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.
