This poem came out of a recent time of prayer. When I was two years old, my father left my mother, my sister (3 months old), and myself. We saw him every other weekend for a few years, and then he remarried and moved around the country from job to job for most of my childhood. This poem expresses my struggle to call God “Abba” and to trust in His loving, faithful presence.

The inner critic is a very demanding, uninvited voice in your head that chastises you for being inept, bad, or deficient. It undermines your self-confidence and increases your self-doubt. ... So what can we do about our internal critic?

For adult children of divorce or separation, we often struggle with the extremes of boundaries: when our person becomes overly entangled with other persons in our family, this is unhealthy; it can be equally unhealthy to completely cut everyone out of our lives because we think this is the only way of preserving ourselves.