Forgiveness?

When the Lord laid this on my heart it was to deal with ME. Then he told me to write this blog post and I said “no”. I dreamed about it, and the next day I wrote a short draft of my thoughts. This sat in my drafts for a total of three weeks and I never looked at it again. but it has nagged at me, so here you go. One of the hardest posts I’ve ever written.

Forgiveness is often a hard thing to understand. When you are an adoptive parent it’s often impossible to understand. This subject is difficult for me to write about, and I don’t even know if anyone will read this, but it’s been on my heart for a few weeks now, so I’m writing this out here.

When you adopt a child specifically a child with special needs, or a child who’s special needs were specifically caused by the birth parent it’s hard not to have a hard heart towards that parent. I mean they hurt your baby. Or caused your baby pain. As mamma’s it so hard not to feel angry for your child. Actually there is nothing wrong with feeling angry about your child’s situation. The problem is when that anger festers and leads to un-forgiveness. When every time we think about that person our hearts are hard. This is completely normal and natural. I have battled with un-forgiveness. I completely understand where it comes from, and how hard it is to not feel badly towards people who have wronged you or your children.

It has taken me many years to get to where I am now, and I admittedly still have a long way to go. But, the Lord has really helped me with the un-forgiveness and truth be told hatred in my heart. When I am sitting in my daughters floor holding her and trying to explain why her mother didn’t try harder to take care of her, I have two choices, I can allow that to fester and feel hard feelings towards her mother and bash her mother (and that would seem justified), or I can accept that her mother made poor decisions and that God loves her anyways, and tell my daughter that I don’t know why those things happened, but that she is being taken care of now and God is in control, and teach my daughter to pray for her mother.

Un-forgiveness towards birth parents is a parasite that grows in your heart. Over time you it will feel like it belongs there. There will be many people who will help it belong there and add further to your hard heart. But the thing about un-forgiveness is that it keeps us from receiving forgiveness from God. Eventually we teach our children to have un-forgiveness  in their heart.

For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive you your transgressions. Matthew 6:14-15

Forgiveness is about freedom. Un-forgiveness and hatred bind chains around you. When you teach your children to harbor hatred and un-forgiveness it binds chains around them as well. So how do you change the way you feel about birth parents when they have caused your children to suffer? Well, that’s not a simple answer. The first thing is to pray, pray and pray some more. Pray for that person. Ask God to change your heart, and your perspective. It’s a very delicate situation because as a parent we feel so deeply for those children that the Lord has put in our lives, and we may never get past that. BUT I assure you learning to forgive them will be one of the best things you can do for yourself and your child. One day my children will be old enough to fully understand what has happened to them. I would much rather be the voice that helps them reach a place of forgiveness and love, then the person who helps them develop hatred.

This is a difficult task indeed, and one I am still working hard on. I am not the best with words, and this probably makes no sense at all, but it’s just something I have really been dealing with, and if for only one person, or maybe for myself, the Lord lead me to write this. And there it is one of the hardest posts I have ever written.