Chew on This For Awhile

I have a darling friend who has 6 biological kids and has adopted 7 in the last couple years from Liberia. This came to my inbox while we were on vacation and I thought it was too good not to share. It's Long--but so worth the 5 minutes it takes to read. Even more worth the days it will take to digest.

Blessings. Karen

Tomorrow morning we will be going to the hospital again for another
surgery appointment for little Miss Blessing. We have to be there at
5:30 so it will be an early wake-up time. They told me to pack an
overnight bag, but I am hopeful we will be home Thursday. The worst
part is the fasting for Blessing, as it is a bummer enough to not be
able to eat normal food, but even worse to have to have nothing at
all. She isn't really old enough to understand why this woman she is
calling "Mommy" and whom she looks to with those gorgeous dark eyes
pleading for a drink has to say "no" until after surgery.

Tonight as I was singing with the kids before bed I started
singing "Jesus is the sweetest name I know, I know" and Marcelo's
face lit up. He jumped in with "He's always just the same
HALLELUIAH; praise His holy name, HALLEULIAH!" I remembered hearing
this song in Liberia and it made me smile to hear my son sing it with
the loud, Liberian intensity that I love.

Tonight I was pondering the many stories I hear from those parenting
children who have been through trauma. Often times people think it
is their children alone who are displaying these particular
behaviors, that there may be something inherently extra-evil about
their child that is making them act so different from their
biological children. As mothers, we need to be flexible and
teachable, and if what we are doing is not working, we must seek God
for His wisdom and strategy and most of all His heart.

I'll just share a little of my own experience. I probably had a fair
amount of parental pride going into our first adoption. Our kids
were basically well-behaved, happy little souls and it seemed that
love and logic worked pretty well. No child is perfect of course,
but all in all I would say we had pretty "good" little kids. Then we
adopted. And the girls seemed determined to take over. And I'm not
sure if I would necessarily change everything I did at first, as I
needed to do a ton of boundary setting and "oh yes I am the boss of
you" type of parenting for a while just to reign in some of the most
disruptive behaviors. I don't think it would have made the girls
feel safe to not have strong, in charge type parents. But ultimately
we are after more than behavior, we are after hearts. And even in
the Word it doesn't seem that consequences ultimately changed
people. Look at Adam and Eve: eat the fruit and you will die.
Okay, let's take a bite. Then there is Israel: follow me and be
blessed, reject me and suffer the consequences. And Israel chose to
rebel. Look at our prisons, if consequences alone were the answer we
would not have repeat offenders!

Having had abused teenagers live with us in the past, having adopted
the girls, I saw a pattern of behaviors that made me realize that it
is so NOT about the behavior. That behavior is fear, and God's
perfect LOVE casts out fear. It's His kindness that leads us to
repentance. It's His grace that scoops us up out of our helplessness
and self-destruction and His mercy and unfailing love that melts our
hearts of stone. Yes the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom, but it's just the beginning. Are we drawn into relationship
with the Father by imagining Him as perpetually disgusted,
disappointed, and angry with His children? How about if we think of
Him as forgiving, long-suffering, gracious and compassionate? Even
as I was reading about the woman caught in adultery, or how "easy"
God seemed to be on prostitutes sometimes, I wonder if it wasn't
because He saw the whole story that led up to that. Were they
sexually abused as little girls? Did they grow up in poverty? Were
they pimped out as little kids to make someone else money?

So when the girls continued to lie incessantly, I knew I was at the
limit of any other consequence. I wanted to break this negative
cycle of them always being "in trouble" for lying. God led me to
some good resources at my point of desperation, and some light bulbs
went off. I felt like I was reading specifically about the kids in
my neighborhood, the kids in my home, the kids all around who have
been through all kinds of neglect and abuse and trauma. The first
time I tried something new regarding the lying it felt odd. I
totally ignored the behavior while not ignoring the child. I put my
arms around Alicia and told her, "I love you. You're safe and it's
going to be okay. I'm not going anywhere and I will always be your
mother and you will always be my child." (in my flesh I wanted to
freak a little and say, "How can I EVER trust you if you continuously
lie to my face?!?!") She didn't need another lecture on why lying
was wrong, what God said about lying, yada yada. Lack of information
was not the problem. Fear of abandonment and rejection makes kids
really scared and scared kids do scary things. (stealing, lying,
food hoarding and gorging, defiance, aggression, lack of eye contact,
etc. etc.) And the flood gates of relationship opened for us.
Alicia broke down crying, on some level I had spoken to a fear she
had never been able to verbalize. Or for Princess who would laugh
whenever someone got hurt, it took a couple years of consistently
responding in empathy to her hurts for her to experience genuine
compassion for another person. All the rebukes in the world about
why her behavior was wrong would have not changed a thing, as she
would do the deer in the headlight look and freeze up completely
whenever she felt any type of verbal correction coming her way. If a
child is worried about their very survival you can logic and
consequence them until you are blue in the face but you will not
break through into their wounded hearts.

So yes, pray and pray and pray some more for all your children.
Remember that love believes the best, even when behavior looks the
worst. Love hopes, it endures, and God says it never fails. Stay in
the moment, don't freak yourself out by imagining all kinds of
horrible futures for your child. Your identity is not in any other
person's behavior and your job isn't to "fix" anybody. Learn to come
to peace with who each of your children are and not who you wish they
would be. Maybe there is a lot more God wants to show you about you
than He does about your child. I personally have had to come face to
face with my own idols throughout our adoptions. I did still have
the idol of comfort and peace and quiet and a relatively stress-free
life in my heart. So it became pretty easy to resent anyone who was
messing with that on a daily basis. I realized that loving without
expectations is impossible except for the grace of God. I realized
how much my trust and attachment-challenged children mirrored my own
insecurities in my relationship with my heavenly Father.

Really practically speaking, one of the best little tidbits I picked
up along the way was the 10-20-10 idea. Take 10 minutes in the
morning, 20 minutes in the afternoon, and 10 at night to just lay
down and hold your child who is having hard times in your arms and
let them talk. About anything. (I would occasionally ask a question
like, "I wonder what's going on in Liberia right now?" just to let
them know it was okay to talk about Liberia-stuff if they wanted to
and I would not be threatened or freaky about hard topics) You will
know if you and your child have attachment issues going on if the
very thought of lying down and snuggling that child makes you
recoil. (I know the cycle that can happen when you feel like one
child is sucking the very life out of you and just their presence in
the room feels like a black hole of need that you can never fill so
you just internally give up and try to avoid them….it's a lie. Of
course you don't have to fill up their empty places, only Jesus can,
but you can engage in the battle to lead them into a relationship to
Christ through their relationship with you) You can start small,
maybe 5-10-5 is a better time frame at first. But listen, don't
lecture. The connecting happens on a physical, emotional, and
spiritual level and the most important thing is to just stay present
with that child and give them your undivided attention. (easier said
than done I know, it is hard enough for me to just talk to Brad
without wanting to fold a load of laundry at the same time).

It is easy to take a scripture or two and build an entire parenting
philosophy around it. God challenged me by adding a verse to my
thinking that I normally wouldn't have thought about as being
a "parenting" verse per se:

Psalm 119:22 Remove from me scorn and contempt, for I keep your
statutes.

It is too easy to look at anyone's behaviors with scorn or contempt,
as if we are somehow better than that. I see people being
scapegoated all the time as the source of some else's
problems. "They bring out the worst in me." Let them bring out the
worst! God wants it out of you! It was just sitting there hiding
all along, so bless the child or whoever else is driving you to your
knees. It seems to be the position God likes us in best!

Love, Jenny

Quote:

The more we are aware of our own sinfulness, the less appalled we are
at the sinfulness of others. ~unknown