Tonight I thought that I would share a unique piece of my heart with you. In addition to my private counseling practice, I have had the privilege to journey with some amazing women at a shelter for women who are pregnant and experiencing homelessness.

That although founded with the vision of creating an adoptive atmosphere where women can make the brave choice of choosing life for their precious children, the shelter’s focus has transformed into a beautiful community where these same brave women can be given something that has remained elusive in their sacred journey. A third option. An opportunity to parent their children and forge a different path than before.

Most women who enter the community are in a place of desperation as they seek shelter, resources, and community. You see, for many, their journey has been one of trial, pain, and trauma. And in this suffering when it became too much, more than they have the ability to handle many have chosen survival, their God given protection system to endure. In choosing their immediate survival they choose to say “yes” to many things that inflict further pain. But survive they must, you must, we must. This need for survival, tolerating the pain that is threatening to overwhelm us, is so great that we give in to other pains, pains that isolate us, wound us, scar us in ways that we never expected.

It is in this pain that I journey with. Wounding pain, scaring pain, torturous pain, sacred pain.

So sacred.

You see things become sacred when they are in the presence of holy, God’s holiness.

I feel this holiness, this sacredness every day I meet with these women. The sacredness is undeniable. But for many in the fog of this pain, this sacredness is elusive as well. Yet despite the vantage point all pain remains sacred throughout our journey.

Sacred because from the moment of your creation, God was there. His Spirit hovering all around taking in your beauty, your uniqueness. The depth of his love for you knowing no bounds. Sacred because through your early pain, the wounding that was no fault of your own, God’s same presence remained, wept for love of you. And in your fight to remain alive, to keep numb from that which was too much, God never left…

Sacred, right?

A wanting , waiting, enduring, loving kind of sacred.

You see, many offer services to these beautifully wounded women, but do not get into the trenches with them. Not really see them. Something that they are used to in their journey, more pain, more numbing.

Most have asked women to choose life for their children and a great task that is. The problem is we give them a high call but no resources or limited outcomes to their choices. Yet, I see that the call to choose life requires us to walk with women, to journey alongside them not simply to make the choice of life, but to offer them a vision, one they only hoped possible, a vision for what their lives could be. Walking with them in practical ways, giving them a way to be self-sustainable as women and mothers who choose to parent, to attend to their precious children in ways that were not afforded to them, to care for and see themselves in ways which were elusive to those who were charged to instill their worth, their beauty, their potential.

Another sacred.

In doing so, I’m privileged to journey back with them in their woundedness, their pain, their numbing. To feel the pain that was once intolerable, the pain they have traded for an illegitimate suffering. And in doing so, redefine what survival was, where God was, and what loss means. Embracing the past as a sacred part of them that they carry with them today and into their future.

In this sacred journey, my vantage point changes. I see something that changes me. I see, in their suffering, in our suffering, the call that Christ sets before each of us. The call to be transformed into his likeness. The call to share in his sufferings. Forged within this suffering alone is an intimacy with God that cannot be forged any other way.

And when I sit with these women, their pain, I see their journey not as haphazard but as holy. A sharing in his suffering kind of sacred. A call to intimacy with God that cannot be manufactured. In the struggles that these women face, that we all face, a oneness with Christ is set before us. A depth to which not all are called to, but a transformational depth that cannot be explained, only understood in the fire. A redefining of suffering into a holy endeavor. A oneness with Christ

I see it as no small note that it was in his wounded body that Christ chose to come back to this earth after he had been in the grave. He came back with his glorious, torturous, sacred wounds. He charged Thomas to see, to touch his wounds. No shame, no fear, just see and touch.

God entered into his traumatized body so that, in part, we would not fear our own trauma.

God entered into his traumatized body so that we would know that our wounds were not the totality of who we are.

God entered into his traumatized body to show us that our in our woundedness we hover between this earth and heaven itself. Much like Jesus himself was hovering.

Sacred.

I’m often taken aback by the work of God in my life, aren’t you? Even when I’m not expecting it, it overwhelms me. I was pondering adoption the other day. The beautiful ways in which many have chosen to love and embrace children who were not born to them.

Another sacred.

The thing that overwhelmed me was two fold. I was struck with the need for these grown women to be adopted. Into our lives, our hearts. Grown as they are, their desire for intimacy, belonging, support, and community remains as strong as it was the day of their birth, the days of their numbing. It’s the difference you know, belonging. The difference between success and transformation or remaining in our woundedness. To know that you matter not just in words, but in action, in staying, in wanting, in walking the journey.

The sacred kind.

The second part of my pondering was Christ’s adoption of me, of all of us really. I was overwhelmed by the notion that adoption is very central to the vision of Christ. Only instead of infant adoption, my heart is burdened with the overwhelming desire to cast a vision for others to enter into the adoption of the women that I have grown to love so deeply. You see when Christ tells of the shepherd who goes out in search of the one sheep, we so identify with what it means to be that sheep, to be pursued with abandon by One who relentlessly loves us.

But it is also charged to us to BE that shepherd. To pursue those who wander like us.

My call was borne out of pain similar to those I sit with. A suffering that cast me into the arms of God when the numbing proved only temporary. It was in embracing myself as that sheep that allowed me to one day see myself as the shepherd.

Tonight, I wonder where your suffering has brought you?

If you have experienced the comforting of our Shepherd. Comforting from someone who decided to journey with you?

Could you see yourself as the shepherd Christ tells of?

To these women, to those around you?

Could you see your pain and their pain as one?

A sacred journey?

Not as someone who goes before, but someone who comes alongside them and walks with them.