season 3 // episode 1 // overcoming trauma through the healing power of faith // an interview with Tricia Collins
Welcome to season 3! This mini-series will highlight stories of adoption as we celebrate National Adoption Month through the month of November. Today, I get to welcome my dear friend Tricia to the podcast.
What could possibly lead an individual, who herself was a victim of abuse at the hands of her adoptive father, to become an adoptive parent? Today Tricia shares how her tumultuous journey of adoption and God’s redemption transformed her heart and life .
Despite her painful past, Tricia and her husband opened their hearts and home to foster care and adoption, creating a testimony of faith, love, and profound compassion. Her testament to the potent impact of adoption is a powerful beacon of hope for those navigating the challenging waters of foster care or adoption and those walking alongside them.
MEMORABLE QUOTES
“We're really just asking God's people to do what God's word says, which is to care for the orphan in distress, and for us in America, that orphan is the child in foster care.”
“It is really messed up when the person who's supposed to teach you about love and about trust and just that you're beautiful and to protect you and all those good things turns and is actually a predator. So that's my first experience as an adoptee.”
“We would choose to step into foster care at that point to add a second child into our home and, unbeknownst to us, God would have just a real clear through line of redemption in that a girl would come to us at age two, same age that I had my stepdad come into my life, and she would be adopted at age five, same age that I had been adopted, and she's our precious baby daughter.”
“I've literally been in church almost my entire life. I've hardly missed a Sunday. There was maybe a little blip in my early 20s with some real strong rebellion that I wasn't in church, but he's always been drawing me to himself. There was always a neighbor who drove me to church, or a van driver, or just someone. He's always had me in church. And you know, as a little girl, they say, I sang the loudest in the church choir and not the best, but the loudest, I think. Even as a little girl, even when I was suffering, I was learning to praise him in my suffering.”
“I realized oh my goodness God, You have trusted me with so much within my story, and trust is a funny thing, it's reciprocal. And so I realized in that moment oh my gosh, You’ve trusted me with so much, I want to trust You with just as much.”
“I heard His voice, undeniable, and He said to me, ‘I want to show you how a father loves a daughter.’ It's a line of demarcation in my life. My life has never been the same. Since that moment. Everything before it's kind of a before and everything after is an after, because what he was doing was he was reworking that experience I'd had at the hands of my father and he was showing me what a godly father is like, through my husband and I as I watched my husband love our daughter.”
“He taught me how selfish my view was, that I was looking at it from what I might lose rather than what they might gain. And what they might gain, that's beautiful pales in comparison to what I might lose. There's no comparing the two, right? It's not adding to our family mechanism, it's giving family to children who need family mechanism, right. And so He just was like ‘Girll, you're selfish, and I'm gonna heal you of that, and I'm gonna teach you that a mended heart is actually stronger than the one that's never been broken.’”
SHOW NOTES
Follow along: