In an unexpected turn, about three years after my adoption, my parents were able to have a child together, giving me a younger brother and bringing their long-held hope full circle.

Before the adoption was finalized, my new mother asked if I would like to change my first name. I was told that it could be done legally as part of the process. I chose to keep the name Richard for two reasons. First, it was the name I had known for nearly eight years, and anything else simply didn’t feel like me. Second, it was the last remaining link I had to my biological parents. My father’s name was Richard, and my mother’s name was Lynn (Marilyn). At birth, I was named Lynn Richard Bush.

Even at that young age, I had a sense that this name might one day help me find my way back to my roots. My adoptive parents reversed my name to Richard Lynn, and years later, that detail proved invaluable when I located my original birth certificate in the state where I was born. To my surprise, nothing had been redacted, as is often the case in adoption records. From that document, I learned that my father was a piano tuner by trade, and that I was listed as “single”—which I’ve always found mildly amusing. I should mention, my sense of humor has always been a bit… underdeveloped—somewhere on par with my sense of direction when driving.

I lived in my adoptive home for ten years before setting out on my own. Those years were not easy. Being separated from siblings I knew and loved, and placed into a home with complete strangers, was a tremendous adjustment. Everything familiar to me was suddenly gone, and I struggled to adapt.

I carried a number of behavioral challenges, many of which stemmed from a lack of structure and discipline in my early childhood. I had grown accustomed to doing as I pleased, when I pleased, often running the streets of Chicago without adult supervision. My adoptive parents had little idea of the difficulties they were about to face, and my arrival was a major upheaval for my new sister as well. Years later, one of her classmates told me that my coming into the family had truly “rocked her world.”

I sometimes joke that my mother’s first reaction after my birth might have been, “All that for this?” Of course, I have no way of knowing what she actually thought—I don’t even have a photograph of myself before the age of seven—but looking back, I imagine my new family may have felt something along those lines at times. I was not an easy child to raise.

But this is not a story of failure—it is a story of success.

It is the story of how an undisciplined and emotionally unsettled young boy found direction and purpose in life. It is a story of faith, and of how God remained present through every hardship, guiding me through the most difficult seasons and never giving up on me.

In time, I was blessed with something I once thought impossible: the opportunity to reconnect with every member of my biological family. Along that journey, I was also reunited with the two individuals I had been closest to as a child—the ones I remembered playing with, and the last two I saw before leaving the orphanage to begin a new life.