Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,
To shine for Him each day;
In every way try to please Him,
At home, at school, at play.
Refrain
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
Jesus wants me for a sunbeam;
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
I’ll be a sunbeam for Him.
Jesus wants me to be loving,
And kind to all I see;
Showing how pleasant and happy
His little one can be.
Refrain
I will ask Jesus to help me
To keep my heart from sin,
Ever reflecting His goodness,
And always shine for Him.
Refrain
I’ll be a sunbeam for Jesus;
I can if I but try;
Serving Him moment by moment,
Then live with Him on high.
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
Jesus wants me for a sunbeam;
A sunbeam, a sunbeam,
I’ll be a sunbeam for Him.
I’ll Be a Sunbeam
Nellie Talbot
As a little girl, I had a recording of this song. I remember skipping around the sun-lit living room of our Calfornia stucco rancher, singing it to my stuffed animals.
This week as I was driving down farm-strewn lanes, in the chill December shadows, the song’s melody and lyrics started playing in my memory.
I caught myself humming, then silently forming the words with my lips.
In every way try to please Him/ At home, at school, at play.
In every way try…
In every way try…
(SCREECH! My wandering, auto-pilot thoughts suddenly skidded to a stop.)
What the hell…? I thought. WHAT did I just sing?
And then: I sang this song throughout my childhood? And this was considered appropriate?
The full force of the words “try to please Him” hit me like a sackof bricks.
My entire childhood, I was taught that I had to try to please God, my so-called Heavenly Father. Not that I was inherently pleasing to him, but that I had to make myself pleasing to him. How? …Well, according to the song, by doing the right thing. By “shining.” By “beaming.” By being flicker of light in the darkness of the secular world; by being “pleasant and happy;” by asking him to “keep my heart from sin” and beinga “sunbeam” (which I can achieve if “I just try”–which begs the question, why do I even need to ask Jesus for help in the first place?).
Getting the picture?
In order to be a good Christian, and in order to please (translation in my child’s mind: be loved and accepted by) God, I had to be a happy, pleasant, kind, unselfish, and sparkly little girl. And I had to be kind to other people (with no mention of being kind to myself).
Fast forward 17 years later.
At the age of 22, I lay in a hospital bed–sunbeams streaming through big picture-glass windows, shades half-open. With my head resting on a squishy foam pillow, I closed my eyes while a doctor sewed up the ripped and bleeding wound between my legs. Nearby, the nurses busily weighed, wiped down, and bundled my newborn baby girl. Then, per plan, they handed her to my friend and roommate–the first person, besides the medical staff, to hold my firstborn. I had arranged it this way for symbolic reasons, to help me remember immediately post-birth that this little child would not be mine. That I would not have first rights to her. I had no adoptive parents picked out yet, to hand her to, so my roommate got the job of first staring into my baby’s squinty eyes. She then handed her to me; I took her into my lap; and I saw for the first time the fair pink skin, long fingers, and long lashes of my firstborn daughter.
In that moment, I felt my lineage stretching behind and before me. I felt small. I felt myself a tiny piece of a great puzzle, stretching back in time and forward into the future, a line of mothers and children bonded by love and blood and sweat and tears. I felt my daughter and I as a unified footnote to a great unfolding chapter in the dance of life.
Yet my heart hurt.
For I was planning on erasing that footnote. Planning to disrupt the natural flow of my heritage and lineage. Planning on committing an unspeakable act against nature.
Nature.
Nature had given me this child.
But nature… was corrupt.
So, despite feeling a sense of oneness, of rightness, of endlessness, and of…love… when I held my child, I could not let myself trust those feelings. For nature was corrupt. “My sinful nature.” Nature could not be trusted, for it, like the human spirit, had been blemished when Eve first tricked Adam into eating a pomegranate. I could not believe in this natural feeling of motherly love as a good and guiding principle as I weighed my options.
I had to look elsewhere for guidance on how to proceed, on what life to give my daughter. I could not look to nature, not even this natural, maternal rush of feelings inside my heart.
And so I looked to the principles of my youth. I was no longer an active Christian, but the after-effects were still raging, and I had not wholly abandoned the struggle to make myself believe in God. Besides… had I adhered to the principles of my childhood to begin with, I would not even be lying in a hospital bed as an unwed mother. Maybe my childhood Christianity had it right all along–I needed to be a sunbeam. I needed to be sparkly and shiny and happy and try to please God and be utterly, completely kind and unselfish to others.
How could I do that? How could I make sure my own desires–tainted, always, by a sinful “nature”–wouldn’t be the primary motivation in whatever choice I made?
I knew this answer: I had to take my strongest emotions out of the equation. I had to ignore my feelings of awe, wonder, love, timelessness, and protective instincts. I had to pretend it all didn’t exist; wipe the slate clean; and look at my–and my daughter’s–situation with unbiased, logical, unselfish eyes.
Over the next two days, I agonized. My heart beat faster every time I held my tiny daughter. She was beautiful. She knew me. We fit together. Her tiny fingers would wrap around mine in complete and utter trust.
It broke my heart to think about leaving her.
But even as my heart broke, I pushed my mind to work logically, to “solve” the entire dilemma, as if it were a mathematical equation. I compared my resources to those of an adoptive family. I considered what two parents could bring to the parenting table vs. just one (me). I thought about the effects of fulltime daycare on children, of not having a full-time daddy, of growing up with a bipolar mommy, of living paycheck to paycheck. And… and… the part of me that still felt I should believe in God, the part of me that was still struggling to be Christian, thought secretly, darkly, “I screwed up my own chance at being with God. I can’t make myself be Christian. I might be spending an eternity in torment. But maybe, just maybe, if I place my child in a good Christian home, she will have a chance. Maybe I’ll be saving her soul by placing her. Maybe relinquishing is my way of sanctifying her, and pleasing God.”
In the end, the equation worked over and over numerous times, I couldn’t escape the conviction that God–if he existed–wanted me to relinquish my baby.
And so, with a tearful heart, I stood over a paper one hot July day and committed an unthinkable act against nature: I gave away my child. After the relinquishment, I imagined God quietly nodding his head in approval.
Now, five and half years and a second child later, much further on the path of recovery from Calvinism, I know how wrong I was.
Now, I look back on that day, and I know… if there is a God… he did not nod in quiet approval as I signed that paper. No.
He lay, face down, prostrate with grief. Tears streamed down his cheeks. And he cried, heartbroken, while he watched his creation–his own child, one he intrinsically loved just for being, in the same way I loved my daughter–sunder two souls.
Copyright belongs to the author. Originally published on http://paragraphein.wordpress.com.
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