Sacrifice

     Losing a child is the most ridiculously difficult thing one can ever go through. The grief washes over you like waves, slowly at first until suddenly one of them knocks you down and you are overcome by it, leaving you gasping for air as they keep pummeling you without mercy until you despair even going on. I have experienced no greater pain in life, and it is a very lonely, hopeless pain. The kind of pain that keeps me from sleeping at night and makes me want to not get up in the morning. The kind of pain that other people don’t seem to understand.

     I always felt it was incredibly insensitive when people would tell me, “I could never do foster care. I wouldn't be able to give a child back,” as if I were somehow magically less caring than them or perhaps just didn't love the child as they would. Now, walking through the experience, I can see that it truly is not for the faint of heart. I never dreamed 15 months ago when I was told that parental rights were being immediately terminated on this child, who became my son in my heart the moment I brought him home from the hospital, would one day be returned to his biological mother. In this system, there was nothing I could have done differently or better. There was no second chance for me. I am a helpless byproduct of a system that leaves a long stream of broken people in its wake every single day, and now, I am walking through every parent's biggest nightmare.

     Tonight as I sat here alone grieving I began pondering in my pain, and I began to see the love the Father has for us in a whole new light. We are created in the image of God. God has feelings just as we do. He gets angry, He loves, and He grieves. I began to imagine what God must have gone through as He watched Jesus walk out His calling to be tortured and murdered. He knew as He sent Him here that there would be no other way. I can imagine how heartbreaking it was for Him as Jesus called out to Him in the garden of Gethsemane asking Him to take the cup of suffering from Him. How difficult was it to stand by as His perfect son was mocked, beaten, scourged, and nailed to the cross to suffer and die one of the most excruciating deaths known to mankind.

     Fast forward to today as I sit here in the dark writing this because I couldn't sleep because of all that is in my heart. I know that my situation is very different from what the Lord went through, but it gives me a whole new appreciation for just how much the Father gave up for each one of us. I would be willing to do just about anything to not have to give up this child I have loved and raised, who calls me “Mama” and gives me kisses when I get him out of his crib in the morning, yet God did it willingly. This Jesus, who was with Him in the beginning as He made everything that was made and was His daily delight. He didn't have to be coerced. He did it because He loves us that much.

The Word says, “He who did not spare His own son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32) He already gave us His best. Why would He withhold anything else from us if He was willing to sacrifice Jesus? It goes on to say, “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39) The Lord gave me that verse several years ago as I was walking through some trials that seemed difficult at the time, and I have considered it a “life verse.” I have always looked at that last phrase as almost an afterthought, but now I can see that it means everything. His love is IN Jesus because that is what He gave.

     I had not planned on publishing this until long after things were settled down in my life. The feelings are too raw, and right now I can’t answer the question, “How are you?” without crying; however, the Holy Spirit will not let me put it on a shelf. In all this suffering, I feel that there is a confidence that this has built in me that cannot be shaken. I don’t understand everything that happens here on this earth, but I know that the love that God has for me, for all of us, is greater than any of us could begin to fathom. So if this world takes my son, I can have confidence that the Lord will not withhold His Word from me and that he will always have peace, that because he has been trained up in the way that he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it, and that one day I will hold him again, if not in this world in the next. Because my God loves me, because He said it, and because He is faithful.