Birthdays and Learning to Forgive

Yesterday we celebrated this girl! She’s grown so much since these pictures were taken, but her smile can still light up a room, and her laughter is contagious.

You don’t see her a lot in this space because I decided long ago to try to give the older kids their privacy — but let me tell you, we are so proud of this young woman and just marvel at the ways she’s growing into such a beautiful woman of faith and integrity.

She was the first person to ever call me “Mom” and she was part of a very important lesson I had to learn after a very traumatic birth experience with an awful midwife (The only bad midwife I’ve ever encountered, by the way. Most midwives are amazing and we went on to find amazing midwives for some of our other deliveries.)

The amount of negativity and guilt our midwife put us through, along with the total lack of respect for my wishes and overwhelming desire to speed things up eventually led to losing all trust in the woman we had hired to help us have a natural delivery.

Long story short, our drug-free natural delivery dreams ended up in an unnecessary C-Section. Not how we saw that ending.

But after 30 hours of dealing with an awful person who made this time almost unbearable, our sweet baby was finally born!

I saw this beautiful face — and all of a sudden, I was completely smitten. All the awful of the past 30 hours disappeared and I was left staring at the beautiful face of my baby. It was amazing!

I cried and told her she was worth every minute of the pain and struggle and doubt and fear — she absolutely was worth it!

I left the hospital totally excited about starting my life as a mom, but slowly the feelings of anger and bitterness began to well up in me (and rightly so). I had bee ill-treated in the hospital and it started to fester.

I knew I had a choice to make. Do I forgive or do I let this bitterness take over? (And forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting). Looking down at my sweet baby, I knew the right answer to that question.

This sweet girl gave me the strength to forgive.

By the way, to forgive is not to say what somebody else did was “okay”. Not at all. To forgive is to free yourself from being attached to the person who wronged you. Until you forgive, you are not free.

Jesus knew what he was doing when he told us to forgive. He knew it led to freedom. He knew if we refused to forgive, we would be the ones who would suffer the consequences, but He never leaves to forgive on our own.

Not only does Jesus given us His own example and the grace to forgive, but I can tell you that He also is right there with us, when we choose to forgive.

He doesn’t make us do this difficult thing of forgiving on our own. He remains with us, every step of the way.

So I prayed a simple prayer “Lord I forgive. Help me to totally forgive”.

It took time, but the bitterness left my heart and I was free to love my sweet baby and the sweet babies that were to come after her. I forgave so that I could be free to fully love again.

And I have this sweet girl to thank for giving me the strength and the courage to forgive when forgiving seemed impossible. I have her to thank for teaching me one of the most important lessons of my life.

I have her to thank for discovering forgiveness as a true path to freedom.

I have her to thank for the discovery that God can bring an even greater good out of any bad thing — and to know without a shadow of doubt that, when plans go out the window, God is still there working in the midst of it.

We just need to trust Him and wait on Him and eventually we will see the good on the other side of all the pain and disappointment and sadness.

She taught me that and she is still teaching me so many lessons I never would have learned without her in our life.

So hooray for this beautiful girl whose very first days on Earth impacted her mom in ways she probably never knew.

Happy Birthday, sweet girl. I love you and will be praying for you as you go out into this world to continue to do beautiful things with the life God has given to you.