Thursday, November 29, 2012

Not My Saving, but His: What I Know Now Thursday

It's time for What I Know Now Thursdays...

Photo credit: Wallflower83 / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND


and what I know now, this Thursday, is a very difficult thing to know:

that my oldest girl's heart is broken, has been broken, and breaks nearly every day...and I can't do anything to stop or fix it.

Are you a parent who watches the child you love suffer either through growing-up painful circumstances or through circumstances beyond their (or your) control?

I understand.

I may not have given birth to these children, but my heart holds them as if my womb did. And my heart aches when their hearts ache.

And right now my 14-year-old, who isn't able to accept me as a mother-figure in her life right now, is hurting beyond belief, and, like my mother before me, I now share the ache-for-the-daughter.

What I know now and what my own mother had to learn through many hard, hard years...is that we can't do anything to get our daughters out of the train wreck they sometimes [must] go on.

We can't be there to catch them every time they fall.

We can't be there to fix everything.

All that is certainly known in the parenting community, but do we really know it in our heart? I'm not sure because I know that I still try to band-aid and fix it all up, anyway.

When my 8-year-old stepdaughter is angry, she will let me sit with her and hold her and talk it out. And when my 6-year-old stepson is scared of something, he'll climb into my lap and we'll sort it out together.

But there is that age, that fighting-for-independence-age, when your teenager pushes away all attempts to love and support, while, at the same time, secretly yearning to know that you are still there, despite it all.

So, that is what I must do. Be here. Loving her from afar, making myself available should she seek me out.

One thing I didn't know not too long ago was that, while I could not be with her 24 hours a day to rescue and comfort her, there is a God who can. This 14-year-old isn't quite sure how she feels about this God we introduced into her life, full-on, 2 years ago, and so she wanders around pinning God-like hopes on mere mortals. How I wish I could open her eyes to all I have seen in 2 years.

But that is her own path to walk and God has His own will to lay upon her.

What I know now is that God's plan for her is a good one. He wants hope and a good future for her (Jeremiah 29:11) and I need to trust that.

What I know now is that, no matter how much I want to, I can't be her savior.

But God already is.

Linking up with Sarah Mae, even while is on sabbatical:


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