You Can Lay Down your Weapons.

I am part of a team here in Monterrey. Our mission is to be a support system for caregivers in the homes we serve. We train them on how to be caregivers that can help a child from hard places heal from their past.

It’s incredible how no matter how much I’ve heard, it continues to be true “God has provided the healing balm for their hearts” (Dr. K. Purvis). I learn when I study the material, when I teach it, but also when I listen to it again and again. When it’s not my turn to teach I sit in the back and focus on the other teachers, my friends and co-laborers, who also have experience being caregivers in a children’s home.

One morning while I focused, I heard my petite friend say “Puedes dejar tus armas.”

“You can lay down your weapons,"she implored us to tell our kids. As the Spanish r’s rolled off her tongue I stopped breathing for 5 seconds.

She continued explaining how children from difficult pasts use manipulation, control, triangulation, aggression and sometimes violence as weapons to protect themselves. But when we care for them in a healing way, we are giving them new tools to deal with the world around them.

I could not keep it together. It was something that I have seen time and time again and have even become frustrated by it, but it was so real at that moment that these were their weapons. They were scared. They were only trying to save themselves. I wanted to look them in the eye and whisper, “Lay them down. I will help you. Jesus will protect you.”

I wish it was so easy to help them understand that the survival techniques they have used since they were infants do not have to be their way of life.

I hope that as we continue to train other caregivers how to help children heal , they can cry out, “The war is over! Lay down your weapons!”