Adopt the Town

‘T he whole town. The whole town wants kids now!”

The case worker at the Texas Department of Family and Child Protective Services was giddy with a mixture of elation and disbelief. A pastor and his wife were in her office explaining that 22 families in the surrounding area were ready to foster children. The pastor emphasized the point that there are more couples than adorable babies available to adopt. These were Christians who longed to live the scriptural mandate to leave no one orphaned. They were stepping up for the children who had suffered deep trauma and who might otherwise be left to age out of the foster-care system and live through additional miseries.

The scene is in the new movie Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot. It is the true story of a small Baptist church in Possum Trot, Texas, that demonstrated to so many of us what true love and radical hospitality look like.

In the aforementioned scene, Bishop W. C. Martin and his wife Donna specifically ask to adopt a child that no one else wanted. The case worker is skeptical — she jokes that not only would she be happy to host foster-care-certification classes at the church, she would also be willing to “get baptized for 22 families.” The case worker is insistent, but so is Donna Martin. “Religious guilt can’t fix a broken child’s heart,” the well-intentioned government official declares to the pastor of Bennett Chapel. “Love can,” First Lady Martin responds. “Real, determined love.”

Even after the case worker explains that many children come back to her — “I have to pick up the pieces; when all the lovey-dovey is gone, the real world hits hard” — Donna declares that “it don’t matter.” “The state ain’t no family.”

So the Martins take in the hardest case, and to say that she is a handful wouldn’t even begin to describe the child’s pain. Donna asks her husband: “What are we doing? . . . Why did we agree to take this on? I don’t even like these kids sometimes.” (Now that’s honesty.)

The movie is a rallying cry for the most vulnerable children among us, those who have suffered the pain that adults who can’t deal with theirs wind up inflicting on them with impunity.

I have a godson whose mother nearly smothered him to death a month into his life. He had no vital signs when he got to the emergency room. He was emaciated when he came to the attention of the family that would eventually adopt him. His mother couldn’t raise him, but her choices — or her inability to make them — are indelibly marked on his life. The unnatural separation. Whatever happened during pregnancy and that first month. Are his learning delays the result of these experiences? The unknown breeds questions.

The reality must be acknowledged. Most families who get certified to foster do it once and find it too hard to continue. The emotional toll it tends to take on marriages is undersold. Possum Trot doesn’t lie. (The Mark Wahlberg comedy Instant Family, which came out a few years ago, also acknowledged that fostering and adopting do not make simple, happier-ever-after stories.) Adoption is a calling, and while not everyone is called to it, we all have a role to play in supporting and offering community to those who are.

Christianity in many ways has been bureaucratized. We make transactional contributions to the church and assume that someone is acting on our behalf to meet human needs in our community. Do we even know who the foster families around us are? Do we know if there is a group home in our area? How many older children are adoptable nearby? These are questions we may think we are too busy to ask. But the life of that child who would gain a family because of someone who made the time to ask would be transformed. We might disagree on seemingly every notion of “social justice,” but how about the idea that a child deserves a family? Put all matters of ideology aside. Possum Trot bears witness to how we can transform society one child — or one set of siblings, another important lesson from the people of Bennett Chapel — at a time.

Often, the reasons that foster care and adoption end up in the news are scandals and crimes. Possum Trot shows the power of raw, authentic love. See the movie. Talk about it. Change lives.

I was on the set of Possum Trot on one of the days when real families from the church were there, too, as extras. They came to know love anew because of those precious children they brought into their hearts. There’s hope for us in their example.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.