The Adopted Kid

When your friend looks in the mirror, they see a face that came from somewhere else. That's not a small thing. For a lot of adopted kids, childhood is fine. The family is the family. But the teen years do something different. Suddenly everyone is asking: where are you from, what's your background, who do you look like. And your friend has to decide every time whether to tell the short version or the true version.

The short version is easier. But the true version has a first family in it. A mother who carried them and made a choice. Maybe a father who was never in the picture. Maybe a whole country or culture they were separated from. And here's what makes it hard: they love the family that raised them. They're not looking to replace anyone. But the questions are still real. Why did it happen this way. What was I like as a baby. Do I have siblings I've never met. What would my life have been.

And underneath all of that is the question they don't say out loud: was I wanted. Not by the adoptive family — they know that answer. By the first family. By the mother who let them go. The teen years make that question loud because this is when everyone is trying to figure out if they matter, if they belong, if there's something about them that makes sense. And your friend is doing that work with a gap in the story that feels like it might mean something about their worth.

What they actually need is someone who will let them say the hard parts without making it a referendum on gratitude. They don't need to be told how lucky they are. They don't need adoption to be made beautiful before the grief is acknowledged. They need their whole story — the broken parts and the given parts — to be held without shame. They need to know that the questions don't make them disloyal and the grief doesn't make them ungrateful.

Moses was born to a Hebrew mother in Egypt at a time when Pharaoh had ordered every Hebrew baby boy thrown into the river. His mother hid him as long as she could. Then she made a basket, waterproofed it, put her son inside, and set him in the reeds by the riverbank. Pharaoh's daughter found him. She knew he was a Hebrew child — which meant he was supposed to be dead. But she pulled him out of the water and claimed him as her son. She named him Moses, which means drawn out of the water. He grew up in Pharaoh's house. He had every advantage Egypt could give. But he didn't look like the people raising him. And he knew where he came from.

Here's what most people skip: Moses spent his whole childhood and young adulthood holding two identities that didn't fit together cleanly. He was Egyptian by upbringing and Hebrew by blood. He had a mother who gave birth to him and a mother who raised him. He had a people he came from and a people he lived among. And when he was a young man, that tension exploded. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and he killed the Egyptian. He tried to defend his people. But the next day, when he tried to break up a fight between two Hebrews, they turned on him and said: who made you a ruler over us. Are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian. He belonged to neither group fully. The Egyptians would kill him for what he'd done. The Hebrews didn't trust him.

So Moses ran. He spent forty years in the wilderness, far from both peoples, tending sheep, trying to disappear. And that's where God met him. Not in Egypt. Not in a palace. In the desert, at a burning bush, when Moses had every reason to believe his life didn't matter anymore. God called him by name. God said: I have seen the misery of my people. I have heard them crying out. And I am sending you. Moses said: who am I to do this. I don't even know what to call you. And God said: I AM WHO I AM. Tell them I AM sent you. Tell them the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has seen them and is coming to bring them out.

God didn't erase Moses's past. He didn't pretend the gap wasn't there. He didn't say: forget where you came from, forget the people who raised you, forget the confusion. He said: I'm sending you back to both. You're going to Pharaoh — the house that raised you — and you're going to tell him to let my people go. You're going to your people — the ones who rejected you — and you're going to lead them out. You belong to me. And I'm going to use every part of your story.

Moses became the deliverer. The one who stood between God and the people. The one who led them out of slavery and through the wilderness. The one who saw God face to face. And none of that erases the fact that he was a baby in a basket, given away to save his life, raised by a woman who wasn't his mother, holding two peoples in his body his whole life. God didn't fix the complexity. He used it. He made Moses exactly who he needed to be for exactly what He was calling him to do.

And here's the line to Jesus: Moses was a picture of something bigger. The whole story of Israel is a story of adoption. God chose a people who weren't a people. He called them out of slavery and said: you are mine. Not because you earned it. Not because you were impressive. Because I set my love on you. And in the New Testament, Paul says that's exactly what God does in Jesus. He adopts us. He makes us His children — not as a backup plan, not as a second option, but as the plan from the beginning. Before the foundation of the world, He chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless before Him in love. He predestined us for adoption to Himself through Jesus Christ.