Families torn asunder

This week marked the two-year anniversary of the spring afternoon when Rusty and Summer Page lost the 6-year-old girl they had raised as their own daughter for more than four years.

The eve of Passion Week seems a fitting occasion to reflect on painful, sacrificial love.

On March 21, 2016, a Los Angeles County social worker arrived at the Pages’ Santa Clarita, Calif., home to pluck a distraught Lexi from her despairing foster family and whisk her hundreds of miles away to distant relatives she had never met.

The reason was a legal technicality that came down to the tiniest of fractions: Lexi was one-sixty-fourth Choctaw Indian.

When the courts terminated the parental rights of Lexi’s birth father, the Pages had begun pursuing adoption. Her birth father—who had a criminal history and had already lost custody of another child—objected.

So did the Choctaw tribe, invoking a nearly 40-year-old law originally designed to keep government officials from arbitrarily removing children from Native American homes and tribes—a phenomenon that had been a tragic problem in the decades before.

But Lexi wasn’t cruelly ripped from her birth family. Her parents couldn’t care for her, and child welfare services sought a home for her. Tribal leaders later argued that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) meant they should have priority in placing Lexi in a Native American home.

In March 2016, Lexi ended up with a Utah couple who aren’t Indian—they’re distantly related to Lexi through a paternal step-grandfather. In January 2017, the Pages learned the U.S. Supreme Court had denied their petition to hear their case. The fight for Lexi was over.

Two years after losing Lexi, the Pages still struggle. I caught up with the couple by email this week, and they said they haven’t heard from Lexi at all, despite sending cards, letters, and gifts to her. They don’t know if she’s seen the notes. They haven’t received any updates about her welfare.

They cherish the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” and they cling to the Lord, saying, “By God’s grace we are able to see new mercies each day, and His goodness is overwhelming.”

They also look for ways to help other families going through a similar ordeal, and they advocate for changes to the ICWA that would do more to protect the best interests of children, and not produce decisions based on race alone.

There are some positive signs: Last week, an Ohio appeals court allowed a 5-year-old boy to stay with his foster family in the only home he’s known since he was 2.

Stan and Nichole Braxton of Coshocton, Ohio, had applied for legal guardianship of the Native American boy with the approval of his biological mother. The child’s birth father and the Gila River Indian Community argue the courts should place the child with a family the boy has never met on an Indian reservation 2,000 miles away. (Court records say the birth father remains unable to care for him.)

The boy’s court-appointed guardian argued it was in the child’s best interest to stay with the Ohio couple who had parented him for three years.

In December 2016, a court granted custody to the Arizona tribe, but 90 minutes before the scheduled pickup, the Ohio Court of Appeals issued a stay. Last week, the court of appeals ruled the lower court shouldn’t have granted custody to the tribe without conducting a full evidentiary hearing on the best interests of the child.

The Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute argued on behalf of the child, and said it was an encouraging sign to see a court lean toward ruling that the rights of a Native American child should mean as much as a child of any other race.

The Pages were encouraged as well, though they say they receive multiple emails and calls each month from families facing separation because of ICWA: “We continue to see the benefits of ICWA in pure form, but we have deep sorrow for how this good intentioned law has been adulterated to the point of hurting kids and families substantially.”

They have deep sorrow over Lexi, too. When they lost their final appeal last year, they wrote a public letter telling Lexi they love her and pray for her every day. They rehearsed all the things each family member (including their three small children) misses about her.

They also thanked those who had supported them: “We have comfort and hope that comes from knowing that God is both sovereign and good even as we struggle to understand the injustice of human authority.”

Their ordeal has made me think of the adoptive families I know. Just in my own small church, I think of adopted children who are Guatemalan, Filipino, Ukrainian, black, and white. They’re not just part of the families that adopted them. They’re part of the broader family of Christ. They are part of us.

And every believer in Christ is part of a family that belongs to a Savior who took on flesh and became a Middle Eastern man to save a people adopted from every nation, tribe, and tongue.

It’s something to think about as Passion Week begins this weekend. Just after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, some Greeks came to the disciples, asking to see Jesus. He knew the momentous meaning of the nations coming to Him: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

Jesus knew His impending suffering would achieve salvation for men and women and boys and girls from all corners of the globe, and would eventually be reflected in our families and our churches, as we grow in the gospel: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.”