BEAUTIFULLY BROKEN

I’ve recently been thinking so much about Nova’s birth mother; maybe because I’m pregnant, maybe because my girl has recently really started to come into her own, showing us so many delightful sides to herself.  I catch myself feeling a pang of heartache for her birth mother because of the gift she’s given me, but what she has had to give up also.  

There’s a dark cloud that hangs over birth mothers when it comes to adoption.

There are many opinions out there, and I’m guilty of having a few of my own before adoption touched our lives.

So many people are of the opinion that birth mothers who “abandon” their babies are irresponsible and don’t deserve to be mothers.  Of course there are some women who do actually abandon their babies in terrible ways and in awful circumstances, and those stories break my heart, and they should break yours too.

But, not all adoption stories start off that way, not all women leave their children on empty streets and in abandoned bathrooms.

Sometimes choosing adoption is the most difficult choice to make.  I have no doubt that the decision to place a child up for adoption has its roots in hurt for so many reasons.

And now that I am pregnant, and falling in love with this big little miracle, I cannot imagine having to give her up to anyone else, or having someone else raise her their way, instead of mine, having someone else be there for all her firsts and celebrating them instead of me.

I used to think adoption was always a part of God’s beautiful plan to build families, especially when it’s the only way some women can become mothers, but the more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to disagree.

In a perfect world, I don’t believe there would be a need for adoption to even exist.  In a perfect world, God would not have needed to come up with the grand plan of having to adopt us back into his family as his sons and daughters in order for us to experience the full-blown miracle that is His grace.

In a perfect world, my daughter’s birth mother would not have had to find herself in the predicament of having to choose another woman to raise her child.  I don’t think God ever wanted a broken, fallen world for us, and I don’t think He ever wanted broken families to even exist. Free will is the thing that makes us and breaks us all at the same time.

But, God is a redeeming father.  He won't leave us in the dust of our poor choices or brokenness, He simply cannot do it.  He won’t turn His back on the woman desperate to be pregnant, or the woman desperate not to be.  He’s not in the business of abandoning us, even when we believe that He should because we’ve messed up so badly. 

I believe He looks at our brokenness and it breaks His heart.  I believe He takes our poor choices and our desperate decisions and is able to make something beautiful from it, even if it wasn’t His original plan for us - like adoption. 

Desperate to be called “mamma”, and desperate to hold a child of my own, He used the miracle of adoption to make that a reality for me.  But I don’t think for one second that He intended for her birth mother to have to give her up in order for me to become her mother.

I don’t believe for one second that He ever intended for her to have to make that kind of decision just so that a dream I had could be realized.  But, He is able to make something beautiful from that sort of brokenness, because He’s in the business of doing just that.  He won’t leave a situation handed to Him in a state of brokenness, and He won’t leave you that way either.

Whatever it is you find yourself broken over, whatever that brokenness looks like, I do believe that something beautiful can and will come from it. I do believe that the cost of a fallen world working its way back to redemption is not too high a price for a Father like mine to pay, and I also believe He’s prepared to keep paying that price, and keep coming up with wonderful ways to make what’s ugly and broken beautiful and whole again.