Forgiven

What do we do with our hearts when our children refuse to reconcile with us? Where do we store all that regret?

On most days, we don’t know what to do.

Parents of estranged adult children walk a wire between hope and pain—hope that conditions will change and our kids will return to our lives, and pain that things will never get better. Sometimes the pain becomes intolerable and we get desperate. We strive to crack the code on some remedy that will open the gates of reconciliation with the people who mean the most to us. The people we can’t live without.

Our adult children have accused us of terrible wrongs. Sometimes their accusations come with a litany of impossible amends we must complete before they will admit us back into their lives. Others of us are living under the sentence of complete silence. We have no clarity about the offenses we committed that justify complete banishment from our children’s lives. In these instances, we can only imagine the apologies that must be required of us.

To be clear, I’m not talking about families in which parents physically, emotionally, or sexually abused or neglected their children. For adult children with these types of wounds, estrangement might be the best course of action.

I’m referring to the rest of us, the families in which no such abuse occurred, where we devoted our best efforts towards loving, nurturing, and guiding our children. Where we gave the highest priority to the needs of our children, at every stage of development. And especially Christian parents who valued children as gifts from God and considered parenting a sacred calling.

So whether our estranged adult children make impossible demands of us, or we can only imagine their claims against us, the outcome is the same—we hustle to make things right. We’ve been hustling for years in one form or another. We drop everything to be available for them. We give them our money, our resources, our time, and our emotional support. We agree with their version of our shared past, even when we know these events are untrue.

The disastrous outcome of these strategies is that they really don’t work, or they don’t work for very long. The weight of accusation looms over us, like a hangman’s noose, threatening our tenuous embrace. We tiptoe over conversational landmines. We edit our words, write, and rewrite our text messages, monitor our tone of voice, and tense up every time our cell phone chimes with their ringtone. By continuing to engage in this way, we perpetuate our own suffering.

We hustle for forgiveness because—let’s face it—we screwed up. We did. And we all know it.

Because even the best of us still made serious mistakes. No one gets through parenthood without an entire screenplay of episodes that still makes us cringe. Even if their accusations are inaccurate, twisted, or patently false, we still know that we live a long way down the road from perfection.

Our need for forgiveness is valid. We need relief from the guilty verdict hanging over our life. But the harsh truth is that our children might not forgive us. They might hold on to their accusations for a very long time. And all our hustling won’t change their feelings towards us.

But there is another way…

We need grace, that beautiful quality that says, “Yes, the things you did were wrong, but you will not be punished for them. You are free to go.” And the person we need to hear this from is not our children—its Jesus.

Jesus knows there is nothing we can do to remedy the wrongs we have committed, which is why he took the penalty for us on the cross. When we ask Jesus to forgive the mistakes we made as parents, his grace is complete. There is nothing more we need to do. It is finished.

Our life experiences are very different, and it could be that there are specific actions that God may want you to accomplish as part of his plan for reconciliation with your estranged children. You will have to press hard into your relationship with God and leave your heart open to his direction. Or God may want you to release your adult children into his loving and very capable hands so you can stop striving.

The important distinction is that God will never require you to earn forgiveness. He has already accomplished that for you.

So take a breath and  let your heart rest in this truth for just a moment.

You are forgiven. For everything. Forever.

Whether or not your child forgives you becomes secondary to the transformative grace that God has given you through his son Jesus.

So what does this mean?

• You no longer have to carry any shame for your child’s rejection of you.
• You don’t need to figure it all out.
• You can stop striving to be the one who makes everything right.
• You no longer have to adapt to the unattainable requirements placed on you.
• You are free to be yourself, the beautiful person God created.
• You can forgive the child who’s rejection has caused you such pain, because God your Father has forgiven you.
• And you can live with so much peace.

Take heart from this powerful scripture:

Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? No one—for God himself has given us right standing with himself.  Who then will condemn us? No one—for Christ Jesus died for us and was raised to life for us.  |  Romans 8:33-34 (NLT)

The way of the cross is our path to life! I pray God’s grace and mercy fill you with peace.