Tell it.

You may not know this, but when I was a toddler, my mom gave me up for adoption. She was in the middle of talks with those who would facilitate the process when her brother stepped in. He had just gotten married and he and his wife said that they would raise me. My mom was in a pretty lousy place in her life, as you can imagine. She figured she wasn't fit to be a mother and anyone else could do a better job. And if her brother took me, she thought, at least she could still have a part in my life.

I never really heard this story from my mother in its entirety until this weekend. She was asked to speak at a women's conference and decided to give her testimony. In the midst of 50 women, I heard the story from her, watched her tell it. As she unfolded her tale over the course of an hour, women teared up at different stages. Some, when they learned of her struggles as a young girl avoiding femininity. Some, when they heard of her broken relationship with her own mother. Still others as she told of her parents' divorce when she was eighteen. By the end of the story, as she ran in the freezing rain back to the army chapel where she'd just heard the gospel for the first time, not a dry eye was left in the room.

Four days later she met the man who would become her husband and within six months she had taken me back from my uncle and we were a new family on our way to the US.

This is the end of my mother's testimony.
But it's just the beginning of mine.

This weekend as I heard her tell it, I learned that each of our stories is everyone's story. The details vary, sometimes so much that we can't seem to understand each other. But at the root, we are all lost, lonely people being drawn to Jesus.

In order to attain the level of closeness that a family offers, though, we have to be vulnerable to each other. We have to open up. Some people are better at this than others. Some will break your heart when you open up to them, as recently happened to me. I gave someone all that I had to give; I opened up in a way I never had before. And he rejected it. He took my gift, small and frail, and threw it back at me. As I pick up the pieces, I wonder if I will ever be able to open up to someone like that again. But I must do it.

We must. My story is not over yet. But every step along the way is a story in itself, and if I don't share it then I do myself the injustice of disallowing familiarity with the people of God.

My story is one of a little girl with attachment disorder and severe separation anxiety paired with a desperate need for approval which has all manifested as severe low self-esteem. If I'm good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, talented enough, fast enough, maybe they won't leave me. Maybe they will love me enough to keep me around. When people do leave, naturally it's because I wasn't enough.

Jesus is taking this little girl and stitching her wounds back together. That's my story.

What's yours?