The Unthankful Years, Part 3

Fortunately, in God’s plan, there is a purpose for everything. In part two of this series I explained the feelings and emotions we went through after our college-aged son got his girlfriend pregnant.

Late in December during that rough year, our telephone rang at two in the morning. A baby boy had been born! We waited to wake our son from his sleep and told him in the morning. Then we went to the hospital to see the child.

That day, everything changed. It was no longer about any of us, but about him. God had already shown my husband and me that it wasn’t about our jobs in church or our feelings or other people’s opinions of us. It wasn’t about what Satan was trying to accomplish either. It was about the child.

He was so small, but very beautiful. He looked like my son and his girlfriend. Now what to do with the baby? Would he be raised in her home or ours? Would we get that blessed opportunity?

After considering all the options, the parents decided they were too young to be a family. They gave the baby up for adoption. For three days they held him, loved him, and took pictures. Then he was gone. I remember thinking and crying with my husband that our first grandson had disappeared. Would we ever see him again? Would our son ever have a relationship with him at all?

Years went by. We prayed and begged God to show us where he was. Was he okay? Did he have good parents and grandparents? We even wrote to the adoption agency when he was about 16 to find out if he had living grandparents and if we could be a part of his life. The answer was no.

The years of praying were over for my husband when he died suddenly at 60 years of age. It would no longer be the two of us praying for an opportunity to meet our grandson, only me.

Then one day 22 years after his birth, I came into work and turned on my computer. There was a single email that caught my eye. It said, “Hello, my name is Michael and I think you’re my grandma.”