The Blind Side

Who knew I loved football?

This week has been tough. Personally and blogally. And this film was the medicine I needed.

Let me tell you something about loss.

It is everywhere. No matter where we go or what we do we will lose people we love. And the hardest thing I ever had to reconcile was the fact that my family would begin with someone else's loss. That the very first experience in the life of my child would be the loss of the mother he knew in the womb.

We all experience loss and we all enter this world with missing pieces. At some point in our lives we come to a place where we see the world in its imperfection, we see how broken we are. And there is no hope for us. Desperation is the cause of madness, the cause of hate and the cause of bitterness. If we are very fortunate, there is someone we love; or at that point when we are so broken that it's impossible that we can love others, let alone ourselves; that someone loves us enough to show us the picture and person of Jesus Christ through their actions. They feed us, they clean us up, they trust us with a place in their home and they make us their child. By law or not they have adopted us. If we are fortunate. If we are not, we become a person so different from who we were born to be that, when we look at ourselves in the mirror, it is impossible to meet our own gaze. Loss is inevitable, but from loss miracles can happen.

Wealthy interior designers from Tennessee can take in an impoverished and broken boy who'd been crushed by his mother's addiction and love him so much; that he calls her momma and would fight to the death anyone who dared threaten her.

A woman who's body doesn't function the way it should, can have a son. A boy who would never know the love of a father, can have a good man to look up to and to help him become a good man, so that he can raise his children to be good people. And the woman who was balancing several other children on a budget the width of a thread, can continue to hang in there and have a chance at getting to a better place in life instead of further in debt, more dependent on the government or the charity of others. She can help herself to better standing with the knowledge that her baby is being loved and cared for, and she isn't hidden from him.

The thing about adoption is this: you take two lives ripped up by loss and you put them together. Then you pour out your soul of love into that brokenness and you grieve your losses together. Then you move forward; undoubtedly there will be things to grieve again when every milestone makes that loss poignant. But you move forward and you make something good out of the ashes of what is devistating.

A girl in my office today said, "Sixteen years without my mother, I would be sad, but my life wouldn't be about me if I lived with her. My life would be about her addiction. And God knows what I would have lost if I hadn't been adopted." She didn't quite understand why I cried, she had no idea what had happened this week.

So why am I doing this? Why am I taking a little boy from his biological/first parents? Because God knows what he will lose if I don't. And for me, that is enough.

Go see that movie. It is Great.