Afterword
My Daughter Moved Out After Adopton
- But over time I began to understand the logic behind it.
- Security creates freedom.
- For years she had been navigating life without the certainty of family. Once that foundation was finally secure, she no longer needed to remain under the same roof to feel safe.
- She could step out into the world knowing that she had a place to return to.
- In a strange way, her leaving was a sign that the adoption had done exactly what it was meant to do.
Hard Lessons
- Parenthood, however, continues to teach lessons.
- One of the first came when I cosigned for an apartment lease. It seemed like a reasonable way to help, but it quickly became one of the more painful mistakes I made as a parent.
- When the lease fell apart, I found myself responsible for the financial consequences.
- The situation forced me to raise funds to settle the lease and move forward.
- It was a humbling reminder that good intentions do not always produce easy outcomes.
Losing Home
- Around the same time, another challenge appeared.
- On Valentine’s Day in 2017 I was informed that the house I was living in would be sold to an investment company. The landlord had previously known about the cats living in the house, but now that the property was being transferred, the arrangement suddenly became a problem.
- Within a short period of time, I found myself without stable housing.
- For several weeks I was effectively homeless, navigating a period of instability that forced me to rethink many assumptions about security and belonging.
Losing Family
- That same year brought another kind of loss.
- My sister died.
- Addiction had taken its toll, and her passing left a void that is difficult to describe. Losing a sibling changes the structure of a family. Suddenly a person who shared your earliest history is gone.
- Then, a few years later, another loss followed.
- In 2022 my mother passed away.
- She was the person who had adopted me decades earlier, the person who gave me a home and a life after the chaos of Vietnam.
- With her passing, I experienced something that felt strangely familiar.
- I had been orphaned again.
The Big Bad
- By 2025 the greatest challenge I faced was no longer a dramatic external event.
- It was life itself.
- The day-to-day routine.
- The internalized weight of years of responsibility, loss, and illness.
- There was no obvious enemy to defeat. No single crisis to solve. Instead there was a slow erosion of energy and motivation.
- For the first time in a long time, I felt like I didn’t care about much of anything.
- If life were a story with heroes and villains, the villain in that season would have been the mundane itself.
- The quiet voice that whispers that nothing matters anymore.
The Moment That Woke Me Up
- Then something small happened.
- It was Easter of 2025.
- During a church service in NYC I noticed a young woman on the worship team (Special K) helping a younger girl in the choir — an African American child who needed encouragement and support.
- The moment was simple.
- But something about it struck me deeply.
- What I saw was compassion.
- More specifically, I saw someone caring about the same things that had always mattered to me — helping young people, especially young African American kids who often need someone to believe in them.
- Watching that interaction woke something up inside me.
- For the first time in a long while, I felt the old spark of purpose returning.
Returning to New York
- Later that year I was asked if I would be willing to help with a Hispanic outreach that the church was planning to launch.
- The request came in November.
- I sent what I could in terms of bibles and materials.
- Then in December I had an opportunity to travel to New York and help distribute Christmas gifts to Hispanic families.
- It was a simple outreach event.
- Handing out gifts.
- Talking with families.
- Helping where I could.
- But something about that experience shifted my perspective.
- The combination of that outreach and the moment I had witnessed earlier in church helped me defeat what I had come to think of as the “big bad” of that year.
- The enemy had not been a person.
- It had been the quiet temptation to stop caring.
- Helping again reminded me that caring still mattered.
Slaying the Big Bad
At one point I tried to explain this realization in a message to someone involved in the outreach.
I wrote:
“For me my praise report is this: I believe you accommodating my desire to donate Bibles and materials and being supportive of my visits slayed the ‘big bad’ of life itself from 2025. I feel better about my life as a whole and finishing it strong.”
- That message captured something I had been struggling to articulate.
- Sometimes the greatest victories in life are not dramatic.
- Sometimes they simply involve rediscovering the will to care again.
One Weekend a Month
- Since then I have begun making monthly trips back to New York.
- Just One Weekend each month.
- Nothing elaborate.
- I go back to the church where I once spent some of the most meaningful years of my life and help where I can.
- Sometimes it involves outreach.
- Sometimes it’s simply being present.
- Even those small visits have been energizing.
- Returning to the place where so many formative experiences happened reminds me that the story is not finished yet.
Finishing Strong
- My time in this life is not unlimited – The time between this heartbeat and the last, that’s all I’ve got.
- Chronic illness has a way of reminding you of that reality.
- But the realization that time is limited can also sharpen your focus.
- Instead of waiting passively for the end of the story, I’ve decided that the final chapters deserve intention.
- If the early part of my life was defined by survival, the final part will be defined by purpose.
- And sometimes purpose begins with something as simple as showing up One Weekend each month to help someone else.
- After all, that is how my own story began.
- With strangers who showed up when a group of children needed help.
- And the truth is, the story that began in Vietnam is still being written.
Isaiah 1:17 (NIV)
Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.
It is by that scripture that I live. And by it I will most certainly die.
