Chapter Two: The Night of Arrival—Life's First Cry and a Welcome of Love
At 11:00 p.m. on January 17, 2023, Little Wheat was born at a hospital in Indianapolis.
That was not his original due date.
He came to us several weeks earlier than expected. The doctors called it a premature birth. For us as first-time parents, everything happened suddenly, catching us somewhat unprepared.
The lights in the delivery room were bright.
Doctors and nurses kept coming and going.
Sue lay on the hospital bed, weariness on her face, but also a quiet determination.
I held her hand. As I prayed, I kept repeating silently the name we had already spoken so many times:
John Earnest Zhang.
Zhang Xian.
May your life be lived in the grace of God.
When the baby was lifted from his mother's womb, he did not immediately let out a loud cry.
The doctors quickly carried him aside to care for him.
Those few minutes felt especially long to me.
Only when I finally heard a cry—not loud, but clear and real—did the tension in my heart begin to ease.
Then the tears came.
It was Little Wheat's first cry in this world.
We had waited many years before we finally heard it.
He weighed about 3,115 grams at birth.
Though his body was small, his features were already distinct. He was not a baby who liked to cry loudly or make a fuss. A nurse looked at him and said:
“He is a very quiet baby.”
We stood there looking at him, still feeling almost unable to believe it.
The child who had once existed only in our prayers, in ultrasound pictures, and in his mother's womb was now truly before us.
We had no grand welcome ceremony.
Nor did we have a carefully designed birth announcement.
That night, what we had was simply gratitude.
I prayed silently:
“Lord, this is the child You have given us. Please give us wisdom and love, and teach us how to be his parents.”
For us, Little Wheat's birth was both the fulfillment of a promise and the beginning of a completely new and unknown journey.
Very soon, the doctors decided to admit him to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) for continued observation and care.
And so concern immediately became mixed with joy.
But we had no time to separate those two emotions.
Perhaps this is what becoming parents for the first time is like:
You are giving thanks
while also being afraid;
you are filled with hope
while realizing that there is so much you cannot control.
In that state of heart, we began learning something that would later become increasingly important:
Loving a child does not mean being able to control everything in his life.
Many times, love means being present, and it also means entrusting.
Little Wheat's first photograph after birth showed a nurse placing him on the equipment to measure his weight.
His tiny body looked especially fragile beside all the medical equipment.
On the care board were his name, his date of birth, and the constantly changing records of his weight, breathing, feeding, and daily care.
We began to make a habit of photographing those boards.
Others saw numbers.
What we saw was that this child was still here, day after day.
Beginning with the first night after his birth, I traveled back and forth to the hospital every day.
Once during the day,
and again at night.
I stood beside the incubator, watching him sleep and breathe, and occasionally open his eyes.
Sometimes I would softly sing hymns to him.
When we returned home, we still kept watching the hospital's video monitor.
The sound of a machine,
a nurse's movement,
even the slightest shift of Little Wheat's body
was enough to make us sit upright again.
We had waited for him for many years.
Now he had finally come.
But his arrival also made us understand for the first time in a very real way:
Life is a gift, but it is never something over which we possess absolute sovereignty.
That night changed our family.
Because from that day forward, we were no longer only husband and wife.
We became Daddy and Mommy.
And that quiet little life became, from then on, the name that appeared most often in our prayers.