Natalie Brenner

...when I decided to be fully honest about whatever my heart undergoes, I found immense peace among the chaos of uncertainties. In my honesty and by acknowledging our big, big God, I found peace.

Wholeness is birthed through vulnerability and sensitivity, which is often conceived in brokenness. Jesus taught me this.

I must acknowledge that though his adoption embodies graciousness, it is also a reminder this world is not as it should be. Brokenness permeates our world. Sure, beauty is born from ashes, but the ashes don't just magically disappear. Suffering and all that is wrong in this world still exists. This side of heaven, tragedy remains and the moments of her son becoming ours is a representation of joy and suffering deeply intertwined. Our son, the living proof and blessing that love is what makes a family, reminds us that adoption is born out of undeniable loss. Irrevocable loss of wholeness, of what was meant to be.To only acknowledge the beauty without giving voice to the tragedy, is to detract from adoption. In diminishing the tragedy of adoption, I decrease my son's story, along with others a part of the adoption circle. I would be choosing to ignore a massive portion of who he is.

Something significant in me snapped when I miscarried; that something hadnt unsnapped yet. It hadn't been put back together and I was afraid it never would. I knew Jesus was with me, but my insides twirled threatening to take me down from the inside out. I knew He was with me, giving me permission to be in the broken parts of my story...

Loss of any sort should stir up emotion; if it doesn__, it__ because we__e trained ourselves to be numb. We__e bought into the great societal lie that emotional and sensitive is bad, is shameful, is weak, and worse yet is unlike Him.

Fast forgiveness is a part of Christian culture I want to help change and transform. I ache for a journey of Jesus-like forgiveness. The kind demanding time and suffering in the process.

...hope is never wasted. Even if what I hoped for did not come to fruition as I had imagined, as I had hoped. Hope is placing the beautifully vulnerable parts of ourselves, our raw selves, into His hands. I believe hope moves His heart; but hope also moves our hearts into His hands. Hope builds trust.

I craved to make my faith as real as possible, which meant being recklessly honest in His presence.

Jesus came emotional and raw, scandalously gracious. I want to be like Him.

Time and time again, I find I cannot skip the night to arrive to the morning. Joy comes in the morning, but the morning comes after the dark night. Sometimes the night lasts longer than we want it to.

In my gut-wrenching honesty and by acknowledging our big, big God, I found peace.

I wasn't there yet, I wasn't finding joy and gladness in my barrenness, but I believed I would. I believed He would make my barren soul as beautiful as His perfect garden.

I began realizing it was okay to just sit with Him instead of always reading and journaling prayers or hustling off to the next bible study. It was okay to just be still. It was possible to find Him in the immense stillness, the hidden parts of my heart. He was always there in my hiddenness.

I wanted to forgive my mom and my dad so badly for the deep hurt they caused, the fear their broken marriage invoked in me, but I also didn__ want to pretend anymore. Pretending is exhausting.

...the sweetness of grace and freedom comes hand in hand with the uncomfortable, bitter-rawness of honest emotions and grief.

I love them both as though I birthed them both, but also as though I adopted them both.

My parents are humans too. This has been one of my greatest awakenings in adulthood: my parents being regular people, too. They have baggage and losses, grown up in imperfect homes with imperfect families just as I did. Life hasn__ been easy on either of them between the mixture of poor decisions and bad breaks; this world lacks perfection for us all.

Too many men I know experience shame because society places pressure on them to withhold emotion: emotion and sensitivity is weak. I have found the opposite is true: emotion and sensitivity is what makes us strong.