Faith Made Raw By the Loss of a Son

The very best intentions.

The most prayers for discernment I have ever said in my entire life.  

A spiritual crisis when God spoke loud and clear.  

We listened.

Why did it still go wrong?  So, so wrong?

I will never know, I suppose.  Those things just happen in life.  Those tougher than tough things.  Those moments when your entire world comes to a crashing halt and everything is forever different.

I was on a blog break when he joined our family, that sweet teen boy, aged right in between Brishen and Basia.  My past blog posts make no mention of him at all.  They don't talk about the emails-- many, many emails between the local adoption case worker, the teen's case worker, and me.  There are no blog posts about the lists of questions I asked or the long, quiet prayers to God before each and every phone call.  I wanted God to help me know the right questions, to make sure I would understand what this decision would do to our family, to make sure I would KNOW that my other kids would be okay if we said yes to adopting this child.  

My blog doesn't tell of the news that Asa became free for adoption right at the same time we were praying about this teen.  This news was significant because we could close our home for fostering once Asa was adopted, and this had been our plan for months already.  

We could close our home as long as we weren't bringing a new foster child into it, that is.  

We said no.  We were done.  We would regroup and focus on life as a family of ten, not a foster family, but a regular family at last.  I sent the email.  We could not take him.  I waited for the relief that we were about to be done with years of foster care to hit me.  I had been so very ready for this day.  

Then I got sick.  Sicker each day.  

I couldn't open Facebook because there would be some inspirational quote on my wall that would encourage me to take a chance, to do what was hard, to love others, to be the hands and feet (and mom) of Jesus.  

I couldn't look at my Bible even though daily study and prayer had been how I started each morning.  I knew what that Bible would tell me.  I knew what it would have us do.  I couldn't turn on my radio.  It's tuned to Christian radio.  Those songs.  Ugh.  I knew they would tell me to open my heart and my home to this child.  I could not imagine sitting through another sermon.  I knew I would simply break down.  

I felt like I was at a huge crossroads.  Either God was telling me LOUD and CLEARer than ever that we were supposed to say yes to this child, or I was going crazy and there is no God.  

It seems overly dramatic, I know.  It felt so, so real.  As I type it months later, the weight of what I felt is still so real.  This is what Christianity is about for me.  This IS MY RELIGION.  God loves me, as one of the least of these, and I am to go out and love others as the least of these, too.  I believe it to the depths of my soul.  If I turned my back on this child who I was being asked to love, what exactly was left of who I am and what I believe?

When I say I was at a crossroads, I do mean it.  I did not seek to convince Jon to take this child, that this was the only right path.  I really felt that God would speak to Jon the same way if he were speaking to me like this, so I thought it was likely that I was going crazy and that maybe there was no God after all.  I did not know what to feel or what to do or how I could move forward in a way that made any sense.  Could I be a pastor's wife who wouldn't go to church?  How would we raise our kids?  Do I just drop them off for Sunday school and fake it just enough at home?

I guess it was a good time to have a pastor for a husband.  He recognized the voice of God I was hearing as I poured out my crisis of faith to him.  Jon knows that there is a God, of course, and that these sorts of feelings are not crazy but are, in fact, God speaking loud and clear.  I was still confused and worried and upset that God was working like this in me instead of working through both of us equally--I had prayed for months that I would not push Jon into anything, that Jon would be the one who would know if we were to adopt again.  Jon insisted that he trusted that God was leading our family this time through me.  We decided to move forward with this adoption.  

Within a few days, I felt a peace like I had never felt.  When a friend asked how we "knew," oh, my, goodness, did I have an answer!  Either there is no God or we are to love this child.  This was knowing like I had never known anything before.    

Within days we were talking to this boy every single afternoon on the phone.  Within a couple weeks, he was flown to El Paso to live with us, his new adoptive family.  The day he came was a dream.  The anticipation was huge and beautiful and now breaks my heart to remember.  I got his room just right with bits of all the things I knew he liked:  Spiderman, the color blue, and Christian music.  His case worker sent me a picture of him waiting for his flight at the airport.  He was so handsome and so ready to be with us.  My son.  

For months everything was perfect.  It was hard, but I learned long ago that perfect can be really hard.  This teen has very high supervision needs and constant emotional needs, but I knew we would all adjust and that God brought us together and that we could make it work.  We were counting down the months until we could adopt him and be an official forever family for him.  He deserved it, and we wanted that for him and for us. 

And then one night everything fell apart.  Everything.  Within hours, I had to admit him into a mental hospital, two very scary investigations were started, and a very different crisis of faith began that still takes my breath away three months later. Spending many hours in the waiting room of a mental hospital in the dead of night with a child who I promised to adopt and truly loved, realizing he could never come back into my home, was the worst and hardest experience of my entire life.  I then had to get in my van at 3am and go home to my other confused kids and assess the damage and pain and face them all with the knowledge that I brought further pain and damage into their little lives when I invited a new brother into our home and family.  I failed everyone.

Trying to mourn and cope and heal and heal your children when investigators and case workers and licensing workers are calling and showing up and doing their jobs in the midst of your own very real, hard, tragic, scary, confusing loss is just simply the worst.  

A week later I got to try for another chance at having the hardest experience of my life when I walked into a therapy room at the hospital.  This child who was my son ran in to greet me, hoping he was coming home.  I instead had to tell him that he would never be coming back to our home.  I had to tell him a final goodbye.  How is it possible that I trusted and followed God to the very depths of my being and with all my love and understanding and still had to look at this sweet, very damaged boy and tell him that he was again being sent away an orphan?  I lost a son, but he lost everything.

I lost a son that night.  I did.  When he walked into my home, he was my son.  Each minute and day and month cemented it further.  That doesn't go away just because I cannot be the one to raise him.  I have a necklace with the birthstones of all nine of my kids, and his is just as precious to me as the others.  I have a family tree picture with seemingly one too many little birds roosting, but that ninth baby bird will not be pulled off the tree by me.  

My faith was also shaken up in ways that I had hoped it would never be.  You never know how you will relate to God in a tragedy until you face one, I guess.  I stink at this.  My prayer and spiritual life is trying to break through this storm, but I'm not where I was.  I stop myself if I think I am going to God for discernment because I just cannot grasp what went wrong when I so fervently sought it before.  I don't know how to trust whether I am discerning His will or not, and I don't even know if I want His will if it can lead to this sort of path.  

I'm only in the beginning stages of realizing  that God doesn't need me to get back to "normal" with my faithful morning devotional readings, my pauses for peaceful prayer several times a day, and my trusting cries for His help in my everyday issues, as beautiful as all that was.  I really felt I was getting so much closer to God back then.  

Now I get to feel first hand that God will take me just like this, when I'm sad and confused and lost and unsure and nowhere near a spiritual high.  I am realizing that I might just be closer to God now that I'm climbing out of a pit of sorts.  I'm definitely closer to so many others who have been in the same hard places in life--I certainly wasn't alone in that mental hospital waiting room.  My faith and prayers are more raw, less rehearsed, less like someone who is doing her best to be her best and more like someone who really needs God and faith and prayer.

I also know that I may never get satisfactory answers as to "why" any of this had to happen.  Why did we feel so led to bring him into our home?  Why, oh, why could he not have stayed?  

I do feel a little more peace about it all than I did a few months ago.  This teen, this child, is still my son, though in a different sort of way.  I cannot and will not physically raise him or have him in my home again, but he calls me two or three times a week just to talk.  I know without a doubt that the calls are a highlight in his life, and I am so thankful for the continued connection with him.  I'm the only mom he has right now, though I pray and pray that he will one day get a new one in an environment that is better for him and the others in the home.  

For now I get the job of convincing him that he is worthy of the hard work of healing and working through all those tough issues from his past, the loss of our family now included.  I get to listen to his stories of school issues.  I get to cry with him when Christmas is days away, and it's a really tough time to be an orphan.  I get to smile with relief when Christmas morning, even in a treatment center, is full of excitement, especially when there is someone out there you can call to tell all about it.  I get to send little care packages and ask him about his choir concerts.  We talk about the weather and about what's for dinner.  I get to be a "someone" in his life when he so often has no one.  

I get to tell him again and again, every time he calls, that he is loved, by me and by God.  After all, God did bring us together and this is the best why I have for right now.