Isaac Melber's Story

I was born in Ethiopia and spent the first five years of my life there.

My earliest memories are marked by both love and loss. When I was very young, both of my birth parents passed away. Their deaths changed the course of my life and eventually led me into an orphanage, where I waited alongside other children for a future I could not yet understand.

At five years old, I boarded an airplane and traveled across the world to the United States to join my adoptive family. In a single journey, I left behind my homeland, my language, my culture, and everything familiar to me. Yet in the midst of that loss, I was given something I did not expect: a family.

My adoptive parents welcomed me fully as their son. They did not treat me as different or separate, but as their own. I grew up in a home filled with siblings, church, school, holidays, and the ordinary rhythms of family life. Over time, those ordinary moments became some of the greatest gifts of my life.

As I grew older, I became increasingly aware that my story was different from many of my peers. I was deeply loved, yet I still carried questions I could not easily answer. I wondered about the family I had lost. I wondered about the country I came from. I wondered what my life might have looked like if things had been different.

More than anything, I wrestled with God. I grew up in a Christian home where I heard often about God’s goodness, sovereignty, and love. Yet I found myself asking a question that followed me for years: Why would a good God write a story of loss for me? Why did I lose my parents? Why did I have to leave my homeland? Why did my story begin with grief while so many others seemed to begin differently?

For a long time, I struggled to understand how God’s goodness and my pain could exist in the same story.

As I grew older, I began to see that my story was not only marked by loss, but also by provision. Even in the places I did not understand, God was present. He placed me in a family that loved me. He surrounded me with people who cared for me. He carried me through seasons of confusion and searching.

Then, thirteen years after leaving Ethiopia, I returned for the first time since leaving. Stepping off the plane was an experience I can still hardly put into words. The air, the sounds, the faces, all of it felt both unfamiliar and deeply familiar at the same time. I was returning not just to a country, but to a part of my own story I had not seen in years.

During that trip, I met members of my biological family for the first time since childhood. I met my sister, along with my aunt and uncle who had cared for me after my parents passed away, and cousins I had never known. I also visited places that connected me to my earliest life: the house I was born in, the gravesite of my birth parents, and my father’s best friend, who had been waiting for the day I would return.

Each moment carried a weight I cannot fully describe. It was both joyful and sobering, as pieces of my story that had only existed in imagination became real in front of me.

What surprised me most was not just the reunion itself, but what it revealed in me. I realized that knowing more about where I came from did not take away from the family who raised me. Instead, it expanded my understanding of who I am. It did not answer all of my questions. I still carry many. But it gave me something deeper: a clearer sense of belonging within the mystery of my story.

I did not have to choose between two families. Both are part of my story. My biological family is part of my beginning. My adoptive family is part of my becoming. Together, they form the story of my life.

I have come to see that adoption holds both loss and gain together. It is not either/or, but both at the same time.

I still keep in contact with my birth family. Even with the language barrier. It brings me joy hearing their voices, even if we cannot understand each other.

Today, I am an adoption advocate, author, and college student preparing for ministry. I have had opportunities to share my story with others who are wrestling with questions of identity, belonging, and faith. Through those conversations, I have learned that adoption stories are rarely simple. They carry both beauty and sadness, joy and grief, answers and mystery.

Looking back, I still do not have answers to every question I once asked as a child. But I have come to believe something deeper. The God I questioned was never absent from my story. He was present in Ethiopia. He was present on the journey to America. He was present in my adoptive home. He was present in the questions I could not answer. And He was present when I returned to the place where my story began.

If I could speak to the younger version of myself, the boy who wrestled with questions he could not yet understand, I would tell him this: Your story is not finished. The pain you feel is not the final word. And one day, you will see that even the parts of your story that felt like loss were never outside the hands of a faithful God.

Your story is not only about where you began. It is about the One who has been writing it all along.