When Your Heart Breaks

My heart is breaking. The young man who is staying with us has had such a hard life. It makes me want to cry to think of the things he has had to endure in his young life. It makes my heart break that his own mother threw him out on the street, for whatever reason. I cannot imagine any eventuality where I would turn my back on my child. Or at least I couldn't have begun to imagine how that could happen, until recently.

We have been having communication difficulty with our daughter. She isn't exactly lying to us, she just withholds some of the truth from us. It is as though she lives two separate lives; the one she tells us about and the one she actually lives. I am about at the point where I will have to enforce some hard tough love choices. I will have to let her fall on her face and not help her up, or help her out of the mess she seem to want to wallow in.

Did this young man's mother go through some of these same feelings before she turned her back on him? Perhaps I am too quick to judge her. I haven't yet walked in her shoes.

Each day I pray for the strength and courage and wisdom to know what the right thing to do is when it comes to my daughter and these seemingly destructive choices she seems bent on making. Each time I get the chance I try to help out in some small way to soften the blow of the "real world". I wonder, if my help here and there is doing her more harm than good? She has absolutely no concept of what it will be like to be on her own, because she has always been dependent upon us, not just for the really essential things, but for the stuff that makes her life easier than most kids her age. She has a car, it may not be a nice car, but it runs. We have paid for all service on it. She has a cell phone. It may not be top of the line, but it doesn't cost her a penny to use. She has a computer for her dorm room. It isn't state of the art, but it runs the internet.

Maybe this is the time when we should just let her go and let her fall down and not help her get back up, or clean up the mess, or fix the car, or pay the fees. If she wants to be independent, maybe we should let her have just what she wants, with all the rights and responsibilities that that entails.

After all, isn't that what our Father in heaven does with us?

Pax