If you are an adult child of divorce, I know how deeply your heart has been torn. Even if your parents divorced decades ago, you still have scars that sometimes hurt. I have learned how to repair my heart with God’s help, and I want to give you hope through my story.
Like many children of divorce, I was torn between two homes. My mom had full custody of me and my sister, but we visited my dad on a regular basis. He lived less than 10 miles away. I looked forward to seeing him, but I had learned with experience that it wouldn’t be easy. I always left with a sense of loss and hurt.
One afternoon several years ago, I cried out to God from my prayer closet: “Why do you allow me to feel so much pain?”
I was standing in the intersection of old grief and new grief. That summer I wrote many memories in the form of poems, an excruciating process of reliving past hurts. I brought old hurts out in the open on paper, examined the pain, grieved the loss of what they revealed, and worked to put them to rest.
Too itchy. Too tight. Too breezy. As a highly sensitive child I was keen to feelings, especially to touch.
O Lord, you have searched me and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O Lord.
You hem me in–behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I am awake,
I am still with you.
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
All photos copyright 2016 Sarah Geringer.
Scripture selections from Psalm 139 NIV.
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