I was born when my mother was twenty-five. By that time she had already lost her first husband in a motorcycle accident on the ice in New York. She next lost the father of her first child in WWII, after which her daughter was kidnapped and never recovered.
So I was born to a traumatized woman. And, the trauma didn’t stop there. After my sister, Sheryl and I were born, she bore Darlene and Lori. Doctors recommend that a woman give her body two years rest before having another baby. She had five babies in six years. Because of exhaustion, poverty, and her emotional fragility, she gave up the last two for adoption straight out of the hospital. (I didn’t even know about them until I was in my forties.) All that was followed by her last loss – divorcing my father a year or so after her last child was born. Three men, and three children, all lost before she was thirty-one.
The point of this history is to explain why she shut down emotionally. She didn’t believe in God, so this was her way of coping with the chaos; her way of maintaining stability; her way of taking care of Sheryl and me.
She eventually healed through therapy. But by that time I, as the first born, had spent my early formative years in what was effectively an emotional vacuum. I absorbed her “normal” as my way of coping with life. Her next marriage lasted fifty years and gave me another brother and sister.
Today, I can see that while “emotionally unaware” is one way of maintaining stability, of taking care of myself, it’s not the best way. It is not only colorless, it is paralyzing. Happily, God called me after I left home, and gave me a very thorough grounding in His Word in an intellectual, non-emotional environment. Even though I’ve dug deeply into scripture for almost forty five years, it was just this morning, that I realized that God offers me a better way to remain stable even in the face of emotional storms around me – remain in His love.
My fleshly parents did what they could to take care of me with their limited spiritual resources. But their limitations left me emotionally crippled for almost seventy years.
Our heavenly Father has no such limitations though, and He has offered to adopt me as His son. He gives me a suit of spiritual armor that provides unshakable hope and steadfast faith. I can be co-heir with Jesus of life in all its glorious, everlasting, abundance.
Yes, replacing my mother’s way of coping with the vicissitudes of life with my heavenly Father’s way will allow some very deep wounds to heal. My spiritual armor consists of the helmet of salvation (hope,) a breastplate of righteousness, my loins girded about with truth, the shield of faith, the sword of the spirit, God’s word, and my feet shod with the good news of peace, a work that has everlasting significance. (Eph 6:10-18) This armor, unlike my mother’s that encumbered my life, actually lightens my load so much that I am able to soar as on the wings of an eagle. (Isaiah 40:31) (Well, actually, I’m sorting of just hopping and flapping my wings right now. But, at last, I am beginning to be able to see myself soaring, something I couldn’t do before.)
As I’m learning to trust our Shepherd more, my sense of security has grown. I’m able to interact with people in healthier ways, and this blog finally exists after years of wanting to set it up, as a direct result of leaning on Him in ways that I never could before. More often now, when I face a challenge, I remind myself that Jesus was calm as He walked on wind-tossed waves of the stormy Sea of Galilee. And my heart settles down, because I know that I have the mind of Christ (1 Co 2:16,) and that mind is calm under all circumstances. My mother’s way wasn’t as healthy as God’s way, Jesus. Thank you Father, for loving me back to health.
Beautiful