I have been working on this post for a month. I have typed numerous words and sentences and deleted them over and over again. Nothing seemed to do justice to the stirring that I felt in my heart. It just so happened that this morning something hit me. This beautiful connection between what I felt in my heart and remembering the death and resurrection of Christ. I didn’t see the connection before, but God is so faithful to make sense of our journey. So if you are brave enough to join me over the next few minutes as I try to make sense of the things stirring in my heart, I welcome you.
Earlier this week I had a dream. In my dream there were two families and the only way I can describe their relationship is something similar to the Hatfields and McCoys. I belonged to the family we will call “Dark” and the opposing family we will name “Light”. There was a generational anger that was apparent in every individual of my family. In this dream my family members were being kidnapped by the Light family and it was assumed they were going to be tortured and deprived. I was even taken one evening by the Light family and kept for weeks. In this dream I was given food and I had consistent positive interaction with the family. I noticed that within myself I couldn’t believe how much I liked this family. I was taught from the time I was a child I could never show anything but hate towards the Light family. It was bred in me to despise them and now years later something had changed when I was actually in their presence. They were showing me who they were, not who I had been led to believe they were. I remember waking up from this dream and thinking “God, please don’t let them send me home.” It took me two days to process through what I had experienced in the dream. It wasn’t until today as I sat quietly in the drive-thru line at McDonalds that it hit me. The opposition felt by those living life without Christ is so generational, so deep, that it comes naturally. They just like my dream self are lost in the anger and hate of the opposition but even they couldn’t tell you why. It wasn’t about the other family as much as it was about the sense of community that hate stirred in my family. It was like hate was a bond that we all had in common, hate actually seemed to bring us together.
I believe God speaks to us so clearly in dreams. As humans we spend 1/3 of our lives sleeping and due to the fact that God created the system of sleep I choose to believe he uses it. I think of dreams as this incredible opportunity for the language of heaven to bombard our lives. So waking up from this particular dream I knew something happened in me. I was privy to some deep revelation that God was sharing. I have and currently am on a personal journey of understanding the importance of the Bible in a way that I have never known. I was privileged to grow up in a family that loved me deeply and made sure I had what I needed. I never went without. As a child I remember just trusting what God said in his word and never giving it a second thought. I never felt deep anger, I have never truly struggled with fear, I believe I naturally operate in a faith gift. That isn’t me saying look how awesome I am, that is me saying “thank you God!” As a person who defaults to faith, I think somewhere in that journey I didn’t hold the scriptures as important as I needed to. I relied on what I experienced and that was enough. Today that is no longer enough. So that hunger, partnered with this dream, was like a big wake up call for me personally.
This blog originally started as tribute to adoption. My husband and I adopted our middle daughter, Lennon Nicole, on March 1st of this year. That process taught me so much about the loving kindness of God. Some of the things that your DHS handbook forget to mention are the emotions that you feel when a parent’s rights are terminated. The brokenness you experience when you watch a biological mother walk out of the courtroom no longer allowed to contact that child. The pain and joy your heart experiences when you stand before the judge saying “yes” to that child forever. It is a lot, a lot of everything. Then today as I woke up reflecting on the death of Jesus on the Cross, it suddenly didn’t seem so hard. Him choosing to die for me, choosing to take on the pain and shame of all humanity and adopt me into his family seemed so humbling. I was adopted into a family that I didn’t “deserve” to be parented by a Father that took a cross for my restoration. I was an orphan and belonged to the “Dark” family before I was shown the restoration of the Kingdom of Light. I was hopeless and forgotten until I was renamed and crowned with royalty. Suddenly this world of adoption and families made sense to me. I can love because I was first shown love. I can give because He was given for me. I can give my family to a child that needs me because He did the same for every single one of us.
On this Friday, the day we term “good”, God had a very beautiful way of reminding me of how personal our story is. My daughter will know her story. She will know that she is loved deeply by me, but she is also loved by another woman who put her on this planet. A woman who I love because she gave me the most beautiful gift. A woman that I will honor and always treasure in the eyes of my daughter. I am so thankful that God calls us out of the Kingdom of Darkness and gives us access to the family that live in the light. I am so thankful that I have a Father, Husband, and King who laid down his life so that not only would I be saved, but that would save generations by adopting them into his family. Adoption affects everyone. For me it has been a very beautiful process that continues to show me of how deeply my King loves me.
I pray that you feel the love of your Father on this day. That you remember that no matter where you started on this earth or what name you were given, you have access to the Name above all Names. You have access to a family that walks in light and you have access to every good and perfect gift. You have a King that was put to death on a Cross but rose from the grave to show the world just how much they mean to him.