Adoption and Name Changing (the philosophy)

When people find out three of my children are adopted, they will often ask about their names.  Did we keep their birth names?  How did we decide?  There are lots of theories about adoption and names (here are my practical tips).  Some people believe you should keep the name they came with to honor their heritage and birth family.  Some believe you should change it to establish a connection between that child and your family.  When we were deciding how to handle naming our children, we looked at the Bible.

When Adam was given responsibility to care for the animals, what was his first task?  He named them (Genesis 2:19-20) just like God named Adam.  It’s part of the way we are wired to express authority and responsibility.  We also see how God changed the names of certain people to represent a major change or calling in their life (Abram to Abraham, Sari to Sarah, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter, Saul to Paul and others).  The meaning was important and their names were changed to reflect a new meaning in their life.

You could gather from this that adoptive parents should always change names entirely, but I haven’t felt comfortable with that.  The Bible is clear that we are to honor our father and mother, but we don’t see if it says “birth father” or “adoptive father”.  I think when possible we do our best to honor both.  Part of the reason we chose the names Joshua and Daniel for our sons was because they were both men who (like our boys) had to learn to cope in a culture that wasn’t their own.  We want to acknowledge the reality that our children had lives and history and culture long before we became their family.

I love that in Exodus 33:17 we read:  And the Lord said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.”  Who gave Moses his name?  It was his adoptive, Egyptian mother.  God not only knew Moses, He knew him “by name”.  Names matter to God.  They also matter to us.

When we got our first picture of my oldest son from his orphanage in Liberia we just wanted to scoop him up.  We were given very limited information about him, but we knew his name was George.  I imagined his first mother kissing his sweet cheeks after the trauma of birth and giving him a name she thought was beautiful.  Maybe it had a family connection for her or was a name she’d dreamed of giving her son since she was a little girl.  When he was left at the orphanage all he had with him was that name.  It was the inheritance she left him when she decided she wanted a better life for him than what she could offer.  She wasn’t perfect, but she gave that boy the deepest brownest eyes and the amazing gift of life.  As much as we love him, those were gifts that only she could give him and we want to honor her importance to our son.   We knew we couldn’t take that name from him, but we also knew we had an obligation to claim him as our own by giving him a name, too.

We agonized through baby books, created top ten lists and vehemently vetoed each other’s choices until we were left with one name- Joshua.  It means “God saves”.  We held loosely to that name during the six months we waited for the paperwork to be completed so we could bring our baby home.  We knew so much could change up until the moment we boarded a plane with him back to America.  While we knew there was a possibility his Liberian mother could come reclaim him from the orphanage at any point, we weren’t prepared for a different kind of phone call that could jeopardize his ability to come home to us- the phone call that he was in the hospital.  We were asked to pray because he had been hospitalized for malaria.  He was very ill and they couldn’t promise he would get better.  I remember laying in bed praying for this baby and feeling the vulnerability of giving him a name.  Why did we name a child we might not keep?  And that was when I felt the presence of God remind me- God saves.  Not Maralee saves.  Not adoption saves.  If this baby was to be saved, it would be an act of God.  And I knew in that moment that before we ever knew this baby, God had called him by name.  And the name was Joshua.

Several weeks later when we arrived in Liberia to pick up our baby boy we were surprised when it seemed everybody already knew what his new name would be.  We hadn’t told the agency, so how could this be?  It was then we figured out the name “George” pronounced with a Liberian accent sounded nearly identical to how we said “Josh”.  We had intended to call him “George” and slowly transition his name, but from the first days we had him with us he would only respond to “Josh”.  God knew and was preparing this child long before we ever saw his face, smelled his hair, kissed his cheeks.

So he is our Joshua George.  The name we gave him and the name she gave him, side-by-side.  It is a legacy of the love of two families and how God intervenes in our lives to write our stories.  I’m thankful for the way He intervened in mine.  While my upbringing was beautiful and idyllic in so many ways, my heart still wrestled to understand God’s goodness in a world full of pain.  When I believed God’s promises of forgiveness and a better and eternal life in heaven because of Jesus, that was when my spiritual adoption happened.  While I didn’t get a new name, I did take on a new identity.  This is why I love Isaiah 43: 1- 7

But now thus says the Lord,

he who created you, O Jacob,

he who formed you, O Israel:

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you.

For I am the Lord your God,

the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

I give Egypt as your ransom,

Cush and Seba in exchange for you.

Because you are precious in my eyes,

and honored, and I love you,

I give men in return for you,

peoples in exchange for your life.

Fear not, for I am with you;

I will bring your offspring from the east,

and from the west I will gather you.

I will say to the north, Give up,

and to the south, Do not withhold;

bring my sons from afar

and my daughters from the end of the earth,

everyone who is called by my name,

whom I created for my glory,

whom I formed and made.”

I have been blessed to be called by name by my God.  I am now called His child and He is my protective father.  I am precious in his eyes and in my life He really did “bring my sons from afar”!  And just as He calls my name, I am called by His name.  Just as my son took on the name I gave him and the last name of our family, I take on a new identity- a child of God.  A child He created for His glory.  A child He formed and made.  What an honor and a blessing.

So much of the love we give as parents is a reflection of the love we’ve been given by God.  We adopt children to duplicate the adoption we’ve received.  We name our children in an imitation of the way God named Adam.  We love because He first loved us.