A Shattered Journey....

Well as you can tell, it has been a while since I have blogged.  I have had so much to say, so much on my heart, but I have had to wait on the time and the way to share so that any and all I put down is for the glory of God alone.  I've been like a horse in the holding pen, ready to race.  Today I will begin to share... but honestly, I have no idea if one entry will be enough.  The Lord has allowed the gate to be opened, but I have a feeling He will pull back on  my bit, to restrain me for a time.  I don't think I will have the time, strength, or permission for the wide open runaway blog today (aren't you relieved?) However,  I do feel I have reached the place where I have the Lord's permission to write... and I will write until I feel Him tell me to stop for today. 

Before I begin, I have a disclaimer.  Please know you are reading at your own risk.  This will be a shared point in our lives that beauty is a bit hard to find, though the peace of the Lord remains.  Should you not desire to know of our personal muck... RUN!  Fast as you can!  Run from this blog post!  But if you don't mind the muck... then come along.  I believe with all of my heart that the beautiful things in life are worth sharing, but I also believe the difficult, painful, ugly things are as well because the lessons are rich and plentiful...especially in those.

If you have read my blog before, you know that I have learned to look at life through different lenses.  What once might have been missed or overlooked, are not only noticed, but are deeply moving to my soul.  My precious Eathan taught me what it really means to slow down and smell the roses!  My problem is not  in missing the opportunity to smell the roses .  I probably could make a person sick with my desire to smell  roses!  (You know it's true!) But sometimes, the roses become sparse and it takes great effort to find the smell.  This is the season I have entered into and this is the time I have come to for writing tonight.

In Ecclesiastes it says in chapter 3 verse 1 "There is a time for everything.  and a seaons for every activity under heaven.  It goes on in verse  2-8 to say, " A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal,  a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to give up, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace."  Oh how these verses speak to me so differently through each circumstance I find myself in.  How painfully loud they are speaking to me now in this current season.

I am a Christian, daughter, wife, mother, and teacher.  Those are the things that make me who I am.  And in those things, I pour myself as completely as I humanly can.  I take deep joy in each of those roles and I treasure the blessings that flow back to me from what I give.  It is astounding.  But in all of those things, the most difficult charge I hold is the role of being a mother.  Never in all my wildest dreams could I have been prepared for all life would bring once I was granted the priviledge of carrying that precious title.  I have been blessed beyond measure and I have experienced levels of hurt that I never knew a heart could feel.  Haven't we all?

Recently however, we have entered into yet another unexpected heartache that has literally solidified a journey now shattered (hence the title).  The things that have occured are irreparable in the aspect of returning back to the place we once were or hoped to be.  The words that surface when I think of describing the current circumstances are words such as devastation.... fear...  heart break... betrayal.  Things a mom never wants to feel... things satan relishes.... things the Lord commands us to look beyond in faith.  That is where I am... between experiencing those feelings and making every effort to try to look beyond in faith. And I am exhausted.

You see, we have a mixed family. Not because of a marriage but because of how God designed our family unit together with children.  We have both adopted and biological children.  Who is what has never mattered.  They are all ours... all of them.  From the moment each entered our lives, we have loved them from the same place... straight out of our hearts.  We have prayed for them, loved them, cherished them, and even been aggrevated with each of them in one way or another along the way.  Never has it mattered if some were adopted and some birthed from my womb, because all were birthed from my heart.

A few years ago, we began to struggle with two of our kids.  Things we thought had been laid to rest from their pre-adoption time began to resurface and we began to trudge through uncertain territory.  We are both from safe, nurturing families and have never experienced the things our kids went through before we adopted them through CPS, so the things they experienced are very foreign to us.  We realized very quickly we needed help trying to cope and understand the different emotions that were starting to surface as a result of the baggage they carry. As time went on, it became clear that this was not our battle, but theirs.  They had work to do.  We had done all we could to as the parents, it was going to have to be up to them to allow Christ to do the internal healing.  We have prayed and prayed and prayed.  We have cried and cried and cried.  And we have waited.

In the meantime, many beautiful things have continued in our family.  Many of which I have shared along the way either on here, or other ways.  We truly have great joy.  We have great happiness.  We have great memories and experiences as a family.  We have felt love and joy far more than I could have ever expected when the journey began to parenthood. I have found myself so often bowed before my Father expressing my deepest gratitude for His favor on me to allow me the priviledge to be a mom. And the deepest gratitude is to Him for allowing the beautiful things to occur so that we could remain grounded that the issue is not the family, but the spiritual battle for our adopted children.  Satan wants to keep them for him.  He wants the genetic/generalational curse to continue on in them.  He doesn't want the bondage conquered because he wants to ravage them the way he has ravaged their biological connections.  But God, ever faithful that He is, has reminded us daily in one way or another that He is in charge of our household in spite of the relentless attacks from the enemy within our own court.  Oh how much I praise Him for the hope that shines through somehow each and every day.

It may come in the form of laughter from my youngest.  She is so absolutely contaigeous when she laughs!  It comes from the pit of her soul and spreads like sunshine every single time.  Darkness just simply disappears when her laughter erupts.  Or it may come when my biological son, my first born, yet my third in age demonstrates a steadfast walk with Christ far beyond what I could have dreamed for him at his age.  It may come when my husband slips his hand around mine and I feel his love without a word spoken.  It may come in the memory of my precious Eathan that brings joy and tears all at once.  It may come through a phone call from my mom or a conversation with a friend.  But somehow, every day, God whispers or screams at us that He is in fact still in charge and remember to seek Him and trust Him and hold fast to Him.  Oh Thank you Lord!

But, even still, we have had some very dark days, all a result of their past life haunting our present, of which we have no real control to stop because as I just said, it isn't our battle any longer.  We have watched our adopted son make choices that will affect him the rest of his life and have deeply impacted our family.  We have grieved those choices and how they have changed the dynamics of our family, but mostly we have grieved how they have robbed him of what his life was meant to be with each of us.  It has been very personal, but yet still very much his.  We have been able to protect our hearts and lives, and especially our other children from too much of the effects of his choices, but there was no protecting him from himself.  As he has grown older he has matured some and we are excited to see small glimmers of hope as he begans to make some very mature choices that we have prayed towards for quite some time. 

Joyfully, we signed papers last week for our son to join the military and we are very hopeful that this will set him on a course for a very hopeful tomorrow!  We are expecting to see what God has promised us when He said, "Train a child in the way they are to go and when they are old, they will not depart from it!"  I don't know if we will see it immediately, but we are expecting because God cannot fail... and He has proven to us so many times He won't fail.  We love our oldest son just as he is, but we desire God's best and won't settle in our prayers for anything less.  We believe in him.  We know he has what it takes to conquer the effects of his past once and for all and embrace what God truly has for his life.

But in the same breath as we began to celebrate the positive step he has begun in his journey with hope towards answered prayer, every ounce of security and peace was ripped right out of my life in a single moment by my adopted teen daughter a week back.  She hasn't even begun to grasp what it is that she has done, nor have we.  What I do grasp is the feelings of betrayal and fear were instantaneous and from that has grown deep anguish, confusion, and a sense of total chaos.  I have  been swirling as I process it all, while I struggle to maintain the sense of normalcy and security my other kids, who have such tender spirits and loving souls, so deserve. 

In the midst of it... I have missed Eathan more than I have words.  I guess because the feelings of hurt run so deep, they draw near to those I felt in his sickest of days... when I felt so helpless and incapable of helping my hurting child.  The feelings are far, far different, yet similar in some strangely familiar way.  Man I miss my little guy this week.  I wish I could look into his eyes, squeeze his little chubby arms, kiss on his squishy little cheeks, and hear him say just one time, "I lu you Mama!"   But I can't... not any more than I can make all the madness go away.  So I must trudge on and find a way to a new normal... yet again.

The details of the betrayal were revealed last Saturday when I found out that my teen daughter, without permission or any conversation, has gone into our attic when we weren't home,  dug through our personal items until she found the sealed documents from her adoption, and has opened our lives in every possible way to her biological connections.  She has made contact with an astronomical amount of people, most of which we have yet to connect in our own minds, who they are, how they are related, and what risk they could possibly pose for our lives. 

When we adopted our children, we took the paper work and read what was required of us... nothing more... and then sealed the paper work with the mindset that where they came from was not our concern, for they were now ours.  We knew what we had to know, but beyond that we felt that would not be something we addressed until the day came and our children became adults and decided that was something they wanted to do.  We had always expected it to be a very tender, prayed over time in our lives with them where we supported them as they faced their past.  We fully believed the day would come and we have been preparing our hearts for years for how we will love them and support them as they read through the documents and determine what it is they need to do from there.  What we never expected was that it would occur behind our backs and that we would be ambushed with the reality that they had not only opened their own lives to all of their past, but had exposed us and our other children in the mix as well.

I stood there that day, when God brought it to light, and I could hear my heart beating in my ears.  It was like that was all I could hear.  I was standing there, virtually speechless, and all I could hear was my own heart pounding right out of my chest.  Things instantly began to swirl around and I found myself going between Mother/protector role to child/needing my own protection role.  I felt instant betrayal and instant fear.  We didn't adopt through an agency.  It wasn't peaceful and sweet.  There were people that had their rights removed against their wishes, some with very concerning criminal records, that now new our name, our kids names... all of our kids names, where we live, what we do, everything.  I felt instantly invaded and assulted. 

Somehow I didn't lose it (Christ alone!).  I remained calm enough to gather more information, from my adopted daughter who very unwillingly leaked a little more information at my continual probing.  I was able to think clearly enough to keep my youngest out of the mix and unaware, to give direct instructions to what I need from my biological son who is far to wise for his years, get my husband on the phone and make the plan to take my adopted daughter to his place of work, and keep my senses enough to calmly place a call to one of the biological connections.  I fell apart later that day, but I was able to manage through those necessary things at the time.  I know it was the strength of the Lord... I never could have done it on my own.  Never.

This is the point where I am feeling the pull of the reigns.  It isn't time to press any further.  I sense this is the place where my raw emotions might over power the trueness of reality from God's view were I to keep writing.  God is bigger though the circumstances at play are beyond comprehension for me.  My emotions aren't completely agreeing with this, but my heart and mind continue to recall all the ways God has proven this time and time again.  So that is where I need to stop and camp today.

I don't know how many of you have continued through this blog post.  But if even one of you  have made it to the end, may I ask you to pray for us.  We feel our safety and security from the earthly sense has really been rocked.  There are valid, strong reasons to feel what we feel, but the details of why are not nearly as important as just turning to God knowing He has the details already worked out.

And I don't know what you are facing.  What your giant is.  But I know that we all have them and they are real.  And I will be praying for you as well.  And in the end of it all, I will praise my God for He is the author and creator of life and He holds us all in His hands.  Go find a rose.  I will too.  And we will be held in the fragrance of our Father.

Thanks for reading.  Thanks so much more for praying. 

Robin