and the parents wanting to adopt through Bethany, Doug said the education gives the adoptive parents “a heart” for the mothers who are willing to go against the prevailing culture of abortion in order to bring a baby to term and then sacrificially give that baby to a family who will raise the child in a Christian home.

“Sometimes people can be a little cold or hardened towards these birth mothers, or prejudiced or put them in a category lower than the rest of us,” Doug said. “But when the birth mothers talk to you and your heart all of a sudden changes, you see what a selfless act this is.”

It was no different when Doug and Cally met Joshua’s birth parents. Bethany had finally received Cally’s fingerprint report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation which had been misplaced three times and set the Walters’ up for the first interview.

“The day we met the couple it was so right,” Cally said. “We cried with them, we prayed with them. It was so natural and so right.”

Cally recalls going home and thinking “my heart just desires to have the baby she is carrying and regardless if we could have 20 other children, this is the child I want in my heart.”

Learning she was again pregnant during the process this time had not deterred Doug and Cally from continuing their quest to adopt.

Still, the waiting was difficult. Doug said instead of the normative couple of days, he and Cally waited instead for over a week to see if the birth parents would choose their family.

It was like being “in the midst of a miscarriage but not knowing for sure if you had miscarried,” Doug said.

Cally said she was anxious, but optimistic.

“It was just so exciting, also just like waiting for a big Christmas present [and thinking], ‘are we going to be given the gift we desire?’” she recalled.

Ultimately, a feeling of humility settled over the couple when they were told the birth parents had agreed to place the child with Doug and Cally upon birth.

“Lord, we feel so humble that you’ve chosen us,” Cally said she prayed. “We are so thankful, so honored, so privileged.”

And that feeling when Joshua was placed in her arms was “exactly” the same as when Abigail was born.

“To us it’s exactly the same,” Cally said, in describing childbirth as compared to adoption. “It’s two [children] you desire that God has given you—whether [in spite of] infertility or through adoption. We got to see both blessings. To me it was just: ‘Lord, I feel so blessed to be entrusted with another child.’”

Even little Abigail had been praying with “tender, soft, child-like faith” that the family would have another baby, recalled Doug.

“In prepping her, we told her that this child will be born in our hearts,” Doug said. “When she was five her prayers were answered.”

Waiting for Joshua’s adoption to be finalized, the Walters were to have yet another tragic miscarriage despite Cally carrying the child longer that most of the others. Doug said afterwards the family experienced an “extremely emotional time,” but put things into perspective when he and Cally realized what is was like for birth parents to offer them their child.

Doug compared the “pain and grieving” of a miscarriage to the pain a birth parent endures at their loss. “What they’ve done is an extremely selfless act and one of the things we always want to do is to hold the birth parents for Joshua in a place of honor in our lives.”

Through the semi-open adoption process, which Bethany counselors recommend, Doug and Cally took Joshua to meet with his birth mother and his birth father at a park at six weeks of age and at one and two-years of age. Each year now they will send a letter chronicling his accomplishments and an assortment of photos. And as the child grows and is curious, they will tell him age-appropriate information concerning his adoption.

“What a blessing to be able to share with Joshua that his birth parents cared and loved him,” Cally said. “Even though he doesn’t comprehend by any means, I still tell him you didn’t come in my tummy, but were born in my heart. [His adoption] will not be foreign to him, but the seeds are in his head. God has a wonderful plan for him.”

And when he is 18, if he desires, Joshua will be given information necessary to finding out more details about his adoption and his birth parents.

“On one hand the child is fully ours,” Doug said, but there are different schools of thoughts on how to proceed. Some believe in a fully open adoption where the birth parents are invited over for dinner at the home of the adoptive parents and so forth.

“Having that balance so that you are being led by the Lord on dealing with all of these issues is important,” Doug said. “Adoption is a beautiful thing, adoption is an option.”

Cally said there was an unscheduled time after Joshua was born when she met with his birth mother just to reassure the overwhelmed young woman that “everything was fine” and Joshua was in good hands.

“It was just two women coming together to be open and spend some quality time together,” Cally said. “It was hard, I couldn’t deny that, but it wasn’t about me. It was about someone who had made a huge difference in society and in God’s eyes. It made a big difference in her and in her future—it was all about her.”

Both Doug and Cally said the young woman has become a “poster child” for Bethany and openly shares her experience and promotes the ministry of adoption. The Walters’ also do their fair share of advancing the cause of adoption as a ministry. Doug regularly speaks with pastors, business leaders and families about Bethany’s ministry. He is involved in organizing charity events and promotes adoption as a pro-life issue and as a ministry in which every congregation should be involved in some manner.

The Walters’ are not alone in supporting adoption as a ministry. Christian musician, Steven Curtis Chapman and his wife have adopted three girls from China through Bethany’s services and began a ministry, Shaohanna’s Hope, to serve as a resource to those involved in adoption and orphan care ministry [see the Jan. 13, 2005 Witness article, “Steven Curtis Chapman: Adoption increases appreciation for the Gospel” (online at: http://www.floridabaptistwitness.com/3700.article)]. In addition, Dennis Rainey, founder of FamilyLife, a division of Orlando-based Campus Crusade for Life, and his wife, Barbara, are proponents of adoption as a ministry and have utilized Bethany’s services for their own family.

The Walters’ told the Witness they hope to adopt again through Bethany, although another “miracle,” little Emma Rose, was born to them Jan. 28, 2005, after the couple decided to attempt one more time to try and carry a baby to term.

Though she adores her baby brother and her new baby sister, Abigail, this time, is praying for either a little girl from China or a little boy from Russia.