All is fair in love and shame

Mother's Day is a day of hiding.
Can I get an Amen from anyone in the crowd?

This Mother's Day will be the third in my life that I go to church - and two out of three have been because I worked at one.
The first time was a terrible mistake. 15 years old, bright eyed and bushy tailed - until I saw the mothers cuddling up with their doting daughters, my own hand left empty.
It was a rough day for my already-volatile teenage heart.
Mother's Day is now a day of Netflix, closed shades on the windows, and 48-72 hours of Facebook-free time to avoid playing too much of the Comparison Game.
The game where everybody loses.

I struggled with the foster families I lived with, being both included and excluded, constantly reading mixed messages about what it means to be in a "family" if it simultaneously tells me to remain loyal and yet reminds me that I am not one of their own.

"She's the girl that lives with us."
A charity.

I still struggle to call my closest friends "family" because t is an f-word of the most offensive nature. It means deceit, abuse, betrayal, abandonment, kicking, screaming - anything but love.

So when the God of love says I am part of his family, I shudder.
My mind races to a thousand "I love you, but..."s, a fistful of different house keys, and a dozen "mothers" and "fathers" that never were.

As if the One who both created and adopted me is also unwilling to deal with this mess.
Or maybe I am just his charity case, a pitiful face on the side of the road.

Somehow we came to believe that love can't be won.
It can't be won through a pile of paperwork - sometimes adoption just "doesn't work out."
Like the kid is a piddly puppy or a too-firm mattress.
It can't be won through inviting the stranger (or even friend) into our home on a holiday.
Because what would the rest of the family think?
It can't be won through waiting patiently with and fighting passionately for the drunk uncle or the prodigal son.
Sometimes people are a lost cause, like an over-cooked souffle.

This isn't to shame anybody, but our reality of physical family mirrors or image of spiritual family.

Love cannot be won?
If we believe this, then we believe that love cannot (and therefore, was not) won on the cross.
We believe that God creating us, shaping us by hand out of his own vision and image, was not enough.
We believe that God choosing to adopt us, taking us back during our runaway teen years and terrible twos, was not enough.
We believe that God promising to remain our Father forever, giving us his own last name and adding us onto his will, was not enough.

And so we hide.
Shame runs deep.
Or maybe it runs thick. Sometimes thicker than blood.

We feel like charities at best and orphans at worst.
As if God doesn't have a special love for the orphans.

Shame takes the things we enjoy most and turns it into our biggest source of pain and frustration.
Shame tells us to hide in our rooms on Mother's Day because we are not worthy of being daughters, or maybe because we are not worthy of being mothers.

God made mothers.
And God made daughters.
But God did not make shame.

So this Sunday, I'll be making a public appearance.
Partly because I have to teach Sunday school to a dozen tweens and teens.
But also because love wins.