Sea glass…

I have something that has been weighing heavy in my thoughts, which I fully intended to write about this morning. After the unfolding of this weekend though, I find myself unable to go there quite yet… It isn’t that it was a bad weekend. It was a full weekend. A busy weekend. A surprising weekend.

My beautiful seventeen year old began her weekend single, with not only no prospects, but learning to accept herself in that place. Said seventeen year old ended her weekend snuggling on my couch with her boyfriend, whom she met 2 days before in totally cute and bookish/classic movie sort of way. I will not share the story here as it is not mine to share. The part I want to talk about is related, but more so mine.

Friday was kind of a huge day for that part of me which connects my brain and my heart. I’m sure you know the part in which I speak of… Gen and I, (in case you’re new here, I’ll take a second to point out that Gen is, in fact, said seventeen year old.) went to see the Hillsong movie on Friday afternoon. (on the chance that you are not new here, I know that this part in my chain of events will be of no surprise to you.) (sidenote: it’s incredible and you really should go see it.) There were a few things mentioned in the film which really stuck in my brain. The longer those things stayed planted in my thoughts, the more they grew and the more I simply felt WOWED by life, by divine intervention, by…

One of these thoughts was a reassurance that things are not up to us and we can’t control them. To degrees we can, sure. But there are so many things that we can’t, bigger things… Sometimes really beautiful things, like the unexpected pregnancies during the difficult and tumultuous times. Though this is not a place which I have lived in, I have seen this very thing play out in the lives of my sister, my older daughter and many, many friends. It is the sea of big scary unknowns whose waves crash into something amazingly beautiful and life affirming. These out-of-our-hands miracles which we may not have wanted, expected or believed we needed are the bits of life which reflect the brightest.

A darker reality of this same idea comes in the form of child abuse. Child abuse of any nature is unacceptable and never justifiable. Anyone who has been present in our world knows, however, that it is an epidemic reality. Child abuse victims, as they grow, become one of two people. Have you ever really noticed this? Having worked in the industry of broken children (which is, sadly, an industry here in America) for the better part of a decade and a half, I saw it unfold and cycle over and over again. Option one is the bitter, self-centered eternal victim who will always wear the blue-colored glasses aiding them to see themselves as the one wronged eternally. By friends, family, lovers, cable men, creditors, land lords, employers, their own children, etc. We all know these people, the ones with the lifetime of themes of being wronged somehow. The ones who talk on and on about it. Psychologically speaking, this is a pretty interesting way to live. Though we often get frustrated with these sorts, and due to that, they may wind up alone- they are not entirely wrong. Often they either keep themselves so down that they attract users and manipulators. In the times when they haven’t, however, I personally believe they are simply stuck in a rut. Whenever their childhood wounds happened, no one likely advocated for them. Isn’t that all they are doing those 10/20/30 years later- advocating for themselves, in their own minds anyway? The second option, however, comes less naturally. It is the option of bettering yourself, and going on to impact the world for the better, in some way, because your childhood wounds made you stronger. The two options truly are choices… And though the first part is beyond our control (and I do not believe EVER destined to happen) we can decide how we handle it, and who we choose to become.

Both my husband and I were at that crossroads, in our youth. We had to decide which route to take and upon our early days of meeting and getting to know one another, we both spoke the words aloud about how we wanted to provide a home to kids who needed it because that had been done for us. Over the 23 years which have followed, we have been foster parents, been a shelter home, housed teenage runaways, and become the parents of three of the most awesome, not-from-our-womb kids we could have imagined. Our home has also been the temporary home of quite a few young adults who became a part of our little rag-tag family. There is no way we ever could have orchestrated any of that, but we would not change a thing. The absolute ugly of our young lives was turned into the most amazing things in our grown ones. The stormy waves crash, again and again, making something beautiful. It is like the origin of sea glass, or the unearthing of shipwrecked treasures…

Sometimes we simply go to work a little lonely, on a friday night and then wrap up the weekend holding hands with a cute boy on the couch whose path yours likely crossed with many, many times before…