Below is a short excerpt from Finding Sarah Finding Me from the evening after a long day of reunion with my birth-daughter Sarah, and after we have said goodbye.
EXCERPT
I am a bereaved mother.
I’ve come back full circle to the grief I thought I’d dealt
with twenty years before. Is the reunion doing something similar to Sarah’s
parents? Has my resurrection from the past reminded Hans and Anne that their
daughter is not of their flesh and blood? Has the reunion brought back the
ghost of their original infertility?
The phone rings. A moment later David tells me it’s Bob
calling. As I take the receiver, I stand dumb, listening. Somehow I manage to
coherently return his greeting. Lifeless as a mannequin, I listen as he
explains that my expectations are too high. I swallow through a raw throat. “So
Sarah’s parents are pretty upset?”
He pauses. “Yes. Anne cried with me over the phone today.
Reminded me of you
twenty years ago.”
I look up at my kitchen ceiling as twin hot rivers flow down
my cheeks, into my mouth, and I taste the salt. “Christine,” Bob softly says, “did you get the bouquets I left
for you and Sarah at the office today?”
“Yeah,” I answer slowly. My clouded gaze searches out the
various bouquets that David has put in water and left on the kitchen table.
While Sarah and Mark were here at the house I had no emotional reserves to fuss
over flowers and forgot them. The long-stemmed pink carnations from Sarah and
those from Bob’s bunch are arranged in a vase. Sarah must have her matching
bouquet in their car, with the single long-stemmed blooms I sent along for her
mom and future mother-in-law.
Bob’s voice pulls me back. “Did you see the single pink rose
in the middle of each bouquet?”
I walk over to the flowers to take a closer look, and my voice
comes out dull. “Yes…there it is.”
Bob’s silence on the other end of the phone somehow warms me.
“Don’t expect too much too soon,” he says. “Give it time. I gave you and Sarah
the rosebuds to symbolize a new beginning.”
A new beginning. Not the end. Is it possible the Lord will
treat my words of despair as dust blown on the wind? The venom that had bubbled
up inside me now drains away. Sympathy for Anne and Hans washes in like a
gentle tide. So too does sympathy for Sarah for having to endure such a
tug-a-war of emotions in the midst of university studies and marriage
preparations. . . .
. . . But as the days and weeks pass, my journals fill with
bitterness. “My heart is torn,” I write. “I have the bond of maternal love
still within me, even though Sarah and I are strangers. How do I start a
relationship in which I’ve already invested twenty years of love and prayer? Am
I to grieve my loss again and again that I am not Sarah’s mom for the rest of
my life?”
I read over my journals from the Christmas before when the
Book of Ruth gave me such inspiration in my search for Sarah. But I’m not
satisfied like Ruth was at the end of her story. I feel more like Naomi when
she hollers out in the middle of their book, in that same gut-wrenching tone as
me, “Don’t call me Naomi…Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my
life very bitter.”
I can just see Naomi, her losses too deep to articulate into
sensible speech, hurting, hurting, crashing to her knees in the dust, feeling
the thud echo through her body. Her other fist curls into a solid ball, and she
raises it to the air, shaking it under the very nose of God. “You did this! You
the Almighty have treated me cruelly.”
New beginning, Bob said. “Huh,” I scoff. All this time,
believing that God encouraged me to search for Sarah, I’ve been wrong. Those
pink flowers I believed were mysterious little miracles over the years, I read
that all wrong. I only saw what I wanted to see.
But I’ve been wrong not only about the search.
As the kids go off to school each day, and David to work, I
huddle in my house alone, remembering those three days in the hospital in 1979,
remembering the strong sense that God wanted me to give Sarah up for adoption.
All those years ago, it wasn’t me giving Sarah to her parents. Instead, God
took my child from me.
Relinquishing Sarah to adoption was, I believed, better for
her. And now the thought snakes in—better
for her, not just because she needed a father, but because you weren’t good
enough to be her mother.
End of this excerpt, but there is a happy ending. I promise. You just have to read further to find out how God mended my broken heart.
Click HERE
to read Forward and Chapter One of Finding
Sarah Finding Me
I am a bereaved mother.
Book Description
Sometimes it is only through giving up our hearts that we learn to trust the Lord.Adoption. It’s something that touches one in three people today, a word that will conjure different emotions in those people touched by it. A word that might represent the greatest hope…the greatest question…the greatest sacrifice. But most of all, it’s a word that represents God’s immense love for his people.
Join birth mother Christine Lindsay as she shares
the heartaches, hopes, and epiphanies of her journey to reunion with the
daughter she gave up...and to understanding her true identity in Christ along
the way.
Through her story and glimpses into the lives of
other families in the adoption triad, readers will see the beauty of our broken
families, broken hearts, and broken dreams when we entrust them to our loving
God.
Something Special About this Book:
Something Special About this Book:
100 % of author royalties for this non-fiction book will be
donated to the Mukti mission in India. If you would like to know the reason for
this, then you will have to read my book. I promise; there is a
beautiful reason for this.
But if you would like a sneak peak, then go to this link Global Aid Network gives aid to the Mukti mission,
especially to the Women's and Children's Initiative. Here is a little bit about
the woman Pandita Ramabai who is one of my favorite
true-life heroines.
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