Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 19, 1994 TAG: 9409270065
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He plays on the thick carpet in the living room, pushing his plastic toy trucks back and forth and laughing at the big golden retriever, Aslan.
Samuel has adoring parents who watch over his every move. They want their "miracle child" to know he lives in a loving, safe home.
Samuel's mother and father say it took a lot of miracles to bring Samuel home a year ago.
His journey began in the bombed-out shell of a house where Samuel was abandoned just after he was born 15 months ago.
The first miracle was that he wasn't hurt by the roaming packs of wild dogs in the rugged mountains of the nation of Lebanon.
Keene and Jan Fuller Carruthers had "wanted to grow our family" for a long time, Jan said on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, but had begun to despair of ever having children.
They had ridden the "roller coaster" of fertility treatments that failed to work time after time. The two times Jan did conceive ended in miscarriage.
A year and a half ago, Keene was 43 and Jan 37, and they were beginning to wonder whether they ought to give up. Maybe, Jan said, they would have to be content to "enjoy other people's children."
They did, after all, have fulfilling careers - Jan as chaplain at Hollins College and Keene as a marriage and family therapist at Family Service of Roanoke Valley.
Jan just wasn't able to give up her desire to be a mother, though.
In April 1993, she headed off to a four-day prayer retreat in Arizona that she ended up crying all the way through. On the last day, as she sat in a communion service, Jan finally stopped weeping and was "just waiting [with her eyes closed] ... when I could see something behind my eyelids."
She breaks away from the story long enough to explain that "this kind of thing doesn't happen to me, on the whole."
"I could see the face of a small boy" and, she said, she knew immediately that this was a sign to her.
Then doubt momentarily broke through. "I thought, `Great, now I'm hallucinating, too.'"
When she shared the experience with others at the retreat, though, they encouraged her to "accept it as a gift of hope," which she did. When she got home, she "asked eight friends to covenant with us" to pray "that God's will be done."
A few weeks later, on May 15, Jan got a call from a man who sings in a choir directed by one of the eight prayer partners. He hadn't been told what specific need he was praying for, but as he prayed for the Carruthers, he said, he was conscious of the prayer of the biblical character of Hannah. After years of being unable to bear children, she asked God for a child, promising to give him back to God's service if her prayer was granted. When he was born, she named him Samuel, which means "God hears."
Jan made notes of what her caller told her: "I saw that the Lord is going to give you a goodly male child who will be a blessing to you."
Though she was "a little blown away ... a little dubious," Jan rushed home from her office to tell Keene what the man had said.
Keene, who comes from a Pentecostal religious background, "was inclined to take it at face value."
In the meantime, Jan's parents were exploring options for adopting a child from Lebanon - the country where Jan grew up and from which her parents are soon to retire as Southern Baptist missionaries.
They heard that a young woman was about to give birth and was willing to give the child up for adoption. Jan dropped everything to get the paperwork done in time for a June 15 deadline. She made multiple trips to Richmond and Washington - where Sen. John Warner's staff was "really helpful."
Then the roller coaster dropped. When the deadline came, Jan and Keene heard the pregnant woman had run away from the hospital and the child would not be available.
Jan's mother, Frances Fuller, continued to keep her eyes open. In early July, she read a Beirut newspaper article saying an abandoned baby had been taken to a small Presbyterian hospital in the mountains of Lebanon, then turned over to a Catholic orphanage.
Because Lebanese orphanages generally place children according to religious affiliation, Fuller called to berate the hospital administrator for not seeking Protestant adoptive parents. He replied that the hospital had not received any abandoned baby, hadn't had such a baby in 20 years, and that her information must be wrong.
Nevertheless, the administrator took Fuller's name.
Six days later, Fuller had decided she must have hallucinated the newspaper story because she not could find a copy of it. Then she got a phone call from the tiny hospital. An abandoned baby had just been brought in.
According to the police report, a man walking to work near the town of Hamana stepped off the road one morning to find a private place to urinate. Nearby, from the bombed out remains of a house, he heard a baby crying. Doctors estimated the child was born 12 to 16 hours before. He had been left in a pool of blood and afterbirth on the floor of the deserted house.
The police report included some amazement that the child had not been molested by the roving packs of wild coyotes in the region. Jan and her mother like to think that angels protected the baby through the night.
Fuller went to the hospital every day for five or six days while police gave her the run-around on whether or not she would be able to take the child for adoption. Finally, she was told that a French family bribed an official with $4,000 and took custody of the child.
When Jan heard, "I couldn't get out of bed the next morning. We had felt immediately this was the one. We had already decided on a name - quite clearly it had to be `Samuel.'
"We were heartbroken."
Ten more days passed before Jan's mom called back. "Guess who I have here," she said. "Samuel."
It turned out the French couple had been married in a civil ceremony and the Lebanese religious courts wouldn't recognize the marriage. So the family had to give the child up.
The next six weeks were the longest of their lives, Jan and Keene said, as they waited for the adoption to be processed. On Aug. 18, the Evangelical Court in Lebanon approved the adoption, but it took another month to finish all the arrangements for getting Samuel into the United States.
On Sept. 17, grandmother and grandchild walked into the Roanoke Regional Airport terminal to meet Samuel's new parents for the first time.
"I don't believe God wants us to suffer," Jan said, so she's a little uncomfortable saying that her inability to have children - and her consequent feeling of being "jerked around" by God - was part of plan that made her home available for Samuel.
"But I have no doubt that God had this child in mind for us."
"No one can persuade us this was just an accident," Keene said. "I think had Samuel come to us in the regular way, I might not be as confident a parent - or as aware of the miraculous nature of children."
"There was a time when I would have said miracles only happen to other people," Jan said. "There may have been a time I would have been a little embarrassed to tell this story."
But now she believes that "we are not in control. Somebody else is in control. ... Something kept us going."
"Sometimes faith looks foolish to those who don't have it. It seems superstitious. They assume you are an idiot if you believe."
But today, celebrating a year of life with their son, Samuel "is a constant reminder to us that God is good, that God wants good things and helps good things happen," Jan said.
"God has blessed us in an incredible way.
"We have tasted of God's goodness and joy. I hope this feeling will never go away."
by CNB