Trying to Leave the Past Behind

There is a part of our journey that we intentionally left out of our previous blogs. As I (Dave) have been reflecting, I realized the past few years have played an important part in why our adoption is important for us personally, and felt the need to share.

The opportunity for us to adopt arrived at the tail end of the hardest year of our married life. Some might not know this, but up until last year I had been working as a youth pastor for 7 years. In 2012 I accepted a new position at a rural Manitoba church. We sold our house, moved closer to the community and entered this new chapter of our life with joy and anticipation. 7 months later this position ended after nearly destroying us both. It has taken months of counseling for me to be able to formulate and understand what happened. 

I can say now (for the first time publicly) I was manipulated, abused, beaten down, publicly humiliated, pushed out, and lied to in the name of dysfunctional church politics and heavy legalism. We left the church with little to no sense of self worth and a loss of identity that left us close to divorce. I can remember praying together with Jen that we would find a place where we could genuinely serve and give in to a social context as a couple, something we were ready for after 8 years of marriage. We were devastated when this did not happen, and broken over a feeling that we did not belong and had little worthwhile to offer.

It was easy in response to become defensive, angry and spiteful (and to my shame I did). It heightens your insecurities and breaks down your ability to trust. It makes you cynical of church, people and life in general. It makes you vulnerable to hurting others in exchange as well. I have discovered through the process of healing that the voices of this experience reached much broader than this particular church. In my own life they resonate from the struggle to emerge from the long shadows of a family of strong, type A leaders. They linger from years of growing up in a highly competitive evangelical church environment. It remains in the hallways of my junior high school where I was beat up and bullied, and in the warehouse where senior workers had little patience for a young guy looking to learn their methods. 

The voices persist as I try to rebuild an identity through personal interests and passions that feel forever overshadowed by those who are more educated, better writers, better musicians, more adverse theologians, more politically responsive and socially aware, better animal care givers, better husband/son/brother, better youth leaders than I will likely ever be.

When you struggle with a lack of self-confidence, any sort of social/professional rejection gets compounded in its ability to impact your life negatively. It highlights obstacles to social acceptance, such as getting married later than most of your peers (and for some not at all, and still others wrestling with divorce), struggling with severe anxiety and depression, struggling with self image and weight, the feeling we have failed to live up to societal pressures of what it means to be a true man/woman, struggles with faith, struggles of staying in the church, and ultimately the struggle with infertility. In truth we have many who care for and support us on our journey, and we are forever grateful for that. With family and friends we know that we are not alone. But the truth of our challenge, which I have also found in the shared story of others, has more to do with the struggle of “feeling” alone. This feeling flows out of an inward guilt over not being “more” than we were supposed to be, however far down this guilt might be buried. It is a persistent feeling that often flies in the face of our reality despite our efforts to change it. 

Social identity comes from balancing the ability to give and to serve and to receive in to a social setting in a meaningful way. When life deviates from perceived social norms it tends to throw this out of balance. It leaves one fighting for the kind of relationships and social/professional success that appear to come naturally to others. When one adds to this picture a degree of social or professional rejection (that often comes from having to try too hard to), it becomes nothing short of a daily struggle to simply choose to reenter the competitive world with confidence. It is easier to simply isolate oneself from a world that continues to remind you of what you are not.

I have found answers to the struggle of loneliness and isolation in a number of different worldviews. Popular atheism and traditional religion have both left me with a similar sense of guilt for not “being” more than I was supposed to be or not “being” able to live up to (any forms) of a “survival of the fittest” mentality. After leaving the church I had an opportunity to return to seminary to finish my masters.

I wrote one of my major papers on the word ‘adoption’ in the first century world. Adoption has allowed me to look at life through a different lens. The only one to use the term in Christian scripture was the apostle Paul, and he borrows it from its legal and political context as a way of defining and making sense of his experience with this man named Jesus. At the heart of his experience is recognizing how the Gospel (which declares this Jesus to be both man and God) directly addresses issues of belonging and social isolation. Adoption as a legal/political practice represented the burden of living up to social expectations and honoring the family name. Adoption as a Christian experience represented the freedom “from” these expectations: two different approaches to “belonging” and “being” in the world. Through learning about the process and definition of adoption I have come to see three things:

 
1. Life is messy and seemingly unfair despite my efforts to control it

2. My faith in God is still relevant even when I felt it wasn’t

3. There is hope to be found in reclaiming an identity as a couple who has something to give in the midst of our social struggles and loss of identity.

Our current adoption from the Ukraine has been one long legal process that never seems to end. And yet as time moves forward, adoption as a  ‘Christian’ idea keeps pressing further in to view. It is a journey that we can claim as our own instead of feeling like we are stuck comparing ourselves to the success of others. It has become a crucial part of rebuilding our identity together. And we can do this understanding that it is not just about our “choice” to “place” (two words at the heart of Paul’s “huiothesa”) our child in to a new family, but rather about the opportunity to see God’s choice to place us with a new found freedom to both give and to receive in to a social context despite how we might feel we measure up to others.

*I have edited and cut and paste a portion of my essay and attached it with this blog. It was written as both a paper and a sermon. I tried to take out the quotes and references so that it didn’t get bogged down as an academic paper, and fused it with the sermon, so it will come across as a bit choppy. If you feel you would find worth in reading through it, please feel free to do that. At the risk of extending an already overly long post, I simply wanted to post it as an add on. 

To read it simply click on the title "adoption thesis" that should be located on the right hand bar of the home page (beside this blog).