Sojourner

CHAPTER ONE – Gideon and David

In the book of Hebrews, scripture refers to faithful believers who walked in faith all their lives and were still living their faith when they died. They hadn’t received what their faith promised during their life on earth. They only knew the promises and welcomed them as true. They were strangers – sojourners – on earth, looking forward to their true home with God in heaven. They were committed to the call of their faith knowing that it separated them from the world and its ways.

August 1, 1943
Gideon Adams was 63 years old when he adopted David Smith. David was five years old. Today was the day that the boy would be brought from the orphanage to his new home.
David said his goodbyes to Mrs. Owens and the other children at Adams House with appropriate emotion, but no words. Sam Green, the caretaker and driver for the orphanage, watched the last embraces. He motioned the boy into the front passenger seat of the large vehicle. David’s bag was already packed and he pulled it with him as he climbed into his seat. He was ready. On the drive, he sat contentedly, memorizing the sights along the Coast and the feel of the summer afternoon, trying to savor the moments as if they held hidden treasure. He understood that the first day of his adoption was an important day and he had been eager for it ever since he had been asked if he wanted to become Gideon’s son. He’d become acquainted with Gideon gradually, through several months of weekly visits. He had felt comfortable with the quiet and unimposing man almost as soon as he met him. David responded to very few people, but Gideon was patient and kind and their conversations during the adjustment period drew him out of his shell. Today he would become David Adams, even though it would take a year for the adoption to be final.
Glenda Owens, Director of the Adams House, had introduced Gideon to the mostly silent boy not long after his arrival at the orphanage. Gideon had a special relationship to Adams House. He had founded the orphanage fifteen years earlier, after he had read about the large numbers of abandoned children in the Gulf Coast area and the deplorable conditions they sometimes faced in group homes or in the foster system. He had provided all the initial funding for the orphanage and it had been his principal charitable concern ever since. With advice from the government agencies that had guided him through the founding process, he had found and hired Mrs. Owens. She had been, at the time, an energetic twenty-five-year-old social worker with a huge heart for children.
David had survived much before he came into Mrs. Owens’s care. His birthdate was recorded as April 12, 1938. He was found that morning on the front steps of the First Baptist Church. The Deacon who came to open the church that morning found him wrapped in dirty blankets and tucked in a box which had been pushed firmly against the main doors to the church. He was alive, but unconscious, weighing less than three pounds. The elderly Deacon immediately called for an ambulance and followed it to the hospital. The child was admitted through the emergency room and processed through as an unidentified male child. The first notation on his records was that he was extremely premature, the E.R. Doctor estimating that he had probably been born more than two months early and that he seemed to be suffering the effects of an unidentified blood disorder. It seemed like a hopeless case. The emergency room physician immediately checked every measurable factor that could cause his condition and was awaiting findings. With no further answers, the nursing staff set to getting him clean and warm. He was transferred to the intensive care ward within hours and put under an oxygen tent as soon as one could be set up. There was no established procedure in the small hospital to handle an unidentified child, but his condition was so severe that the medical and nursing staff used every skill and facility that they could. It was tacitly assumed that they would have only a few hours before the child died, but they nurtured every sign of life. Minutes turned to hours and hours lasted into days. The nursing staff began to refer to the child as David. At the end of the first week, the County stepped in and approved funding to help the hospital cover their costs. Needing a name, they went with David and added Smith as his last name.
David remained under care at the hospital from crisis to crisis for the first four years of his life. He continued to be unconscious for the first six months, fighting high fevers and struggling to stay alive. His care slipped under official supervision as the work of keeping him alive came to be an accepted part of the daily duties of his ward. The nurses on staff saw his fighting spirit survive every crisis and responded with equal heroism through their affectionate care. On the few occasions when he gained consciousness over the next years it was only briefly and episodically. He could somehow respond to spoon feeding without appearing to wake up and he slowly began to gain weight. Since his survival was completely unexpected and every improvement was believed to be just a brief delay of the inevitable, he was essentially lost in the system. He was officially in the care of the county, but there was still no one involved with his case who thought he would survive. His advocates were the nurses who surrounded him with affection and mercy. They were enthralled each time he struggled out of the latest crisis. Each infection or fever spike that seemed to fit the expected end might have been left untreated as a kind of triage decision. But, instead, they were handled promptly with sufficient care. The tiny child’s surprising determination to live seemed to be guiding individual decisions made by the doctors from day to day and month to month. Finally, in what seemed unbelievable to the attending physicians, David gained full consciousness in June of 1942. He was kept under observation for a few weeks after that but, once he could live without specific medical support, there was no applicable funding to keep him at the hospital. He was released and discharged from the hospital into the care of the county.
In October of 1942, David entered foster care at the first available home near the hospital. A few months later, in February, he was placed at Adams House. Both foster families he had been assigned to hadn’t felt qualified to handle the training it would take to get him talking well enough to fit with their other foster kids. Adams House was perfect and no one could have been better for him than Glenda Owens. Her heart responded at her first sight of the small, silent boy with openly trusting eyes and a shy smile. Although David never spoke when he first arrived, he was alert and observant of everything around him, He seemed to like the other children and to be accepted by them.
Mrs. Owens promptly thought of Gideon Adams.
“There is a reason that he is such a quiet boy,” she explained to him. “When he woke up last year, he had no vocabulary at all. It’s possible that he learned words that he could have heard around him during the years that he was unconscious, but he wouldn’t have had a way to speak. He learned a few words at the hospital after he gained consciousness, but he’s shy to use them.”
“God must have had him with special people,” she added, “because they just never gave up.”
“When I was called,” she continued, “It was clear that the nurses adored him and that they had helped him to be able to communicate every way they could.