When your child estranges you it changes you forever. It changes how you see yourself as well as how you feel about yourself. It changes your priorities. It changes your life in every way - it changes your future. You find yourself on a journey you never expected to on, a journey through a deep dark forest laden with thorns and thistles at every turn. It is a journey just to even see the daylight as you struggle to understand how you got on this new journey that brings nothing but pain and confusion from the inflictions that the thorns and thistles bring to your wounded soul.

And to know that your child did it to you on purpose. It was done with forethought and intent to hurt - the absence of love. Their removing themselves from your life to punish you for not being perfect, just adds an extra dimension of pain and suffering that you never expected to have added to the struggles that you knew would come with aging alone.

With death, whether it was an illness or an accident, you know it was a part of God's over all plan for mankind. However, with estrangement the message is "My life is too busy to find time for you to visit." Or it is, “You are not good enough for me to want to spend time with you”. So not only do you lose your child, you also lose your inner confidence that "love conquers all". Why? Because your love was not enough to create a lasting parent/child bond. Your love was not enough to reach beyond imperfection to forgiveness. Your love was not enough to produce the kind of adults that stick by you when the "going gets tough".

With rejection, fear like you have never know enters every part of your being; fear that you really are not good enough for anyone or anything. Fear that even your best efforts were somehow really flawed when you thought you were making the best decisions for them that were in their best interest. Worry is also allowed into your life, worry that you are so unlovable that maybe not good enough to be loved. Worry that you maybe really are not as good a person as you thought you were. Loved children don't reject their parents do they? Rejection from a loved child destroys you to the very core of who you are, right down to the very bottom of your soul.

Rejection is the most evil and wicked of all weapons because it is a weapon of contempt. For it leaves the body alive and destroys the soul, the spirit, and sends your emotions into a tailspin. It leaves the victim battling for survival. Every day becomes a battle to re-establish self worth. Everyday starts with praying to God to strengthen you enough to take another step on the journey to healing beyond the forest of thorns and thistles. And you do it through your faith in Jesus alone, because the very people that were supposed to be there for you when your spirit was first broken are the very ones that wounded it in the first place through lies and the distortions of half-truths.

Is it any wonder that it takes us such a very long time to recover? Is it any wonder that we can’t just finish grieving and move on?

Is it any wonder that we are in such a swirl of emotions that one day we can be feeling positive and think that we are making progress and then the next we are right back to the start of the process all over again wondering “what went wrong?”

Not too long ago, due to my ignorance of using my son's nickname, my DIL/son discovered this group and a photo of their family that had been displayed for the whole world to see. In a phone discussion that followed he made this statement...."Your group is nothing but a bunch of angry mothers sitting on their pity-pots crying poor me...BUT I love Jesus." Really? To this I say, "You don't follow the same Jesus I do then."