Read an Excerpt
He Knows Your Name
How One Abandoned Baby Inspired Me To Say Yes To God
By Linda Znachko, Margot Starbuck Kregel Publications
Copyright © 2016 Linda Znachko
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8254-4404-3
CHAPTER 1
"Baby Found in Dumpster"
"Breaking News: Baby Found in Dumpster."
I sat dumbfounded in front of my computer, struggling to make sense of the words scrolling across the online news site. I'd just come inside from the crisp October chill and shuddered at the thought of a child having been abandoned to the elements to die.
"Baby Doe wearing only a diaper."
The words seemed like nonsense, and I was unable to process them.
Other words settled into my heart:
Doe is not a name.
A dumpster is not a grave.
A diaper is not burial clothing.
The video accompanying the news story showed police investigating the industrial dumpster where a couple, searching for scrap metal, had found a baby's body earlier in the day. The masks worn by the gloved professionals weren't enough to disguise the sadness on their faces. A twisting blue light flashed above a squad car. Yellow caution tape stretched across the downtown parking lot, keeping curious onlookers from getting in the way.
What I was feeling, however, was far more than curiosity. As my heart began to quicken I recognized the nudge of the Holy Spirit, prompting me to act. God had been training me for years to follow in faith by taking one small step at a time. Although I could never predict what God had in store, I knew God was now inviting me to say yes to the Spirit's unlikely leading.
Quickly scanning for the byline, I called the Indianapolis Star and asked for the journalist who'd reported the story: John Touhy. Perhaps he'd be able to answer my questions.
When he picked up the call, I introduced myself and asked for his help.
"So, what happens to this baby?" I pressed.
In a gravelly voice, he patiently explained that the investigation was now a legal matter.
"The only one who can answer your questions," he explained, "is the coroner. I'm waiting to hear back from her office right now — Chief Deputy Ballew."
"I'll try her. Thank you so much for your help," I said before hanging up.
Knowing city offices had closed for the night, I would call the next day.
BEDTIME MUSINGS
After I had spoken to John Touhy, I explained my strange attachment to this child to my husband, Steve. Though neither one of us could have predicted the absurd unfolding of the day's events, Steve had always been the person in my life who was more afraid of saying no to God than of agreeing to even the most complicated or unwieldy yes. So, although we had no idea how this child would continue to impact our lives, Steve was quick to lend his support and encouragement.
When I climbed into bed that night, slipping between smooth satin sheets, thoughts of the precious little one continued to pulse through my heart and mind. The words that had so gripped me when I read the jarring news headline still rang in my ears: A dumpster is not a grave.
Grabbing my thick, blue, spiral-bound journal from my nightstand, I scribbled down the facts, writing what I knew as if to try to understand what I did not.
No name.
No funeral.
No burial clothes.
No songs.
No readings.
No blessing to acknowledge that this child did live.
As precious memories from my mother's funeral, just four months earlier, flooded my mind, I felt as though I was reeling in some alternate universe. The gruesome end of this child's earthly days suggested that he or she had never lived. But, I insisted to myself, this child had lived. If only growing inside a mother's womb. This baby lived.
Pressing pen to paper, I continued to process:
A child of God was left to die in a dumpster. He or she was found early Wednesday morning by a couple looking for scrap metal. Looking for scrap, they found the remains of a baby. Buried in a trash heap.
Life and death had been close to my heart over the course of the year.
My daughter's fragile health hung in the balance. At that moment, we didn't yet know if she would live. And although cancer had ravaged my mother's body, it had not stolen her dignity. I continued to contrast the lavish funeral she'd received, honoring the inestimable value of her life, with the crude treatment of this precious little one.
"This baby needs a name," I wrote. "God already knows it because it is, after all, written in the book of life. We just don't know it yet. But he or she has one, and deserves one."
FURTHER DIGGING
The next morning, I waited until just after nine to call the Marion County Coroner's Office. An administrative assistant fielded some of my questions.
"The body will be disposed of after the case is closed," she explained.
Her language shocked me. Garbage is disposed of. Babies are not.
"What does 'disposed of' mean?" I asked, trying to quell in my voice the rage and sadness I felt inside.
"It means a pauper's grave ... a mass grave," she told me.
A jolt of indignation shot through my body. What?
Now my head was spinning.
In 2009? I'd never imagined such a thing existed right where I live.
I silently vowed, No way. Not if I can do anything about it.
The receptionist told me I'd need to call back later to reach the coroner.
So I called throughout the morning until I was able to speak to Chief Deputy Ballew. I explained my intentions, that I was interested in giving the baby a proper burial. She confessed that she'd never received a call like mine before.
"I'd like to be granted the legal right to the child," I pressed.
"Well ..." She paused, thinking through my last comment. "I can put your name and number in the file. That way I can call you when the criminal investigation is completed and the case is officially closed."
The situation was highly unusual and I could tell that Alfarena Ballew was trying to honor my request while upholding the law and doing her job with integrity.
"Promise me," I begged, "that you will."
She promised.
In the quiet of my heart, as I hung up the phone, I prayed that God would allow me the privilege to do what my heart was aching and longing to do by honoring and dignifying the life of this child.
PURSUING A PROPER BURIAL
Every Friday, I called Alfie's office, hoping for a crack in the case. Perhaps there would be some new lead. A shred of evidence. I waited eagerly, hoping this little one would be released into my care.
As the case unfolded in the media, a barrage of local news reports painted a picture of an unknown, heartless mother who disposed of an unwanted child in this callous manner. At night I continued to journal:
I can't get this mother off my mind. Every day I think about her. I woke up today thinking about how adorable Andrew, my son, was at three months. Chubbiness sets in. Smiles come and babies are sleeping through the night at that age. I wanted my son. I don't know if anyone ever wanted Baby Doe. Probably not.
As I wrestled to assemble these disparate pieces into a comprehensible whole, I could only imagine that this baby was unwanted. I continued to reflect in my journal:
Being wanted changes everything in the heart of a child or an adult's life. I see it so often in friends and family members of mine. To be welcomed, adored, and desired versus being an intrusion, an interruption, or a disappointment. We all feel it deeply and it somewhat defines us deep down.
Alfie warned me that a criminal investigation could become quite lengthy — quite unlike the ones solved in sixty minutes on television.
This provided plenty of time for the what-if questions, about all I didn't understand and couldn't control, to creep into my mind, tempting me to stray from obedience. But, reminding me that I didn't need to see the future he already saw, God was teaching me to trust him one step at a time: all I needed to do was to walk through the door in front of me. So God gave me small steps to accomplish as I waited to discover the identity of this baby: I called a funeral home to arrange a service; I contacted a cemetery that had served other abandoned babies; I prayed for the woman who'd given birth to the baby found in the dumpster.
All I knew about the baby's mother was what I'd gleaned from TV. I had no way of knowing whether or not she was the monster others imagined when they watched the evening news. I didn't know if she'd wanted her child or wanted to get rid of him or her. My instinct told me that whether her child had been planned or unplanned, she would still be grieving. My only certainty was that, whoever she was, God loved her and was filled with overwhelming compassion for her. During the months of waiting, as God continued to soften my heart for this mother, I continued to pour out my thoughts in the pages of my journal:
Baby Doe has a name; I just don't know it yet. I will meet a grieving mother. I will offer her help. I will tell her she has not been alone this past year. I have waited with her. I have hoped with her that this baby would be given dignity.
And I prayed that God would open a door for me to know her.
I suspect my heart connected so deeply with this mother because I too was grieving — as a mother and as a daughter. I was a grieving daughter, having recently buried my mother. But I was also a mother who was grieving the precarious future of the daughter I loved.
Anna's terrifying illness, which could easily have snatched her away from our family, had activated both my fierce maternal instincts to protect her and a fiery advocacy on her behalf before the throne of God. These same impulses were unleashed again when this baby's body was discovered in a dumpster. And they fueled me as I fought to honor the life of that child as if he or she were my own.
* * *
How many times had I watched the horrors on the evening news, breathed a quiet prayer for those who suffered, and returned to my life and family? And yet now God's Spirit was prompting me to step into a stranger's deepest pain. Had I declined, no one around me would have been the wiser. Had I heeded the internal voice reminding me how awkward it was to be pursuing something that wasn't my business or my area of expertise, my life would have continued as it was, normal but lacking and slightly broken. But somehow my small yes to making one phone call was opening me up to sense and respond to God's leading in a fresh new way. Calling me into deeper obedience, God daily assured my heart — in the time we spent together each morning — that his voice was the only one that mattered.
CHAPTER 2
Though My Father and Mother Forsake Me
On a crisp, cold January morning, just three months after learning of the baby who had been abandoned, I dropped my husband off at the Indianapolis International Airport for a men's leadership retreat in Florida. Returning home, I felt the bite of bitter cold in my garage, and perhaps a nip of jealousy that I wasn't headed to Florida. I ducked into the house and went upstairs to my desk.
Since it was a Friday, I did what I did every Friday morning: I called the coroner's office to check on the Baby Doe investigation. As had been the case every Friday for the last three months, Alfie relayed that there were no new developments.
"But," she added with a long pause, "I'm glad you called. I was just about to call you."
Call me with no news? She piqued my curiosity.
Alfie went on to tell me about a baby who had been abandoned at the coroner's office. A five-month-old, African-American male, who had died of natural causes while at his grandmother's home. Since there was no criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death, the baby's body could be released.
For one month, however, no one had claimed him.
The more Alfie shared, the more troubled I felt.
And as she spoke, I glanced through the sunroom and noticed my dog, Sedalia, a yellow lab, frolicking in the back yard. If I had been able to join Steve on his trip to Florida, we would have dropped Sedalia at a local kennel the previous day. In order to leave her for even a long weekend, we would have been obligated to sign a document acknowledging that abandoning a dog at a kennel was a criminal violation. We would even be bound to pay all legal fees if prosecution became necessary! And yet a child wasn't afforded the same protection?
My head swirled with more questions, and each answer Alfie shared broke my heart.
Neither the boy's mother, who was homeless, nor her family had taken any steps to accept responsibility for him. They wouldn't even respond to the coroner's request to retrieve him for burial. Though the chief investigator for the case had visited the home of the baby's grandmother and made repeated phone calls, the family had ignored the requests.
As Alfie spoke, I was already feeling a familiar internal tug to embrace this child by giving him a dignified burial. Then Alfie asked me if my "organization" would want to help.
Thankfully, I didn't blurt out what I was thinking: What organization? Did I need one?
While others would begin to catch the vision for life that God was sowing in my heart, and would eventually ask to join in, at that point there wasn't any organization. There was simply the gentle whisper of God's voice, "This baby needs a family and I'm in this with you. I am all you need."
I certainly didn't feel equipped for what lay ahead. Who in their right mind, I wondered, would willingly move toward death instead of flee from it? No sooner had I wondered it than a face filled my mind. It was the countenance of Jesus who, moved by love, had chosen the sting of death.
At least I was in good company.
For years I had been growing to recognize the sound of God's voice, even when he asked the most unlikely things, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had been called to do this.
That was enough.
A few years earlier I had been given Mother Teresa's book No Greater Love as a gift. In it she writes, "I will take any child, any time, night or day. Just let me know and I will come for him." I felt this same sense of urgency about Zachary.
LOOSE ENDS
Alfie patiently detailed some of the obstacles surrounding the case.
Because the baby's mother didn't have a residence, she wouldn't be able to request assistance from the Marion County Trustee office that offered a small stipend toward burial to struggling families. Cremation, Alfie explained, would be the cheapest option. She told me that Derek Harris, the coroner assigned to Zachary's case, had located the mother in the community just two days prior. Alfie read bits from his report to me that noted that the mother had been "dismissive in attitude" about her child. The baby's mother, she explained, had washed her hands of all responsibility for burial.
A flash of rage at a mother I did not know surged through my body and a single thought pounded in my mind: I don't understand her.
The voice inside me was answered by a gentler, kinder voice: "Right. You can't and you never will."
Humility seeped into my heart that had so suddenly been seized by anger and judgment. I didn't know this woman. I couldn't comprehend what she'd endured in her past; I didn't understand her pain; I could not fathom her hopelessness. As a person with resources — not just financial, but social and emotional and spiritual — I had no idea what it was like to live in her skin, to see the world through her eyes.
And in that moment God's Spirit replaced my judgment with a confidence in his love for her. Although I might not ever fully understand her, God knew her name and he loved her. In the same way I held my children in my heart, this woman was held in the heart of God.
She, too, had been somebody's baby.
Before I would get more deeply involved, however, I still wanted to make sure that this mother understood that there could be resources available to her. I wondered if access to resources to honor her son's life might equip her to engage as a mother. I wouldn't usurp that from her, if she would respond.
As we were hanging up, Alfie connected me to Derek Harris. Explaining who I was, I asked for his help.
I explained that I wanted to bury this baby boy and asked him if he would be willing to approach the baby's mother one more time. Because he needed to have her consent for burial, he was willing. He offered to return to the homeless community to find her.
"First," I requested, "can you make sure that she knows she will have help if she wants to bury her baby? I want her to have that option."
"Yes," he agreed. "I can explain that to her."
But we both knew how his first visit had gone. Though neither of us spoke it, we knew that this desperate mother might still balk.
"And if not," I continued, "can you ask her to sign away her rights so that he can be released to me? I want her to make an informed choice, but if she refuses to care for him, I want to be able to adopt him freely."
As I spoke the word "adopt," a deep resolve rippled through my frame to claim this precious child as my own, with the same steadfast faithful love that God had extended to me. The same love God had for this baby's mother.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from He Knows Your Name by Linda Znachko, Margot Starbuck. Copyright © 2016 Linda Znachko. Excerpted by permission of Kregel Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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