When I was fifteen, my mother told me I was adopted. I was, as I imagine all children are at hearing such a thing, distressed. My great, loving parents were suddenly no longer my parents.
“That’s silly. We always have been and always will be your parents.”
“But I have other parents out there somewhere,” I whimpered.
My mother was so gentle, and told me that my mother had loved me but could not take care of me, so God had brought me to them. I knew right then that no child could have been loved more, and I vowed to stop worrying about it and make the best of the life I had.
I got through high school and college, although I can’t say I liked school. I was anxious to get out there and start making something of myself. After all—since age three—I knew that I’d been lost and I needed to find myself.
As most college kids do, I partied and drank a lot. On this night, I drank way too much. As I stumbled around trying to find a bathroom, I bumped into a mirror. I just stood there, looking at myself for the longest time, too drunk to wonder why.
I felt a bit of panic when I raised my hand to my chin and felt stubble—and my image in the mirror’s hand did not move. Frowning, I slowly reached out to touch the mirror, and instead I felt the image’s clean-shaven chin. Gasping, I drew my hand away quickly as he said “Hey, what the hell, man?”
That was no mirror—that was me, talking to myself. I was hallucinating, and my strongest thought at the moment was that I had killed all of my brain cells with booze and this was it—I would stop drinking immediately.
“You ok man?” myself asked me.
The shock was sobering me up pretty fast, and I was able to stutter, “Who—who are you?”
He laughed and said, “My name is Josh. Who are you?”
I said, “I am you. You don’t see that we look exactly alike?”
He said that he had noticed it, maybe not as strongly as it had hit me. Then he said, “Maybe we’re related. I was adopted.”
When my mouth finally closed, we both got a cup of coffee and went outside for a private chat. After we had it all figured out, I asked him if he’d come home with me—and meet my parents—and he agreed.
We walked in the door, and I called out, “Mom, look what I found.”
She looked at Josh, then back at me and said, “Oh, Lord.”
Then, “What did you find, honey?”
“Me,” I said, smiling at the priceless look on her face.