...since becoming pregnant with my first baby, I appreciate mothers even more. Especially amazing to me is the love and sacrifice of birthmothers who carry a child for 9 months, and then willingly place that child they have carried into another woman's arms. There is no way you could ever label that "giving away your baby." There is no way that any woman could carry a child for 9 months, give birth, and not do all of it out of love. Wow. Talk about self-sacrificial love. This song makes me cry every time, because it is so beautiful.
The singer & songwriter is Mark Schultz, and he is singing his own story. Just as we often have very little idea of the sacrifice birthmothers make in adoption, so many birthmothers have no idea how amazing a chance they are giving their child. Who knows what each adopted child will become? Only the One who knit them together in their birthmothers' wombs, and selected the places and times they would grow up and live.
That song is my great-grandmother, who did an amazingly brave thing years ago, and gave life to my grandfather, and through him, to my father and his siblings, and to me, my sisters, and all my cousins, and even now her gift of life is ongoing as a new life grows in me. She missed her baby boy for 50 years, and when he found her again and we all got to know her, I think everyone was amazed-- truly our God brings beauty from ashes. And what a sweet, godly woman she was. I'll never forget the kindness complete strangers showed to my sisters and I when they found out whose "grandbabies" we were. Alzheimers took her from us years before she died, and now Heaven has even more of an appeal to me. I can't wait to hug her and thank her and rejoice together at the feet of the One who saved us both. Amen!
To all mothers, be they natural, birth, or adoptive, may you receive the thanks and honor due you for bringing us life and love... for sacrificing so much for us. May the Word to you be "well done, My good & faithful servant. Come and share your Master's happiness."
3 comments:
"... so many birthmothers have no idea how amazing a chance they are giving their child."
I think that a more appropriate word would be gamble. It's a crapshoot, even when the babies go to the very wealthy adoptive families. I got lucky and hit the jackpot: a wonderful, loving couple adopted me. Others had adoptive moms and/or dads who saw nothing but evidence of their own failure to procreate when they looked at their child's face.
An excellent piece of literature regarding this topic is available on the Childrens Welfare Bureau website.
Lisa, I am so glad that you "hit the jackpot" as you put it. I hope that you will be glad to consider the following two things that put your comment in a different light. First of all, birthmothers & fathers have as much say as they want in where their child is placed. Adoptions have significantly changed in the past 60 years. See http://www.impregnant.org/index.php/adoption or http://www.impregnant.org/adoption/adoptionmedia for more. The amount of forethought, choice, and care birth parents can now put into making adoption plans for their children is a far cry from a crapshoot. Wealth totally aside- it's the character, family dynamics, and values of the families which most birth parents look at.
Secondly, even if a birthmom didn't have any say, or an adoptive family totally had put up a front or decided they didn't want a child after all-- God was still not blindfolded. "All the days ordained for me were written in Your book, before one of them came to be," the Psalmist marvels. (Ps 139:16) "And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet He is actually not far from each one of us..." (Acts 17:26-27) That's comforting!
You weren't kidding--that song really is a tear-jerker! Thank you for sharing the blessing of that song, your post and your blog overall. I'm going to share some of this with my family next time I try to talk to them about my faith.
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