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One day, the Lord showed me how little I really knew what was best for my family and me. In the fall of 2003, a friend in Hong Kong sent me an e-mail. His wife is on the board of an organization that brings Chinese orphans to the United States and lines them up with doctors who perform free surgery.

He wrote that an orphan from China named Fu Yang was coming to Medical City Dallas Hospital, where these doctors work. It's five minutes from my home. My friend asked me to take pictures of Fu for a visual record; Fu has Treacher Collins Syndrome, a rare genetic defect that only 1 in 10,000 infants are born with. Fu's ears never fully formed, and he had a cleft palate. He couldn't hear or talk. Also, people with Treacher Collins have very flat cheekbones. It causes the skin around their eyes to droop down and requires years of surgery to restore typical human features.

For a photojournalist, fall is extremely busy because of football season, so when I got the e-mail, my first reaction was, "I just don't have time to do this." But Dinah, my wife and reliable moral compass, said, "He's an orphan. Take an hour out of your time and go help him."

Reluctantly, I went. I found Fu in pre-op. Since he couldn't hear or talk, I wondered how I was going to communicate with him. Actually, we got along from the moment I met him. I just followed him around and took pictures. He was like a regular kid except that he couldn't talk.

This surgery really was his last chance. China didn't help him much beyond giving him food, water, and shelter. We don't know what year he was born. At the orphanage, when kids get to be 10, 11, 12—like Fu—they don't have much of a shot at adoption. Being flown to Dallas for a major operation at no cost was nothing short of God's hand in Fu's life, even before Fu knew that there was a God.

That day, Fu's chaperone was talking to me, saying straight out, "You could adopt Fu Yang." I was stunned. That wasn't in any plan I had in mind. But Fu has a charisma that's hard to describe. As I drove back home, the Lord, in his quiet way, was saying to me: You have an opportunity here to participate in something special.

I thought about that for weeks, probably coming up with every reason in the book why our family couldn't adopt Fu. At first, I actively fought against it, and it was agonizing because Christ in me was saying, Reach out to this boy. There's blessing here. You can't even imagine what's ahead.

The part of me that's selfish was responding: "My kids are almost grown. My wife and I are not prepared. We've never ever talked about adoption. Dinah won't go for it. I got kids to put through college."

But this holy nudge persisted. Every time I tried to shut it up, it wouldn't shut up. Then, I was in Birmingham, Alabama, on a photo shoot. I was driving around killing time between sessions, and all I could think about was Fu Yang.

Searching across the radio dial for something to take my mind off of it, I hit on a Christian station. James Dobson was talking to a woman about adoption. She said, "We thought at first there's absolutely no way we could do this. It doesn't make sense. We don't have the money. But we did it, and I'm so glad."

Immediately, I realized the obvious: I ought to stop trying to resist this. God is at work here. God could have provided for Fu some other way, but we have been given the opportunity to help.

By that time, Fu was staying with a family from a local Chinese Bible church. It was wonderful, but they didn't have any young kids, so he was often playing by himself. I started coming over and playing with him, putting puzzles together. Dinah could see that Fu and I were drawing closer.

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February 2008, Vol. 52, No. 2