“Can’t love my baby”

“Can’t love my baby”

Kris at “Kris Thinks” used my recent blog entry titled “Rudeness and ‘breeders’” and a comment by Dan Jasmin as a jumping-off point for a story she saw on “Oprah” once about a woman who prayed for a child, but decided she couldn’t love her when she arrived. Dan’s comment had noted that all parents may get frazzled and wonder if we can cope with having more children, but the proper response is to recognize that the weakness and deficiency is in us, not in the children and not in God who sends them to us as a blessing.

Unfortunately, as Kris points out, not everyone sees it the same way:

She had 2 children but desperately wanted another child. She and her husband were having fertility troubles. It was heartbreaking. She wanted nothing more than to have another baby and it seemed she could not.

She prayed very hard for God to give her this. And God being a good and gracious God - she finally got pregnant!! Hooray! Nine months later she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Glory be to God. But, what’s this? A defect in this miracle of miracles? The baby girl had Downs Syndrome.

Try as she might the mother just “could not love her”. I remember these words exactly!!! She actually said that she realized “that I could not love her as she deserved to be loved” Ok so you get help with that right? You try to CORRECT YOUR defect right? This is “a deficiency in me” (as Dan Jasmin puts it so well) should be her response. But it is not.

This mother, decides that what is best for her daughter is to be given away. She puts her daughter up for adoption. She gives her miracle baby way to another woman “who can love her as she deserves to be loved”. This other woman has many children with disabilities in her home. Yet, she does not have a husband to help her. (at least not one that they showed on the show)

I am convinced that one of the reasons God gives us children is to teach us how to love as He loves: completely, in self-abandonment, with self-sacrifice. And who better to teach us that love than a Down syndrome child who can only love completely and purely? It sounds like this woman needed to learn this lesson and yet so self-involved was she that she couldn’t see the love that was possible and in God’s greatest blessing.

The worst part of the story? After she told Oprah what she had done, the audience actually applauded her. For her “courage”.

There was no defect in that child or any child to make her unlovable. Any such defect is in us and we need to change ourselves and become more like the Lord. Frankly, how unlovable must I be with my disgusting sins, yet “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” to die for us on the Cross and redeem us so that we might have eternal life. Do we want “Oprah”-style love or the real thing?

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