And I was brought immediately back to Good Friday.

Two years ago.

When my son’s therapist admitted to reporting us to DCFS.

At the beginning of the parent session, where I was presenting our case to the therapist, she stated that she’s a mandated reporter, and anything that needs to be reported will be.

And I said, of course.

I remember thinking, We’re fine.

I told her of a situation that happened in our home, one of many. The very reason we were bringing our biological son in for play therapy.

When you’re used to living at a 9/10 chaos level and a day hits 10/10, you don’t think it’s DCFS level. You think, “whew that was a hard day.”

I left the session feeling very hopeful that our biological son would feel seen and have a space to process his feelings.

Three weeks later, DCFS showed up at our door. We were under investigation — again.

The investigator started interrogating my 5-year-old about the incident. Something that had happened in the privacy of my car. Something no one knew about — except those I told in confidence.

I wracked my brain for who it could be. Who would report us?

Only after the investigator left the house did I have enough mental capacity to actually think. My mom suggested my son’s therapist, and I was immediately flooded with a significant sense of betrayal.

I wanted therapy to work for my son — we needed something for him — so I sought her out to talk about it rather than just pull him out immediately. I was able to talk with her on the phone the next day.

She admitted to reporting us, but regretted breaking her own protocol by not bringing it to our attention before calling the hotline. She wasn’t reporting us because she thought we were bad parents. She reiterated this wasn’t about us. She told me she believed our adopted son needed more help.

Well, that’s not how the hotline works. You don’t report a 5-year-old and he gets services. You report a 5-year-old and the parents have a case opened against them.

This just happened to be Good Friday. She’s a Christian. We were treading holy ground.

I felt deeply betrayed. The person I went to for help, turned and used that information to report us. She knew she’d broken trust.

I wasn’t angry that she was a mandated reporter. I was hurt that she had not expressed a concern about our parenting or our son’s safety, and yet the information I’d shared in confidence had resulted in an investigation into our parenting.

It makes sense to me why this situation came to mind during Sunday’s sermon as my pastor was talking about rebuilding trust after it’s been broken.

We continued to take our son back to this therapist for a year after this incident, and people were stunned. I wasn’t willing to throw away something that was helping him because trust had been broken.

But I did have to carefully consider how that broken trust impacted other areas of our family’s health.

I was in counseling myself, and it just so happened that my son’s therapist was my therapist’s supervisor.

I remember sitting across from my therapist one day, recounting a conversation I’d had with a friend. This friend is also an adoptive mom of kids with FASD, and she’d confessed her temptation to retaliate after getting punched all day long.

I shared how her honesty had freed me to acknowledge the truth I rarely admit out loud: sometimes I want to retaliate against my kids, too.

Even writing that sentence makes my stomach tighten.

Because the moment the words left my mouth, reality smacked me upside the face: My therapist is a mandated reporter.

And I went into survival mode: Be careful. Don’t say too much. Don’t get exposed. Don’t lose everything because you tried to be honest.

I could feel my heart rate rise as if honesty itself had become a threat. And instead of pretending I wasn’t afraid, I named it.

I told her the truth underneath the truth: “I’m scared you’re going to report me.”

It felt terrifying to say aloud. As if speaking DCFS into the air solidified her position. But it also felt like refusing to keep pretending vulnerability is welcome until it costs something.

She listened.

Really listened.

And then she did something that brought me to tears: she spoke back to my fear like it made sense. Like she could hold the tension of motherhood, trauma, ministry, and exhaustion without getting too clinical.

In our next session, she brought it back up. She had taken my fear seriously enough to consult with her supervisor (yes, that supervisor). And then she said something that steadied me: honesty about struggle is not the same as danger. We are not looking to report you for being human.

For the first time in a long time, I exhaled.

We stayed with my son’s therapist for an entire year after the report, until he’d escalated beyond her ability to help and we needed to seek other intervention. People were shocked we were still there. You can’t un-break trust. It took work to rebuild what had broken, of course it did. But it was worth it to me because my son needed help.

I remember texting my friend after our last session with her. It was the same friend I texted while I was standing in my kitchen listening to my 5-year-old being interrogated by DCFS.

After our last session I texted: Got teary eyed as we said goodbye today. What a road. What a year. What a redemption story. From utter betrayal to tears at goodbye. She has loved our son well.

That’s what came to mind when my pastor preached about reconciliation. Not because the betrayal didn’t matter, but because it did. We couldn’t rebuild something that we refused to admit had been broken.

Reconciliation isn’t pretending nothing happened. It’s deciding that what was broken is worth rebuilding.

I wondered if all my years of research would just be stored up information in my head but then I became a transracial adoptive mom and started looking at life through the lens of what it would be like to grow up in this world as my children. Trying to see the world through my children’s eyes led me to reading more about racial reconciliation within communities, not just on a systemic level, but also in relationships one-to-one.

In Randy Woodley’s book, “Living in Color” he offers seven steps for reconciliation in relationships and across races. As I read, my years of studying the TRC came flooding back into my memory, almost viscerally.

It was Woodley’s work which helped me see why the TRC was indeed groundbreaking. Where silence is often the breeding ground for bitterness, true reconciliation can only come from the truth being spoken fully, and listened to.

In a culture that worships efficiency and tidy endings, we too easily bypass the necessary steps for reconciliation, simply because what’s necessary makes us uncomfortable.

This kind of reconciliation requires enormous emotional maturity.

There have been relationships in our lives where we have tried, and what felt like resolution was actually just a false or first layer. When hurt was re-triggered, emotions erupted even more fiercely than the first time. We’d been operating as if all the dirty laundry had been aired—and washed. But it hadn’t.

The full truth was not spoken the first time we tried working through things. Because of that, there was only partial resolution for the people carrying the hurt. This has led to superficial peacekeeping, but significant unresolved tension.

And these are people we go to church with.

This is not what Jesus is asking for in His bride. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul pleads with believers to reconcile with one another because Christ has reconciled them to God.

It takes tremendous effort to achieve this kind of reconciliation. And if there’s hurt amongst several different individuals, the work can seem daunting. Because life is busy, and this kind of work takes time, it’s often not even reached for.

I think one of the reasons truthful listening is so rare is because when someone finally speaks honestly about how they’ve been hurt, most of us stop listening somewhere in the middle and start protecting ourselves instead.

We start thinking about what their pain says about us. Can our relationship handle this? What does this mean about me? Then we end up making the person who is already hurting carry our discomfort with hearing their hurt.

Actually listening to someone’s pain takes security. Enough security to let their honesty expose things in us that we may not want to see. But truth isn’t what destabilizes a relationship as much as silence. We can keep things looking fine for a while. We can smile in the hallway and carry on. But underneath the surface, the hurt doesn’t disappear. It takes root.

True reconciliation requires enough security — in Christ, in relationships, in your own identity — to believe that confession will not destroy the relationship, but may actually be the thing that allows it to heal.

I have very specific memories of my husband coming to me with pain that I had caused him. Somewhere along the conversation I stopped listening and started worrying about what this would do to our marriage.

The reality is, if I would have laid down my fear about myself and leaned into what he needed then our marriage would have strengthened. Instead, I created a stalemate where he didn’t feel heard and I sat in my discomfort.

We have a friend in ministry who has modeled this type of truthful listening. He has not only allowed family members to bring their grievances to him, but has invited it for the sake of relational healing. And as they have shared grievances against him as a brother or grievances against him as a dad, he has listened and wept and apologized.

It’s this listening without defending that can bring about the most healing.

And that’s what’s so earth-shattering about what took place in South Africa at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

White Afrikaner officials — men who had committed some of the most heinous atrocities toward black South Africans — were allowed to confess their crimes and (if they made full disclosure of their involvement) receive amnesty from prosecution. The leadership of the TRC insisted from the outset that truth, more than revenge, would be liberating for the nation.

The Commission created something that feels almost impossible in human relationships: a space where people could tell the truth without immediately being met with defensiveness.

People are often only willing to confess when telling the truth won’t risk them everything.

Confession requires some possibility of mercy.

And for the first time, black South Africans were given a formal national forum in which they could publicly tell what had been done to them, and the nation was called to listen.

Maybe that was the deeper question underneath the entire Commission: Can we hear the truth about ourselves and survive?

That same question exists in marriages. Friendships. Churches. Families. Can we survive the truth? Or do we need silence in order to feel stable?

I wrote this piece about five months ago and have been sitting with it. In that time, I’ve had the privilege of confessing some of my greatest wrongdoings to my closest friend, and receiving mercy, forgiveness, and dare I say some sense of reconciliation. All because I had the gusto to say I was sorry. Not just sorry, but “here are the explicit things I did wrong, here’s what that wrongdoing stole from you.”

When I started speaking, she was stunned. What do you have to apologize for?

And as I continued, she resonated. Those were areas I’d invalidated her, cared more about myself and my needs than hers.

And then she did something just as stunning. Is there anything I need to apologize to you for?

While I had something in mind — an area I’d been hurt — I was not intending to share it unless asked. This conversation was about me confessing my wrongdoings.

I stepped into the conversation and she had the privilege of owning, confessing, and repenting herself.

It was beautiful.

There’s no longer superficial peacemaking in the church hallway. Though, she did acknowledge that she’d felt it over the past year.

In reply to her acknowledgment, I confessed: I knew how to grieve my dad’s death. I didn’t know how to grieve the loss of a friend who was still alive. Seeing her at church was too painful and I pulled away, cold-shouldered, guarding myself.

She exhaled, understanding.

I asked her: do you have capacity for friendship again? Not just capacity, but any desire?

We’d both more or less replaced one another with new friends, people whose lives have the same texture as ours, for whom getting us isn’t as much work.

She said yes, and asked what I wanted it to look like. We established expectations, something that had been missing the first time our friendship was formed.

We had their family over for dinner last week. And, honestly, I could have cried. We’d hosted them in small group weekly for 8 years. And then to have them in our home again after the painful year apart — telling the uncensored truth is what began making the relationship possible again.

When I got the first proof in my hands, the design was actively working against what the words were intending. Busy, lack of margin, lack of white space. I was reading the words on the page but experiencing something quite the opposite.

So I went back to the drawing board and redesigned it from scratch. The end result was a book I was much prouder of, a book with design that matched the message of the manuscript.

A few months later, one of the moms texted me, “You did your own cover and book layout/design, yes? Is that a service you offer, or would consider offering?”

The exchange lit a flame in me. And I realized then that this is something I totally love: helping bring stories to life through creative design.

I’ve always felt myself to be a creative storyteller. One of my favorite parts of working at the church for eight years was bringing a sermon series to life through visual design. A series on Ecclesiastes with the earth vaporising beneath a firm foundation. A Christmas series where the magnitude of heaven funneled its way into a lowly manger.

Book design is no different. What’s written in the manuscript should be matched in the colors and the aesthetics, in the layout, margins, and even the trim size of the book. The design should honor the story.

I have almost 13 years in print publishing, working for my church and designing magazines. I’ve done a handful of my own books. So I decided to bring this venture to life for independent and self-publishing authors.

Many independent authors pour hours into their books and their manuscripts, but don’t know what to do with design.

Although we say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” we totally do.

Another recent experience helped propel me into this business venture.

A friend shared with me about a book that she had been gifted, written by a young woman who grew up with a sister with disabilities.

Because of the work I’ve done around secondary trauma in biological siblings of adopted kids, and the experiences of siblings who grow up alongside disability and mental health challenges, I thought this would be such a great book to read.

And then I saw the cover of the book, and judged it hard. If I did not know the weight of the words inside, I would never pick this book up.

Just because of how it looked.

It’s something that I was drawn to because of the story, but the design totally repelled me from the story.

And I just thought, how many readers is she probably missing out on because she didn’t have someone helping her and guiding her with design?

This is why I’m doing this. I want to help authors take the thing they’ve poured so much of themselves into and make sure the design invites people into the story instead of keeping them out.

So, here’s to introducing Emily Lawson Creative.

I’m offering book cover design and interior book design for independent and self-publishing authors who want their books to look as thoughtful as the words inside them.

I’d love to help you bring your book to life. You can see what I’m offering over at emilylawsoncreative.com.

Emily Lawson Creative

And then there was the first time we walked into a Replanted meeting, a support gathering for foster and adoptive families, and my friend’s son, who is Ethiopian, whispered, “Wow, there are kids here who look like me.”

Assumption. Suspicion. Recognition.

All of it was teaching me something I didn’t want to admit.

Love wasn’t enough. As much as I wanted to believe that the security of my love and being part of our family would ground them, the world around us was constantly reminding us that race and culture are ingrained in every part of life.

I thought love meant absorbing my children into my world but God showed me love meant letting my world be rearranged around them.

Early in our adoption-education journey, I encountered a teaching that suggested our children’s new inheritance meant their old identity faded.

I didn’t question it at the time.

Russell Moore’s book Adopted for Life helped many Christians see adoption as a picture of the gospel, and I am grateful for the theological foundation he laid. But there was a line in the book where he joked that his children no longer ate Russian pastries but now preferred southern Mississippi cooking.

After all, they were Moores now.

At the time, I nodded along.

The assumption was subtle: that joining a new family meant the old story slowly faded away.

But that is not the story or beauty of adoption. Welcoming a child into a new family does not mean their old story disappears.

Love does not erase what came before.

Much of the inner work and discovery I did in this area began because a therapist entered our home at exactly the moment we were drowning.

We had been calling every service we knew. Voicemail after voicemail went unanswered. Eventually a woman named Adelia called back. She had just been hired for the position and apologized for the delay — there had been no one working when we first reached out.

She asked if she could come the following week.

I didn’t know what kind of therapy she practiced. I didn’t know what we were signing ourselves up for.

But she came.

And over the course of the next two and a half years, she slowly rearranged the way I saw the world my children were growing up in.

Very little behavior changed in those sessions. In fact, many of the sessions brought chaos and dysregulation from our kids. Some days it felt like nothing productive was happening at all.

But week after week, conversation after conversation, Adelia was quietly changing something in me.

Before becoming a child-parent psychotherapist, she had spent time studying racial representation in children’s literature while living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her work in racial inclusivity shaped many of the conversations we eventually had.

Those conversations helped me realize something I had never considered before.

Stepping into a multicultural life could not exist only for my children.

It’s not just a necessity for me as an adoptive mom.

It’s a necessity for me as a Christian.

A habit that captivated my husband was Earley’s approach on redeeming family car time. He argues that car time is conversation time and parents can transform the travel from passive transport to active discipleship.

The internal rebuttal came quickly: But my son’s therapist said it’s best to avoid any type of serious conversation in the car! Because a Major Trauma happened in the car, his cortisol spiked at the mention of travel, his body braced upon entry. Additional conversational pressure would only compound that. Silence for us wasn’t passive transport, it was active healing: You are safe here.

My husband was in agreement. Some of these ideas would have to wait.

When reading the Christian parenting books or sitting in church small groups with other new parents talking shop, I felt so much pressure because these ways of doing things weren’t working for our family.

My kids needed support the people around us didn’t know how to give. We didn’t even know how to give it. And as we sought support inside our church family, I began to feel the weight of how much our family needed. As our needs became harder to accommodate, the relationships I thought would hold us began to change. People pulled back. Invitations became less frequent. And one day it dawned on me how few people in our church family really knew what we were carrying.

It’s not that people just couldn’t meet our kids’ sensory needs, it’s that I didn’t know where I belonged anymore. When my children couldn’t participate in the ways other children could, and when the strategies other Christian parents were using didn’t work for me, there was no neutral place to land.

It took me years of personal work to find the freedom to discern between good advice and appropriate advice. “Christian parenting” had become, in my mind, almost synonymous with faithful parenting. What did it say of me as a Christian mom – a pastor’s wife! – that I was rejecting biblical parenting advice and looking elsewhere?

Like Screwtape writing another letter to Wormwood, the Voice continued. And my mind traveled to the advice I did lean into. Not just lean into. I sought it out. I consumed it. I wanted to be wise. I wanted to do this right. I wanted to be the parent my kids needed, so I pursued wisdom the way Solomon tells his son to pursue it.

And yet, the two people who have made the most dramatic impact in my son’s life are not Christians.

• A CASA worker stopped a court order that would have removed him from our home and placed him back with his biological brother.

• The BCBA assigned to his case, who has decades of ABA experience, repeatedly goes back to the drawing board to relearn why what works for children with autism doesn’t work for children with FASD.

Both women went (and are going) to great lengths to pursue his safety, healing, and flourishing.

There’s beauty and pain in the truth that the people who have impacted my son’s life the most aren’t Christians.

Beautiful because God provided. Painful because each time I remember this, I’m struck by the thought that people outside the church understood something specific about my children that the church wasn’t equipped to understand.

I don’t expect the church to be professionally licensed trauma therapists or trained in reflex integration occupational therapy. A church shouldn’t have to know what a particular child’s nervous system requires. But parents still need somewhere to belong while they go find people who do.

The church isn’t created to be all things. But I didn’t know how to experience its limitations without experiencing it as abandonment.

We’ve done the hard work of going outside the church to find the help and hope and healing our children needed. Therapists. Specialists. Professionals. Different frameworks. And our children have gained things they didn’t have before: capacity, regulation, safety, access, trust.

And now we’re ready to step back in. To have the car conversations. To attempt family meals. To lean into some of those habits of the household. Because all along, they have been good advice. All along, they’ve been good parenting methodologies. But our children didn’t have access — in their brains, bodies, nervous systems, and levels of anxiety — for our attempts at those habits to bear any fruit.

We’re coming back because our children are finally able to receive some of what we couldn’t give them before.

And I’ve found myself hesitant, stubborn?, to lean into those things I once rejected. All in fear of the “I told you so.”

I told you so. From everyone I once told “that doesn’t work for my kids.”

Because there is no “I told you so” without the story that came before it.

Yes, some of those things work for my kids now. And praise God for it. But they didn’t work then. And the path to here required us to leave some of those parenting methods behind. We had to find a different path than what was traditionally provided to us. To find people who understood what their bodies and brains needed.

The advice wasn’t wrong. But our kids needed healing before we could heed it.

This particular angle of “the pastor’s wife” resonated with me, because I was on staff for 8 of my husband’s last 10 years here.

I lurked in the shadows of the church office that first year, throwing myself into helping with the cafe renovation project our first months here, though staining 18 tables and repainting accent walls wasn’t my first choice of work.

We didn’t have kids and I didn’t have a job. It seemed like a good way to get to know people and help make this church our home.

I joined staff as graphic designer just nine months after Brad was hired, and worked my way from graphic designer to Communication Director, hired a counterpart and took back over design as Creative Director.

I loved my job at church. Truly. My husband and I love doing ministry together.

So when we felt deep conviction that God was calling me to resign so I could stay home with our kids, grief and identity crisis settled in hard and fast.

Identity crisis? Someone asked recently. That shows you were putting too much of your identity in your job. You’re first and foremost a child of God.

Yes, I replied. I am first and foremost a child of God. But that doesn’t erase the unique ways He created me. He hardwired me to tell stories, bring ideas to life through design, and encourage the church through writing. Laying those things down felt like laying down part of myself. Hence, identity crisis.

Over the past year since resigning, I’ve felt the tension of this pull that Tim wrote about. It’s not that I feel guilty I am not doing more. I want to be doing more, but that’s not in the cards for me right now.

My kids need me. Therapies and appointments abound in our schedule this season.

(And yes, I now quote to myself at least two times a week: Cease endlessly striving to do what you love and learn to love what must be done. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

I’ve looked at stepping back into a serving capacity at the church, because — gosh, I feel so detached from the church after being so fully engaged for so long — but stepping back into the comms department is too messy right now.

I remember one day, Brad was sitting in a staff meeting when I was home with the kids. “Your name is being tossed around for running point on this event. Want me to kibosh it?”

💯

I didn’t have the capacity I once had.

Surprisingly, letting go of the work wasn’t the hardest part. It was trying to figure out who I was in the church once I was no longer on staff.

It’s not even because it’s great writing. It’s because it captured then what I didn’t know I would be writing about all these years later.

Set in the final months before apartheid fell, the novel follows a young Afrikaner woman grappling with her father’s death as the country she loves is coming apart around her.

(Yes, I started writing it before my dad died. Yes, I looked long and hard at the novel once he had.)

In the introduction I wrote: There’s a beautiful story of reconciliation waiting to be told if only we weren’t afraid of acknowledging the facts and embracing the truth.

Twelve years ago—before parenting children with trauma, before church hurt that made me want to walk away, before books and friendships that exposed blind spots I didn’t know I had, before all of it—I had a fictional Afrikaner woman state that reconciliation can happen if we aren’t afraid of the truth.

I didn't realize then that those words would become one of the defining drivers of my 20s and 30s. It’s like I spent the last decade catching up to the question my younger self had already put on the page.

Can we tell the truth about ourselves and survive?

And in those 12 years, my understanding of truth or rather, honesty, has changed. It went from facts: apartheid happened. People died. White South Africans have to face what they did.

To:

• letting another person’s experience define itself before I explain it away.

• hearing pain without immediately protecting myself.

• relinquishing control over the narrative.

• allowing reality to be more important than my innocence.

• believing a relationship can survive honesty.

Those aren’t lessons I learned by studying South Africa. They’re lessons I learned by living. Earlier this summer I wrote an essay on a situation in my life that caused me to sit closer to that question than I wanted to: can we tell the truth about ourselves and survive?

It’s an essay I’m sitting with and will share in time. But it’s a question that has always pulled me back to South Africa.

To Malan.

To Coetzee.

To Paton.

To Krog.

To Gordimer.

To de Klerk.

To books written by white Afrikaners who wrote while taking a long, hard look at their nation’s history. Who told the truth in narrative form.

Writing a novel is so hard (for me)! This one has been such a challenge and growth point. I’m better at telling my own story than developing a plot. I’m better at seeing what God is doing in the narrative He’s unfolding in my life than writing a narrative around a question I’m trying to answer.

But that’s the beautiful reflection on what I wrote 12 years ago and what I’m writing now. Some stories refuse to let us go. After a summer at an orphanage in Jo’burg during the 2010 World Cup, this idea for a story refused to let me go.

A family’s reckoning of truth that mirrors a nation’s.

This manuscript wasn’t waiting for me to become a better writer. It was waiting for me to become a different person.

Many of us read this story and see the extravagant love of the father poured lavishly on the runaway son. Some have even suggested it should be called the story of the prodigal father because of his extravagant welcome.

If we read about the older brother, many of us see him as arrogant, angry, and jealous.

This was the third parable in a series Jesus told to the Pharisees after they complained about Him welcoming and eating with sinners. Jesus’ point in these parables is the extravagant rejoicing over a sinner who repents. But in this story, unlike the others, He introduces a third character: the older brother.

Jesus is turning the story back onto the Pharisees—angry at the celebration for the repentant sinner, frustrated that their years of faithful service seem overlooked.

I want to be careful here not to make a one-to-one comparison. While, yes, our adopted children (like our biological children, and us) are sinners—that is not the point of this story. And not all biological children respond with resentment.

But what I see in this parable—especially when we consider the heart of the Father—is that the older brother feels overlooked.

Many of us have read Luke 15 and assumed the older brother was simply arrogant. But look closer—he had been the faithful, responsible son and felt invisible for it. His cry in verse 29—“All these years I’ve been slaving for you… yet you never gave me even a young goat”—isn’t arrogance, but the pain of feeling unseen and unrewarded.

Many biological kids in adoptive families feel something similar: I’m doing the right thing, I’m holding it together—but no one notices me. Parents in our Replanted group have shared testimony after testimony of bio kids quietly voicing that same ache.

We rightly remember the father running to the prodigal, but for years I overlooked how he also left the party to seek out the older brother. Both children needed reassurance of love—one after rebellion, the other in the midst of faithfulness.

The father doesn’t shout reassurance across the yard—he goes to his son, names his presence, and invites him back into relationship. That is what repair looks like in families, too.

And throughout Scripture, God repeats this theme: He sees and remembers faithfulness. The older brother wasn’t wrong to want that assurance—and God delights to give it.

In the same way, the church’s role isn’t only to wrap around the hurting child with a trauma history, but also to notice the bio or older siblings who may quietly be asking, Do I matter here too? They need to hear, Yes—you are seen and deeply loved.

In our own home, we’ve experienced how biological kids can carry secondary trauma—absorbing the stress and instability of their siblings’ struggles. That reality underscores the need to care for the whole family.

As these questions about seeing our biological kids were stirring in my heart, I realized I wasn’t the only one wrestling with them. At the beginning of our seventh year leading a foster care and adoption support group at our church, I proposed a new branch of the ministry called Replanted Siblings.

In Replanted, we serve families who have welcomed children through adoption or foster care. These children rightly receive a great deal of attention, prayer, and support—and we want that for them. But as I looked around the room each month, I kept wondering about the other kids—the ones born into these families, quietly adjusting to their new normal.

I dreamt up a branch of Replanted, discussed it with the groups director, and said we’d pilot it at our church.

The heart behind it was simple: to intentionally affirm, encourage, and celebrate biological kids—reminding them they are just as valued and loved. We hoped to relieve some of the unseen pressure these kids carry and strengthen their sense of belonging in their own families and within the Replanted community.

The plan was to start small—monthly check-ins through snail mail, sending stickers for younger kids or small gift cards for teens. Sometimes we connected briefly with parents after church to ask how their biological children were doing. Eventually, we dreamed of attending games or recitals, or even taking them out for ice cream—small ways of saying, You matter. You are not invisible here.

When I sent this proposal to people who had shown interest in serving with Replanted, I expected an openness to serve in whatever capacity the ministry was leading. But that’s not what happened. All but one never replied. The one reply stopped me in my tracks:

“I’m not that interested in serving in this capacity. It’s like I’d be serving the older brother in Luke 15.”

I sat there stunned. I hadn’t even mentioned the parable—but there it was, named out loud.

She was right. These biological kids are the older brother in many ways—standing outside the party, feeling unseen, wondering if there’s any celebration for them. But instead of moving toward them with compassion, she used the comparison as a reason not to serve them.

That was the moment it became clear to me: this isn’t just a parenting issue for adoptive families to figure out. This is a discipleship issue for the whole church.

When Jesus told the story of the prodigal son, He wasn’t simply giving parents a model for loving their children. He was confronting religious insiders: Are you okay with grace that feels unfair?

In the same way, we have to ask ourselves: Are we willing to stop the party long enough to go find the ones standing outside? Are we willing to spend our energy, our prayers, and even our ministry resources on kids who look “fine” on the outside but are hurting on the inside? Are we willing to celebrate the quiet, faithful, overlooked ones—not just the dramatic stories of redemption?

This is kingdom work. The Father’s heart is not divided between the prodigal and the older brother—it is wide enough to go out to both. And the church should reflect that heart.

So like the Father in Luke 15, we remind our biological children: all I have is yours. You are with me always. You are seen, you are loved, you are not overlooked because of your quiet obedience.

And if we’ve missed them before, the invitation is still open—to go to them now, to listen without defense, and to say the words that begin repair:

I see you, and I’m here.

In my first essay in this series, I wrote about a conversation between a grandmother and her visibly tense grandson.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him. “Your brother can play with us.”

Her repeated “it’s okay, it’s okay” was a loving response. Most of us would have said the same thing. When a child is distressed, our instinct is to reassure them. We want to calm the situation. We want to help them feel better. So we say things like, “It’s okay,” or “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

But sometimes reassurance misses what is actually happening beneath the surface. A child’s body may be communicating something very different than their words. Their nervous system is saying, This doesn’t feel safe. Meanwhile, our words are saying, It is safe.

And those two messages don’t match.

When that happens, the child isn’t simply carrying the weight of their fear. They’re also carrying the confusion of having their internal experience contradicted. Instead of helping them regulate, we can unintentionally increase their distress. We’re responding to behavior while the child is experiencing a body response.

Over time, this matters more than we might realize.

Imagine a child whose nervous system becomes overwhelmed. They don’t have language for what is happening inside them. They only know that their heart is racing, their muscles are tight, and something feels wrong.

The adults around them respond with phrases like: “You’re fine.” “That’s not a big deal.” “Why are you acting like this?”

No one intends harm. But repeated experiences like this can begin to shape beliefs. Not beliefs a child consciously chooses, but beliefs formed slowly through thousands of interactions. Instead of learning, Something happened in my body, they begin to believe, Something is wrong with me.

This is where shame begins to take root. Guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says, I am something wrong.

And once that belief settles in, it doesn’t just affect a single moment. It begins to shape how a child sees themselves, how they interpret future experiences, and how they respond the next time their nervous system is overwhelmed.

The next time their body sounds the alarm, they aren’t just fighting fear anymore. They’re fighting the belief that fear itself makes them a problem.

That’s why looking beneath behavior matters. If we only respond to what we see on the surface, we can miss what is happening underneath and unintentionally reinforce beliefs that become part of a child’s identity.

So what might a different response look like? Instead of correcting the feeling, we can acknowledge what we observe. “I notice your body looks tense. Would you like to sit with me?”

A regulated adult nervous system can help a child’s nervous system settle. Sometimes our presence is more helpful than our explanations.

Or we might say: “It looks like something big is happening right now. Let’s take a moment together.”

Notice what this response does. It names what we see without telling the child what they should be feeling. It creates space instead of pressure.

One of the phrases I’ve found myself returning to is this: “I will keep everyone safe, but I will never tell you what you’re allowed to feel.”

As a parent, it’s my responsibility to set boundaries and protect people. I won’t allow harmful behavior between siblings. But I also won’t tell a child they’re wrong for feeling angry, afraid, hurt, or overwhelmed. We can validate feelings while still providing guidance. We can acknowledge fear without reinforcing it. We can parent without shaming.

At the time, while I was fascinated by it, I also couldn’t wrap my mind around it. How could people who loved Scripture arrive at conclusions that caused so much harm?

I tucked that question away.

Years later, after becoming an adoptive mom, I watched something similar happen.

Not because my experience was comparable to apartheid. But because I discovered how surprisingly easy it is to apply the Bible faithfully in one sense while misapplying it in another.

I wasn’t trying to become a savior. I was trying to be faithful. But I had quietly stepped into a role God never asked me to carry.

People would quote the doctrine of adoption over our family in ways that sounded beautiful but often left us carrying burdens only for meant for Christ, the Savior.

And suddenly that old question came rushing back.

How can people who sincerely love God, cherish His Word, and want to obey Him, end up applying Scripture in ways that wound rather than heal?

Recently I read Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley, and one theme gave me language for something I’ve been circling for years.

None of us reads Scripture from nowhere. We all read it from somewhere.

McCaulley points out that many Black Christians naturally see themselves in Israel’s slavery. The Exodus becomes a story of hope because it reflects their own history.

The Afrikaners also saw themselves in Israel. But they saw themselves in a different part of the story. They identified with God’s chosen people entering the promised land.

The difference wasn’t just interpretation. It was identification.

As I sat with that, I realized I wasn’t outside this dynamic.

I had been doing it too. Not with apartheid. Not by reading myself into Israel. But by quietly reading myself into the role of the rescuer.

I had quietly placed myself in the role of the rescuer in my kids’ story, because of how I and others had been reading us into the doctrine of adoption.

I had started reading the passages about adoption as though my role was to fix what was broken.

I never would have said that out loud. It was all subconscious. I didn’t read a passage and directly think “it’s my job to save my kids.” But when doctrine gets misapplied long enough, eventually it shapes the way you see yourself.

I wonder how easy it is for us all to do this.

Before asking, “What does this passage mean?” we’re subconsciously asking: “Where am I in this story?”

And the answer to that question is shaped by our families, our churches, our culture, and our experiences more than we realize or want to admit.

If that’s true, then perhaps the first step toward reading Scripture faithfully isn’t pretending we’re neutral. It’s becoming honest about where we’re standing when we open our Bibles.

What one mom said: “What I’m appreciating about it is the way you lead readers to a deeply personal connection to God.”

Here’s the introduction to my newly-released devotional, Held to Heal, which is available on Amazon.

“You cannot lead a child to a place of healing
if you do not know the way yourself.”
— Karyn Purvis

When I first heard a TBRI Training Specialist quote these words at Show Hope’s Hope for the Journey conference, I resonated with it, but still didn’t know how hard that path to healing would be.

I didn’t realize how much of my own story I was bringing into my children’s stories, how much of my own hurt I was carrying as I tried to parent my children.

I carried unspoken expectations about what parenthood would be. I carried the weight—real and imagined—of what I thought other Christians expected my family to look like. I carried grief over my dad’s death and the dreams I had quietly held of him knowing my children.

With all of this that I carried, still there were seasons when I didn’t feel safe in my home as I parented my kids. Dysregulation and trauma meant aggressive tantrums and cold-hearted shutdowns. I didn’t feel safe, seen, empowered, or capable of what God was calling me to. Yet I kept showing up and telling my children, “You are safe with me no matter what.”

And still, I wondered: Where was God when I was getting kicked, called names, or threatened? Where was God when eyes pierced me like daggers and the words send me back filled the room?

I tried to do my devotions in the early quiet mornings, but I couldn’t read the Scriptures—my nervous system was on high alert at every step in the upstairs hallway. Instead, I found myself mulling over the principles of Karyn Purvis’ Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), repeating self-talk like: My children are precious; they are not my enemy. They are safe with me. And I am safe in this home.

But the deeper truth was this: I needed to be TBRI’d by God.

I needed to know I was safe with Him no matter what. I needed to know He would come for me and connect with me before He tried to fix my mistakes. I needed to know He was equipping me and empowering me to do the work He had called me to.

Are you in the trenches of trauma-informed parenting and wondering some of the same questions?

Am I safe? Am I seen? Can I do this? Is this worth it?

I wrote this devotional for moms like you and me, out of a deep hunger to see the truths we apply in our parenting applied to us first—so that we can live and parent from a place of being held, healed, and strengthened by God.

ABOUT THIS DEVOTION

TBRI rests on three core principles: Connecting, Empowering, and Correcting. This devotional is organized around those principles, with each one forming its own section containing 5–7 short devotions that introduce and ground the foundational truths of that principle.

This book is intentionally divided into two parts:

Part One invites you to receive these truths from God first—as His beloved child.

Part Two returns to the same principles and offers practical, trauma-informed ways to apply them as you parent your child.

Move through the devotions gently. You might spend a whole week on one. Read the anchoring Scripture, sit with the reflection, and write whatever the Holy Spirit brings to mind. Use the additional Scriptures if you want to go deeper. Try one small practice and notice what shifts—not only in your thoughts, but in your nervous system and your sense of connection with God.

DRINK IT IN, SLOWLY

Writing this devotional was a journey, and I expect reading it to be one as well. There are truths near the end that, if you’re in a tender or vulnerable place as you begin, you may not feel ready to hold yet. And that’s okay.

Just as we connect with our children before we correct, I urge you to let the Lord connect with you and hold you before you move into the more corrective truths. This is not a checklist to rush through. Pause between devotions. Let your nervous system receive the truth before moving on.

If a devotion lands deeply, return to it across several mornings until you feel its comfort, connection, or correction settle in you. If all you can do today is read one verse and whisper one honest prayer, that is enough.

Drink these truths in the morning and pour them out through the day. Let the connection, empowerment, and corrective love you receive from the Father shape how you respond when triggers come. Over time, the same principles that help your child heal will begin to steady and heal you, too.

The wedding, set against the backdrop of mountainous Colorado, was beautiful. But it was more than the scenery I was impressed with.

In our time spent in premarital counseling with this couple, I was continually struck by their spiritual maturity. At 21 and 23 years young, they would share with us trials they’d faced and how they’ve navigated them together. Many of the principles Brad and I hoped to pass on from our thirteen years of marriage were already becoming part of their lives.

Some of those hardships were ordinary growing pains. Others were significant. The groom’s father died two weeks before he left for college. The bride endured a painful experience with a close friend during her college years. Yet as they recounted those seasons, what stood out was the way they had cared for one another through them—listening, serving, and remaining present in each other’s pain.

This maturity wasn’t unique to the couple.

We spoke to several of their friends, including a 21-year-old friend of the bride, who shared that her mom had died when she was 11. Only in the last year or two had she begun learning what it meant to grieve.

So much of what she was sharing are the lessons I learned when my dad died. I’ve experienced it myself but I found such wisdom in her young years as she said: grief and death can either push you away from God or you dig in deeper.

It’s true.

On our drive to the airport the next day, my husband and I talked about the class I’m teaching at this year’s Replanted Conference: secondary trauma in biological siblings of adoptive families.

He asked me a thoughtful question: Do you think adoption is ultimately good for biological children, despite the hardship? Or do you think the good primarily benefits the child who is adopted?

With enough of my own digging deep with Jesus on this topic, my answer came with assurance.

I wholeheartedly believe that, despite the very real challenges and secondary trauma biological children experience, God will use adoption for their good — if they let Him.

In fact, I told Brad that I would rather my children face some hardships of life for the sake of the Kingdom while under my care than be shielded from every hardship now only to encounter suffering later without the foundation to understand it.

That conversation brought me back to the young woman at the wedding.

God allowed a profound loss in her life at an early age. She had a choice. Dig deep, get numb, or walk away. That loss meant her life would never be the same. And somehow, through that pain, she learned to dig deeper—into God’s sovereignty, His goodness, and His presence in suffering.

Those are the same lessons I had to learn after my father’s death. Before that, much of my theology lived comfortably in my head. Grief forced it to become something more.

Theology had to become reality. Head knowledge was forced to either become heart truth or be disregarded.

I wish the churches I grew up in had taught this earlier.

Maybe they had and I wasn’t in a place to receive it.

Tim Keller said it himself when interviewed about his cancer diagnosis:

“If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need [our belief in God and the afterlife] to be anything other than mental assent. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.”

That’s why, difficult as it is to say, I believe the hardships adoptive families face can become opportunities for spiritual formation.

Not because trauma is good.

Not because suffering is something we should seek.

But because suffering inevitably comes, and when it does, we discover whether what we know about God is merely information or living truth.

The spiritual battle is real. The enemy would love nothing more than to use our wounds to drive us away from God. But when we learn—not only theologically but experientially—that God is nearest to us in our suffering, everything begins to change.

We encounter a Savior who entered human pain rather than avoiding it. A Savior who is not intimidated by our anger, questions, bitterness, or grief, but meets us there with compassion and steadfast love.

And it is often there, in the places we would never have chosen, that we begin to see God doing what He has always done: taking what was meant for evil and, somehow, mysteriously, redeeming it for good.

It wasn’t written that way, but it’s how I interpreted every parenting book, every sideways church glance, every Bible verse taken out of context and aimed at my children’s actions.

Obedience equaled righteousness. Good behavior equaled belonging. And when my children couldn’t comply, it felt like both they and I had failed the gospel.

But that’s not the gospel Jesus lived, died, and rose to give us.

Somewhere along the way I began living as though the Gospel says: get it right, and you’ll be accepted. But Jesus says: you are accepted, and from that love, you can learn to live right.

The first crushes under the weight of performance. The second breathes life into weary parents and wounded children alike.

Jesus sharply rebuked the Pharisees who ceremonially washed their hands and bowls but inside were whitewashed tombs. Yet I found myself feeling encouraged to do just that with my children.

The tantrums must stop.
The meltdowns can’t happen.

If the Christian life were built on perfect obedience, none of us could stand. But Jesus stood in our place. He bore our shame—the shame of every tantrum in the grocery store aisle, every sideways glance from a stranger, every time our children’s needs are misunderstood, every time we are, too.

He bore the shame of whitewashed-tomb religion that measures worth by appearance. And He replaced it with a gospel that looks us in the eye, dirt-streaked and trembling, and says, You are mine. I am not ashamed to call you family.

Obedience matters. Jesus says in John 14:15, “If you love me, you will obey my commands.” When I began trying to work against the gospel of behavior in my own parenting, this verse tripped me up. I was viewing Jesus’s words through our own cultural context. I was reading the words on the page but interpreting them as: “Obey me to show that you love me.”

But that is not what Jesus is saying. Obedience here is a natural result of being loved and loving back; it’s a result of relationship. It springs from a place of felt safety, of knowing you are loved. It’s not the price of admission.

More than first-time obedience, the gospel is first-time compassion, second-time grace, third-time mercy, seventy-times-seven patience. It is Jesus kneeling down beside our children in their dysregulation and saying, I see you. I know your story. I will not walk away.

When I parented according to behavior, I was teaching my kids to hide.

What’s more, I was learning to hide myself.

And when I couldn’t keep hidden … the cracks in the foundation were obviously exposed.

When all that’s spoken to you is not your preciousness, but instead pressure to perform, fractures turn to fault lines and we crumble.

The laundry list of “do-better” echoed not just in my head but across the four walls of my home.

They need to sit still for dinner.
They need to put their belongings away when they get home.

But “they need to” assumes ability. It places the weight on small shoulders and calls it righteousness.

So we reframe our approach.
Not what do they need to do?
But what do they need?

Instead of demanding stillness at the dinner table, maybe your child needs a way to move—to release the energy their body is holding.

Instead of requiring productivity before rest, maybe they need space to decompress so their brain can re-engage later.

Their needs are not inconveniences to overcome; they are invitations to draw near. To see them for who they are, and what they need.

Their needs are not interruptions of the day; they are the work of the day.

And when I listen there instead, I don’t feel the same urgency to fix them. I feel the call to meet them.

We’ve spent the last year meeting them in their below-the-surface needs. And slowly, something beautiful happened. Now we can sit for a family dinner. Now we can put our belongings away when we get home. Sometimes we get up for a dance break mid-bite. Sometimes we kick our shoes off, go potty, then come back to put them away. But we’re building routine around what’s really needed.

And that’s the invitation of Jesus. Not “get it together and then come.” Not “behave and then belong.”

But: Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

It’s the invitation He extends to our children.

And, perhaps just as importantly, to us.

His comment unsettled me. Not because I wanted permission to rage, but because it seemed to confirm what shame had already been whispering: Even this is not allowed.

When my dad died, I don’t remember carrying lasting anger toward God. Death, after all, is the inheritance of every human being since the Fall. We are born into a world where life ends. As painful as his loss was, it did not feel like a theological betrayal.

But motherhood has exposed a different kind of grief—one I was far less prepared to hold.

As we have navigated the layered sorrow surrounding my children’s stories—and more specifically, how trauma ripples its way through families—I have discovered an anger toward God that I have not been able to shake or easily reconcile.

It is the anger of watching children carry burdens they did not create.

At its core, my anger wrestles with this question: Where is the God who protects the vulnerable? Because right now, He does not always seem to align with the character I have trusted.

Our experience of secondary trauma sent me on a deep dive into Scripture, searching not merely for answers but for evidence—evidence that God is who He says He is, even when a child’s story feels unbearably heavy.

And what I found planted a fragile but stubborn hope.

The God of Scripture refuses to let the unseen remain unseen.

Psalm 10 declares, “But you do see… you have been the helper of the fatherless.” The word fatherless is broader than orphaned; it speaks of those without protection, without advocacy, without someone noticing their vulnerability. By that definition, all of my children — adopted and biological — are held within God’s attentive care.

Exodus 2 offers another quiet reassurance. Before anything changes about Israel’s suffering in Egypt, we are told four things: God heard. God remembered. God saw. God knew.

Their pain was fully registered in His heart long before it was relieved in their lives.

This is what I return to when anger threatens to harden into unbelief: the stories of vulnerable children in our lives are not finished. God has not abandoned them. The Lord who hears, remembers, sees, and knows is still at work—even when that work is hidden from us.

And this is where biblical lament becomes not just helpful, but necessary.

As Mark Vroegop writes, “Lament is the biblical language for how we talk to God about our pain while we wait for Him to keep His promises.”

Lament is not the demand that God explain Himself; it is the decision to remain in conversation with Him when every part of me is tempted to walk away. Lament does not require me to silence my anger, but neither does it allow anger to have the final word. Instead, it teaches me to bring my protest directly to God—to argue, to ache, to ask why—while choosing, however falteringly, to remain turned toward Him.

Not because He has proven Himself to me beyond all doubt, but because He has already proven Himself trustworthy in Christ.

So I am learning that faith is not the absence of anger.

Sometimes faith looks like refusing to walk away—bringing my fiercest questions into the presence of the very God I am struggling to understand.

In my first essay, I shared a story about a child whose body tensed the moment his brother entered the room. What appeared, on the surface, to be meanness was actually something much deeper: a nervous system trying to protect itself.

This is one of the realities we often miss when talking about trauma in families: nervous systems shape each other.

When a child lives for years in an environment marked by unpredictability, volatility, aggression, or emotional instability, their body adapts accordingly. Even if they are not the child carrying the primary trauma, they are still being formed by the atmosphere around them.

Children who grow up alongside dysregulated siblings often learn to scan constantly for danger. They become hypervigilant. They pay close attention to tone of voice, facial expressions, footsteps down the hallway, the emotional temperature of a room.

Can I relax right now?
Is this a safe version of my sibling today?
Do I need to prepare myself?

Sometimes these adaptations look confusing to adults.

A child suddenly becomes silly the moment tension enters the room. Another distracts, interrupts, or escalates situations that had finally become calm. Some children become unusually compliant and emotionally easy, organizing themselves around keeping peace inside the family.

What appears immature, manipulative, or attention-seeking is often something else entirely: adaptation.

The body learns: Make them laugh and maybe everyone stays safe. Stay small and maybe conflict won’t come toward you. Keep the peace because everyone is already overwhelmed.

This is often referred to as secondary trauma or secondary traumatic stress. It occurs when someone lives in prolonged proximity to another person’s trauma, dysregulation, or volatility. Over time, their nervous system begins absorbing the instability around them.

And siblings frequently carry this silently.

They may deeply love their sibling while simultaneously feeling afraid of them. They may feel guilty for their resentment. They may carry burdens far too heavy for a child, trying to compensate for the stress they sense in their parents or home.

The trauma one child experiences is real. But so is the upheaval experienced by the nervous systems growing nearby.

This is especially important in conversations around adoption and family systems. Often, the child with the most visible story of trauma becomes the sole focus of support and attention while quieter nervous systems absorb the aftershocks unnoticed.

But these children are carrying something too.

Fear in their bodies. Grief in their hearts. And nervous systems shaped by years of learning to survive environments that did not always feel predictable or safe.

These children are not manipulative.

They are adaptive.

In the next essay in this series, I will explore how adults can respond to these fear-based behaviors without reinforcing the fear.

“What is I’m?” my 5-year-old son yelled from across the house.

I looked toward the other room, confused.

He asked again. “Mom, what is I’m? If Julissa is Mexico, what is I’m?”

I paused. Put the folded shirt in the basket and slowly made my way toward the room where they were sitting together. I knew what he meant, I just didn’t know what to say.

Walking towards them, I wasn’t satisfied with the answer I had. “You’re white” felt icky. “You’re Caucasian” felt confusing for him. “You’re American” felt … vague.

We’d been on a journey to introduce and embrace our adopted daughter’s Mexican culture as a family. And, somewhere along the way, I’d left a gap.

His questioning was clear. Everyone must be something.

I answered, but with hesitation, not confidence. It all felt lacking. I didn’t know how to see the beauty in being white or the richness in being American. Those markers felt flat to me, generic. Nothing clearly marked—language, food, culture, richness.

We’d been intentional with our adopted children. We’d created life books honoring their heritage, filled our home with the smells of pozole, and surrounded them with people who became racial mirrors for them.

And yet, when Elijah asked, I felt not the weight of something heavy, but the emptiness of something missing.

I’d never had to notice my culture until my son asked me to name it. I knew how to answer for my adopted children, but I didn’t know how to answer for us.

Fifteen years prior I’d been en route to a summer mission trip in South Africa by way of Frankfurt, Germany. I had 24 hours in the Frankfurt airport to try to catch up on sleep and observe.

I did a lot of observing.

I specifically remember the allure of this culture. That they had identifiable markers that made them distinct. Bratwursts, beer, language: it felt rooted.

Then a group of American tourists, who were notably from the south, made their way through the terminal and I felt the difference.

Their sweet tea and collard greens were not mine.

In that moment I felt an acute sense of how little I could claim.

I know somewhere down the line of my ancestry there’s some German roots and some Swedish roots but “some, somewhere” is all I know. And I felt an ache of wishing I had something to claim.

So when my son asked me: what is I’m? I felt the ache of that question: Who are we?

The clarity I felt around my children’s Mexican culture exposed how thin my own sense of identity felt.

I like a charred hotdog on the 4th of July as much as the next person, but as I dug into our children’s Mexican culture – or even as far back as observing German culture – I began to realize I didn’t know how to name my own.

I’m from Iowa. I’ve never worked on a farm. I don’t like steak.

What Elijah was asking wasn’t a sociological question, but a question of belonging. What am I a part of? Where were the books of his heritage? What was his holiday pozole? He wasn’t asking for a history lesson. He was asking for a home.

I’ve done such work to study and learn and embrace our adopted children’s heritage, that I began to realize I’d never done the same work for myself. What my son was asking for wasn’t just an answer about ethnicity, but a place to stand—and I wasn’t sure how to show him one I had never fully located myself.

Cultural identity isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing. It shapes how we’re seen. More importantly, it shapes how we see — the world and ourselves.

And I realized—I didn’t know how to see myself at all. Not because there was nothing there, but because I had never needed to name it.

There is a kind of invisibility that comes with living inside the dominant culture long enough to mistake it for normal.

Where I’d been cautioned not to elevate my children’s Hispanic identity above their identity in Christ, I’d inadvertently reduced my own identity outside of Christ down to almost nothing.

I could have answered my son: we are in Christ. And that would have been true.

But it would not have answered his question.

He wasn’t asking about who he is before God. He was asking where he belongs in the world he can see.

Scripture does not erase where we come from. It places us within a larger story—but it does not pretend we were never shaped by smaller ones.

The work we’ve done to honor Julissa’s heritage gave Elijah a question many children never have reason to ask: what is I’m?

And it also revealed a mother who’s still learning how to answer.

I recently had coffee with a friend who was describing an evening babysitting two of her grandchildren. One is adopted and one is her daughter’s biological son.

She was playing a board game with her biological grandson when his adopted brother walked into the room. She described his body tensing up before he spoke: He can’t play with us.

Before telling me how she responded, she inserted her own pain she feels around her grandchildren’s relationship, longing for the boys to be nicer to one another.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she’d tried to reassure her grandson at the board game. “He can play with us, it’s okay.”

I paused, taking in her story. Then responded definitively: that’s not a mean brother, that’s a nervous system on fire.

Most of us are trained, by instinct, to take behavior at face value. And most of the time it helps us operate in the world around us. But when trauma* is part of the story, behavior is often the most visible and least accurate picture of what’s taking place.

Behavior is what we see on the surface, but it’s often the end result of something happening much deeper. Something in the body. Something in the brain.

And if we skip over that—and go straight to correcting behavior—we end up responding to the part of the story that makes the least sense instead of the part that actually explains it.

If we only respond to behavior, we are going to consistently misunderstand people.

Not occasionally. Consistently.

That doesn’t mean we ignore behavior. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. It just means, we have to be willing to ask a different question. Not just: What are they doing? But: What might be happening underneath this?

So when this brother tensed up and said, “he can’t play with us,” those were not words of cruelty, but words of self protection. His body had learned this relationship could feel unsafe. And therefore, the body was speaking before logic could catch up.

People cannot be reasoned back into feeling safe. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” is a logical response to a bodily activation. Bodies do not learn safety simply because behavior was corrected. Bodies learn safety through repeated safe experiences.

Here’s something we must embody if we’re going to live with this: Safety isn’t built in a moment. It’s built over time.

Through consistency. Through presence. Through enough experiences where the body starts to learn: Maybe this is different. Maybe I am okay here.

In the next essay in this series, I will explore why trauma responses often emerge not only in the child with the obvious story, but in the siblings and family members around them.

Becoming a transracial adoptive family forced me to confront questions I had never thought to ask. Would I be learning Spanish, changing the decor in my house, and attending Hispanic Heritage festivals if I didn’t have Hispanic children?

The answer was no.

In conversations with our family therapist, I began to see how in many white evangelical spaces, colorblindness can be excused in the name of theology.

It plays out subtly: because my adopted children are part of our family, their Hispanic ethnicity can begin to feel a less important characteristic of their identity. After all, they are Lawsons, and this Lawson clan is not Hispanic, as if they lost their identity when they were adopted. (They already lost so many other things; let’s please not erase their identity as well.)

I don’t think people would explicitly say, “your children are not Hispanic because they’re part of your family,” but I do think the white American Christian church — at least the church circle I run in — would tend to overlook their Hispanic culture in favor of tidy theology that leaves little room for cultural complexity.

Not long ago, someone in my circle expressed concern that our therapist seemed too focused on my children’s Hispanic identity rather than their identity in Christ.

I understood the instinct behind the comment — many of us were taught that emphasizing our unity in Christ protects us from division. But I found myself quietly wondering: when did honoring the uniquenesses of God’s image in my children become a threat to their belonging in him?

They’d point to verses like Galatians 3:28 to argue their point. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This passage is not about erasing racial identity, but about the availability of salvation to all people equally.

As conversations with our therapist continued, I began to see how easily I had accepted whiteness as the default setting for life — not from malice, but from inheritance, from what I knew.

Following Jesus dismantles the myth that our cultural defaults are neutral.

But are we discipling a generation that actually believes this? That understands the doctrine of imago Dei?

Are we teaching our children to recognize the beauty in every image-bearer — regardless of race or language? Are we modeling for our children that we value all cultures because each person is uniquely created in God’s image?

Or were we modeling — without ever intending to — that white was right, even in a home with children of Hispanic heritage?

I began intentionally seeking out opportunities to learn more about Hispanic culture and step into opportunities to provide racial mirrors for my adopted children. But my adopted children rejected it.

“I’m freshening up on my Spanish for you!” I would think as my daughter screamed at me to “stop talking weird.”

My therapist suggested that my attempts to explore Hispanic heritage for my children actually made them feel othered in our family rather than more a part of it.

Then came the internal questioning: would I be doing this if it wasn’t for them?

Brittany Salmon, author of “It Takes More than Love,” writes: “If you become a transcultural family you cannot live a monocultural life.” But, stepping into a multicultural lifestyle had to be for so much more than just my kids. It’s not just a necessity for me as an adoptive mom. It’s a necessity for me as a Christian.

The first step I made in reconciliation with my children was repenting of the subtle posture of superiority I had inherited through my cultural normativity.

If I continued living as if white is right, I would not have expanded my circle of friends to become a more diverse community that represents all nations (or at least more than it did before). If I hadn’t repented of my ethnocentrism, I would have continued passing judgment subconsciously on the very people who gave my daughter life.

If I didn’t pursue friendships with women who could act as racial mirrors for my daughter, she would grow up in a home that ignored her needs and didn’t provide a safe space for her to process her identity as a transracially adopted child.

Repenting of my mentality around my white normativity allowed me a racial window for the first time into black friends’ lives and I could see — with empathy — the pain they carried from recent cultural events that didn’t faze my white counterparts.

But more than this for my children, this has been discipleship for me. Following Jesus continues to dismantle what I once accepted as neutral, and I am learning that discipleship may require far more rearranging than I ever expected. I’ve begun to wonder how easily we can confuse cultural comfort with biblical faithfulness — especially as we disciple the next generation.

I am grateful for the growing cross-cultural work happening in our denomination. But real change does not happen only through programs or initiatives. It begins in our homes, in our friendships, and in the quiet repentance of what we have long assumed was neutral.

As someone sitting in the pews, raising children in a transracial family, I’ve found myself listening more closely to how we talk about unity in our churches. When our preaching emphasizes oneness in Christ without also honoring the distinct ways God has formed people through culture, it can unintentionally communicate that maturity means assimilation.

The gospel does not erase culture; it redeems it. And families like mine need more than good theology — we need embodied awareness lived out in community.

Yet the Lord remained faithful. Just as he did for David in Psalm 40, he pulled me up from the pit of destruction, out of the mud and mire, and set my feet on the rock and gave me a firm place to stand.

Now, here I am, almost three years later, being asked by God to surrender something that is causing me nearly as many tears as my dad’s death.

My job is not just a job; it’s been my safety net and safe haven when the riptides of trauma are about to pull me under. When I sat down at my desk last Monday morning, I could breathe steadily for the first time since 5:15 that morning when my son woke up screaming and threatening me.

And I am being asked by God to give it up. He’s not taking it like he took my dad. I have a choice this time. To trust and obey — terrifying as it seems at times — or keep going my own way. It is true that we walk by faith, not by sight.

The enemy is having a heyday right now in my inability to compartmentalize my hard homelife from my stepping away from work. Every time things are escalating at home, the narrative is: I’m leaving something I love for THIS?? (What’s beautiful about this is God put it directly on my husband’s heart to pray for my ability to compartmentalize the hard at home and my letting go at work.)

But because the Lord proved himself faithful in my grief after the death of my dad, I have complete confidence he’ll do so again.

This is why, though the tears roll hot and heavy, fast and free, I am still walking this path of saying goodbye. If God is asking it, taking it, he’s working in it.

In my book, “Cracks in My Cup,” I write about a Sunday at church when we sang “I Surrender All.” I felt like a hypocrite singing the lyrics, “All to Jesus I surrender // All to Him I freely give,” because I didn’t have a choice to surrender my dad, and given the choice, I wouldn’t have surrendered.

I wrote then that we do have a choice to submit to God’s plans even in our grief. To submit ourselves to the hand of the sovereign and loving Father, who takes nothing from us outside of His will for our lives. What I wrote then I repeat today: I will surrender. I trust your ways are better and your plans are higher. I will trust You’re comforting me during life’s toughest times and You’re using this to shape me more into the image of Your son. I’ll trust You’re using my resignation, just like you used Dad’s death as a ministry to others. And my grief in this loss as the same.

What the Lord showed me about himself through that season is a lesson I’d never give back. And I am walking forward by faith, with that testimony as an anchor, that he’ll do it again.

We met with other Christians who were fostering. We joined a support group for foster parents. We heavily weighed and considered the implications this would mean on our family, our jobs, our lives as we knew it.

And we still said yes.

Fast forward five years and we’re dumbfounded at how little we actually understood the cost. (And I imagine if we fast forward 5 more years [or 15!] from now, we’ll see even more how much we’ve misunderstood it.)

ONLY FOOLS DON’T COUNT THE COST

Jesus tells a parable in Luke 14 about a man who desired to build a tower, and first sat down to count the cost (materials, labor, investment, etc.) in order to determine if he was going to be able to complete it.

Jesus makes clear this man’s wisdom, for if he didn’t first count the cost, his friends would mock him: See! This man began to build and was not able to finish.

There’ve been recent moments where I felt like that man, mocked by my friends for my ignorance at the cost of what I stepped into.

We thought we counted the cost, but we truly had no idea.

So where does this leave me? A fool who blindly agreed to step into a calling God placed on my life, only to be abandoned when the rubber hit the road?

That is extremely uncharacteristic of my God, and unbiblical to believe “blind faith” is foolish. Faith isn’t blind when it’s founded on the Ancient of Days.

But still, I wrestled with the question. And so I sought out answers.

HOW DO YOU COUNT THE COST?

How were we truly to count the cost, when we didn’t know what was coming? How do we count the cost in advance, when we do not know what cost will be exacted from us in the end?

The passage in Luke is sandwiched in between Jesus saying, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple,” and “every one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.”

So, as I was wrestling with the cost of foster care, I was really wrestling with the cost of following Jesus. After all, Jesus had called us to foster care. Jesus had said: follow me into brokenness to bring the vulnerable to light and life.

In (what was for me) a life-altering article, John Piper writes: The answer is that Jesus requires, upfront, a commitment to the highest possible cost. And nothing later is going to surprise you then because you’ve already totally sold to the highest, most excessive cost. (…) In other words, there’s no negotiating here with Jesus. There’s no calculating. There is no saying, “Well, if the cost reaches this, then I’m not interested in Jesus anymore.” Because Jesus says, “You can’t sign up that way. Nobody signs up for seventy percent of what I require.” 1

[Mic drop.]

From that article commentating on Luke 14, Jesus has helped me shift my perspective.

My inner wonderings and under-breath murmurings have gone from “what were we thinking” to “this is what you meant; this is the cost of following Jesus; this is daily death to self.”

REPAID A THOUSANDFOLD

The beauty and comfort of walking with Jesus is the promises he’s made in the midst of our sacrifices and suffering for his namesake.

Just a few verses prior to the man counting the cost of building the tower, Jesus is spelling out other high-costs of discipleship and says, “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

In other words, “There is no cost that you can pay in following [Jesus] that won’t be made up to you a thousandfold in the resurrection.”

This is not the motivation for following Jesus to the nth degree. Jesus himself is the motivation, because he alone is worthy of our all.

While the repayment is not the motivation, it is indeed the promise that he sees us and has not forsaken us. That while our friends may mock because we were seemingly ignorant to the cost, he knew the cost that would be exacted from us even when he didn’t, and he will sustain us through it all.