Because I Love You…

My blogging journey began out of a desire to tell Justin’s Story. Justin is my firstborn child. You will find posts about him throughout my blog. Old fashioned people would call my son illegitimate. I prefer to say he was born my son and mine alone.

I was just about to begin my Senior year in high school when I learned I had gotten pregnant. His father abandoned us a few weeks after I told him we were expecting a child.

Justin grew up without his father. When he was eight months old, I met my first husband with whom I had two more children — the girls, Brittany and Taylor. This is the man Justin grew to know as his daddy.

But, like his biological father, the girls’ dad would abandon Justin when he was nine. I don’t know that I can really blame him.  His new girlfriend did not approve of his giving his time and money to another man’s child and so he stopped by one day and said, “Nikki says that Justin is no longer welcome in our home.”

My husband, Scott ended up being the too little, too late guy. By the time he came on the scene Justin was an angry adolescent without a father identity. He also had learning disabilities and a penchant for trouble. To Scott’s credit, he tried. But Justin would sabotage the relationship when Scott got too close. Scott’s expectations for Justin to simply “straighten up and fly right” also were not met.

We had a few sweet years when I home-schooled Justin and he became involved in the youth group at church. He accepted the Lord as his Savior, and made some really good choices.

When he was 15-year-old, we re-enrolled him in school and he began his Freshman year at Northwest High School in Denton County, Texas. Challenging does not begin to describe our life after Justin returned to school. I was ill-equipped to teach him adequately the things he needed to learn and our budget would not allow for self-paced online programs that offered him a high school education. All we could do was hope, pray and well… Watch as those two years he spun irreversibly out of control.

Any discipline or consequence only served to reinforce his rationale that he was no good. He would go to church and fall on his face before God, weep, pray and then return to the few friends he had at school and live like hell the rest of the week.

I would literally lay in my bed at night and cry asking God if change would ever come to my son. Then the run-ins with the law began. We spent nine months managing crisis after crisis, and calling the police to our home regularly two or three nights a week. Later we learned he had self-medicatd with drugs and alcohol covering up mental illness among other things. I remember laying on my bed and crying out to God and told him I didn’t want the job of being Justin’s mom anymore. I felt I could do no more to help him. I did not think I could take watching him self-destruct up close and personal any longer.

God helped me through that time and many others until one day I had a strong sense that for whatever reason, Justin would be leaving me. I had told my Pastor’s wife at the time, “I have this strong sense that I’m going to lose my son.”

At that point I believed the loss would be a prodigal journey away from home and even, perhaps, through the legal system. But, somehow the revelation did not bring me angst but peace. God was preparing me for something. All I could do was continue to pray, watch and wait.

On August 15, 2005, my Justin was in a serious automobile accident with four of his friends. All but one of the teens in the car ended up with serious and/or life-threatening injuries. We spent eight days at John Peter Smith Hospital bracing ourselves for the worst and praying for God to deliver Justin from multiple injuries, the most severe being a head injury.

At 5:00 pm on August 23, 2005 — one day after Scott and I marked our seventh wedding anniversary — a handful of our extended family members joined us as we released Justin to go home with the Lord. We buried him a few days later and well, God began building his legacy in us on that day.

As devastating as the death of my oldest child has been I would not consider doing it differently if I could choose. Justin resides now in heaven with the Loving Father he longed for all his life. He is safe, living in joy and whole.  The enemy came into our lives back then to kill my son, steal my faith and destroy our family… I live today to tell you that he did not succeed. We’ve weathered the rough places of grief and loss, and somehow found our way through it together and stronger both in faith and our love for one another than ever before.

I write because telling our story, tells His story… The story of how He has redeemed our losses, restored our lives and is releasing us to live out our original created identities authored by God before the beginning. I write because He loves me.