Unconditional Love: Letters to an Adopted Family

In 1961, Murray and Dorothy Leiffer went to Singapore to study the status of Methodism in that country. They befriended Samuel Wong, then a college student, and encouraged him to pursue advanced training in the United States. Upon Wong’s graduation, they adopted him as their “number two son.”

Over a thirty-year period, they wrote him letters from different parts of the world and the United States, telling him of their work and of life in America. They spoke of their visits with friends. They shared about their social and civic engagements as residents, citizens, and church members. They wrote freely about their travel experiences and their observations on jobs, marriage, family, nature, and retirement.

Their letters are evidence of an unconditional love flowing through all those years, a vivid reminder that Wong was loved as he was, not “despite of” or “because of.” They groomed Wong for church service, but he became a bureaucrat in the federal government. They expected him to honor the marriage vow of “till death us do part,” but he broke it in the pursuit of academic and career advancement. Yet they never said they were disappointed in Wong.

These letters, published as Unconditional Love: Letters to an Adopted Son and Unconditional Love: Letters to an Adopted Family, draw a portrait of an extraordinary couple that demonstrates in their everyday life the essence of unconditional love. They are complementary to the couple’s reminiscences on a seminary campus, Enter the Old Portals (1987), and a companion to Wong’s autobiography, A Chinese from Singapore (2009). Their letters are testimonies to grace and fidelity, a reminder of that which is true and honorable, civil and decent.