Psalms 23:2 states "He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside quiet waters." (NASB) Other translations will say "still waters", but however it is translated it describes a peaceful place, a place of rest.
I have no still waters right now. My emotions are raw with fear and anger and almost everything makes me want to lash out or break down in tears. (See my previous post for background on what is happening.) And things are not getting any better. She has been in a facility for a month now and she has learned to play their system so well that her insurance is thinking of discharging her due to not having any behaviors. No medication, no progress in therapies, no changes whatsoever and to be sent home to do the same things again. Nope. I have two other children and a wife to protect.
I am so angry at the people who said that they were going to help. Angry at the hollow words spoken on admission of promises not kept. Sad and scared of the possibility of more trauma to our other children and ourselves. Overwhelmed at the fact that I cannot change this situation that we are sitting in.
We do not know the future. We cannot say for sure what is going to happen and we cannot lean on our own understanding. We are trying to trust in the Lord, to walk down the paths where He leads and go through the doors that he is opening.
I know that God is a good father. I know that He wants what is best for us and our children and that He intentionally gives us what He does. That is why I am trying to not allow this fear and anger get the best of me. Since He is intentionally good to us, I will intentionally worship Him.
This is my song for today: Intentional by Travis Greene
May these lyrics bless you as you hear that "all things to work together for the good to those who love God" (Romans 8:28 NASB)
Do you ever feel like David did?
"How long O, Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?" Psalm 13:1 NASB.
There are times in life where we feel that God is far away. That He is willfully apart from us. Honestly, I have to admit that I am going through one of those times right now. And it has been going on for a while. I do not know how to stop it or if this feeling is ever going to stop.
My wife and I have a biological child and we adopted a brother and sister sibling group. We wholeheartedly believe that this was what God called us to do. Even before we were married we felt the call to adopt on our hearts. So after much prayer, preparation and planning, and five years of waiting we were placed with two children. Feeling that this was the road that He had planned for us, we embraced the whirlwind.
Now it is two years later. And during those two years we have had four good days with our adoptive daughter. Four days where the weight of the trauma of her past was lifted and she was a happy and whole child. Four days in which we could see what she could become if she wanted to. Those were good days. Those days raised our hopes, and our cares vanished for little while. The pressure of us as parents having to find the right formula to help her was gone.
Then day five hit and everything crumbled and our hopes also. Those good days freaked her out, and she backslid into a whole host of other problems to include now being on medication, and as a family we have 7-8 therapies a week. We have found out the the medication is not helping with her ability to choose what is good for her. She is willfully choosing to not choose the good. This has been going on for months now. This is where I have the problem with waiting.
We have given her over to God. We/I understand that we cannot fix her and the more that we try and deal with her psychological problems, the further we are at being her parents. I have started to see a problem to fix, not a child to parent and love. This cannot go on. We have started to look at residential treatment facilities where she can go and work on her, and get the internal foundation that she needs to be stable. We will visit her, attend family therapy sessions and be there to love and care for her when she gets out.
I hate the waiting and I truly hope that God will sort this out soon. I am down, like David, constantly crying out to God to intervene and to bless us with an answer. Darkness hangs on me like a shroud that I cannot throw off and it overshadows every move I make. I have started to second guess my decisions hoping that they are the right ones. It makes me ill to know that I cannot fix it myself. If this was my fault I could change things like parent different, pray harder, or will it into existence. But I can't. And it hurts to know that she does not want to be better.
The waiting for God to move, the unknown answers that I do not know, the anticipation of something that needs to happen that I cannot see happening, irks me. I am not God, nor do I want to be. At the same time I want to fix her and I can't.
I truly hope that one day soon I can be like David at the end of this chapter where he states, "I will sing to the Lord, for He has dealt bountifully with me." Psalms 13:6 NASB.
I want her to choose Him. That way He can deal bountifully with her.
There are times in life where we do not need to forget what we have been through. Where we can see that God has been with us, and blessed us. Through our struggles or maybe answered a prayer that we have been praying for years. The memory of the great thing the Lord has done for us fades unless we set up a memorial. Memories, no matter how good, will fade with time.
That is why we have photo books and the fond memories that pop up on Facebook of things that we shared years ago. It is also why we keep our kids kindergarten art work. These allows us to remember what they were like at that age.
Folks in the Bible did not have picture books or Facebook to remind them of the good times. They had oral histories and physical markers in place where the awesome work that God had done on their behalf to remind them.
These are paraphrased from the Word.
Jacob set the rock up the he used as a pillow and blessed it and named the place Bethel. (Genesis 28:18-19)
Joshua told the Israelites as they crossed the Jordan on dry land that one man from each tribe should lift a stone on their shoulder and carry it to the other side. While on the other side they placed the stones in a pile in Gilgal, to remind them that they passed that way through the Jordan on dry ground. (Joshua 4:4-5, 20-22)
While Joshua was still in the riverbed, he placed 12 stones on the place where the priests that were carrying the Ark were standing. (Joshua 4:9)
Here is one more example and this one applies to my family personally.
After defeating the Philistines in battle, Samuel placed a stone between Mizpah and Shen and named it Ebebezer saying, "Thus far the Lord has helped us.". Ebenezer means 'Stone of help'. (1 Samuel 7:13-14)
We are getting a puppy on Saturday and we are naming him Ebenezer. We will literally be raising a stone of remembrance, a stone of help. He will also be a physical testimony to others of what God has done for us that we can share with them as we get the funny looks about his name.
We are naming him this for specific reasons. To remind us of the struggles that we have been through the past months with adopting our children and getting them help. To remind us that God was, and is with us during the loving interactions and hard won battles. To remind us that it will not always be this way, and that His love will never change.
I challenge you to go out and place some stones with your family. Use it as an opportunity to tell your children what God has done for you in the past. Do not tear it down after and you will be surprised at how long they will remember what it means. You could also take a stone and write a word on it to have in your or your kids pockets. Words such as "strength", "faith", or "prayer" could be a reminder of how God is working in our lives.
I really like driving. It is one of the things that I feel I am good at. I grew up driving in a hay field when I was 8, while my dad threw the hay bales in the back of the truck. I did that for many years and finally transitioned to the country dirt roads that we had around our house.
What has struck me over the past couple of days is how life is like those dirt roads. I have found that sometimes we are on some long washboard roads that just shake and beat you to death; the vibration just wearing us out. The day to day life that just grinds us down. The thousand little things that we do during the day that seemingly have no consequence, while at the same time can build up over time.
Maybe we are driving at night and we hit a huge pothole that came up too fast to miss. The jarring impact only lasting for a short time yet it can leave us forever changed, whether it be losing a job or putting a child in residential care. These may come and go quickly, however, while we are in their midst they do not feel short. In the grand scheme of God's plan they really are a bump in the road and we are changed for just for experiencing with them.
Sometimes roads will be so dusty that we cannot see what is behind us even as we focus on where we are going. And we could feel that if we stop, that cloud of murky, grey-colored air will catch up and descend on us so that you will not be able to see where you are going. Funny thing about us stopping is that the dust cloud goes away after a while. The dust settles, no longer obscuring our vision.
Then there are the times where God shows us that He is taking care of us, where He has come and used a road grader to smooth out the washboards and fill in the potholes. Then He sent some rain, just for us, to wash away all of the dust. We can look back and see where we have been and have a clear view at where you are going. Knowing that God put us right here, right now, for what we are experiencing, is a huge blessing.
I may be feeling nostalgic about those country roads, but feeling as I do now, I will not be able to look at them the same way again.
We have been having a hard go of it lately. In one of the previous posts, I talked about starting something new and the devil attacked. He started nit-picking at first and moved on to bigger things from there. For the past little while I have been trying to keep my head afloat, to keep the kids somewhat civil, to take one problem at a time and to fight my own battles.
As some of you know, that does not work and I quickly became overcome by the weight of all of the difficulties that we were facing. Parental, financial, relational, and work related, I was buckling under the pressure leading to my short temper and explosive ideas and words in my head. It was not a good place to be. I think that most of us has been in a similar type of situation before.
What I was trying to do to fix these situations and problems was not working. No man is an island and we are not meant to walk this world alone, so when I opened up to my wonderful wife about these issues and shared my feelings I started to feel better. She has a great listening ear, but our real help comes from the Lord. Over the past few days He has sent people to help us in almost all of the ways that we need. From a place for our daughter to go to get help to yesterday a check coming into our account 3 days early. He is taking care of us and He is showing us His love in very obvious ways.
I have a prayer journal that after my bible time in the morning I write down a prayer that is on my heart. Yesterday morning it was for God to help us. I confessed my own selfishness, thinking that I could handle this on my own. I asked for increased faith, and I asked for a way out of this hole that we were in. Yesterday afternoon, God showed up in a big way.
This morning, as I was flipping through my bible looking for my bookmark I came across Psalm 120:1. The verse in the picture above. It says, "I took my troubles to the Lord; I cried out to Him, and He answered my prayers." I have that verse highlighted, underlined and starred. There is no telling how many times I have read it, heard it preached, or seen it on a poster, coffee mug or card. But today it was a fresh smack on the back of my head. Gibbs style. (We are NCIS junkies).
We need to take our problems, cares and worries to the Lord. As 1 Peter 5:7 states, "Cast all your cares on the Lord, for He cares for you". He does. He wants to be allowed to handle them.
Whatever you are going though right now, God has the shoulders big enough to take them. He loves taking care of His children.
Have you ever used a flashlight outside at night? The only thing you can see is in the beam of the light. Everything else is dark, mysterious, or maybe even dangerous. You have to sweep the light back and forth to keep from stumbling over rocks or logs. It can be a little scary. Especially while you are moving up a mountain to go hiking or hunting.
How much easier would it be to flip on a light switch and make the same trek when the sun is up and you can see everything. All of the obstacles in your way you can easily walk around or see the edge of the cliff and move accordingly. It is amazing what you can do when you can see in the light.
This life is in a world full of darkness. Jesus is the light. We can see the world through His light, but sometimes it still looks like we are using a flashlight. He allows us to see what He wants us to see. Mostly only a few steps at a time. This builds up our trust in Him. If He were to let us see everything that we were/are going to go through, we probably would not do it. I know that I would have stopped in my tracks and said, "Nope, that way is too hard, I'm going this way". While He is giving us pieces at a time we are building faith and strength. And while we may slowly be reaching the end goal, there is an end goal. We are not just floundering in the depths for no reason.
My wife and I have adopted two children and we have a biological daughter. I can tell you that the road of "normal" parenthood is not easy and when you throw in kids that you do not know, that bring in their own problems and generational curses, life gets really interesting. All of the help that we have given them and the time that we invest in all of them, all of the love we share for them and the pointing them to Jesus is just the beam of light. It is up to God and them to make their own path.
Most days I want to be able to see where God is leading us. That way I can get there quicker by bypassing some of the pitfalls and detours. But those are what help us grow. And grow we do. Slow and painful growth is still growth.
How do we grow in faith, how do we raise our children, how do we eat an elephant...slowly but surely, one piece at a time. We use flashlights, not light switches.
This is a video of a creek I found out at a foster/adoptive dads' retreat in Colorado that I attended a few weeks ago. One of the main concepts that I learned was that we need a group of individuals, a band of brothers if you will, who are in the trenches with us. No matter what the trench is, whether financial, spiritual, parental or anything else. It is wonderful to understand and know that we are not alone. It lifts the weight off of our shoulders that we placed on ourselves. It gives us a breath of fresh air to understand that we are going through the same thing.
In sharing these burdens, we can not only find help, but we can help others. We can take part of that weight by either being a mentor for them, or mentored by them.
The number of dads at the retreat really surprised me and the level of sharing of experiences and situations allowed me to understand that I am not alone. We are not alone. Just knowing that empowers me to continue to breathe easier. I can better understand some of the behaviors at home and I can come up with better ideas on what to do.
Brothers, we need fellow men beside us to help us in these trenches. Brothers, strangers, friends or whoever, we need to be able to call on them in our own time of need. We need to be willing to ask for help and to go when someone asks us. And to go and help in a non condescending, know-it-all kind of way, but with compassion and love.
Before this trip I thought I was alone. Yes my wife was with me but I felt that I needed to the the stoic wall that never swayed too far left or right. I learned that doing that was making matters worse. While I was on this trip I found a group of men that I can confide in, gain wisdom from and fight this fight with. And they felt the same way that I did. I was able to ask questions about their journey and they were able to give some perspective to mine. I can call or message and just see how they are doing with their families. It is wonderful to know that we are not alone. We cannot do this alone.
God has really been placing on my heart to create a ministry to support foster and adoptive dads. Because we need help and we need to know that we are not alone. My wife and I really want to minister together and I think that this is the way. So prayers please as we jump down into the trenches, to help others along their way.
Stay tuned.
