Category Archives: adoption

Test of the “I Was”-es (Part 1)

Posted on by
Reply

Matthew 25:35-39 KJV

[35] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: [36] Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. [37] Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee ? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? [38] When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee ? [39] Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

The test of the I-was-es:

Seeing Jesus in all our weakness and need

We are the catchers in the rye

Posted on by
Reply

Matthew 13:38-39 KJV

[38] The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one ; [39] The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.

When I was younger I would read Catcher in the Rye on a yearly basis. First I was Phoebe’s age, then Holden’s and now I am old enough to know that the narrator sounds too much like a middle aged man with a Peter Pan complex.

But the catchers in the rye are older than me and J.D.

They are the injunction of a God who saves us all from the precipice hill of Golgotha. He tells me I owe him all and I agree. He tells me, come with me into the fields

And I go

I try to go

Ah-buh-nim

Posted on by
Reply

The little boy in the picture wore the most adorable overalls

And brand-spanking-new shoes

He approached the chicken in the unfamiliar garden

With the utmost deference,

The pears still hung on the trees, each carefully wrapped in old newspapers to shield them from pestilence

An unseasonably warm day to worship one’s ancestors and

The food at the restaurant was good

Something about historically accurate food

In the last few moments before

The two little red-headed children

Reported

All they saw–aggressor-accomplice-victim

The little boy in the picture wore the most adorable overalls

Eternal Sea

Posted on by
Reply

When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.

I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,

Sea like the color of his eyes

Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together

Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all

Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce

C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me

But I can still remember

The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist

The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because

Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang

The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car

If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly

It would not begin to be as much as you are worth

Of your eternal value

Of the Light you can become forever

If you just

Turn and face the Sea.

All hat, no cattle

Posted on by
Reply

I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children

If only an ordinary person like me could

Cast a spell with words

Hocus pocus–live!

Abracadabra–live!

I alternate between believing

That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or

The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing

Calvariums.

Louisiana and the Supreme Court

Posted on by
Reply

The idea that a person whose sole job it is to cut out and exterminate living humans from their home by force is “a real doctor” is directly related to the Rabbits of Ravensbruck, the death camps of Hitler, the medical experiments conducted on unwilling victims by “licensed doctors” in WWII German and Poland, to Pol Pot, and ultimately to all the forced, anti-disability, and sex-attributed abortions around the world.

Real doctors try to save life, not crush unborn patients. So I get why the Supreme Court would be a little confused about the Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges.

But it is a good and appropriate law and should have been upheld.

If it is not, then we must ask what the five ruling justices think will happen when the mothers in these clinics face the physical trauma of an operation or procedure that is by its very definition violent?

They will face it alone, because the person who did this to them does not live in their community. Does not reveal their true identity. Does this thing to them and then leaves them alone.

When our courts are unjust and our moral compass has been knocked out by nearly 50 years of acquiescence to legal and institutional murder, it is no wonder that we have lost our way.

We will not find it again without facing what we have done and what it has cost us–

Our very souls and our own children.

Abortion is murder, not medicine, and SCOTUS has just proved it by shielding practitioners who perform it from the full and appropriate licensing and credentialing process.

Shame on us. Shame and mourning.

Job 4:7 NIV

[7] “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?

Abortion. That is where.

What Would Tyrone Say?

Posted on by
Reply

I have been a big fan of Alex Hirsch since first encountering Gravity Falls. The series is layered, well-written, lovable, and infinitely quotable. So last night when I found out that Hirsch and his partner have raised money for Planned Parenthood, it was point of sorrow.

Seems ironic that a man whose works are written for children would not see that abortion kills children.

I know, I sound quite plaintive and simplistic, but I can’t stop thinking about one of Hirsch’s most lovable creations–a clone of his comic placeholder, Dipper Pines.

I wonder how Hirsch could have kept the narrative alive for Dipper’s several (and equally lovable) clones?

Keeping the narrative alive–

The opposite of the deadly agenda of Planned Parenthood.

The Imaginary Conversation

Posted on by
Reply

He is gone now

Gone to me, anyway

But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–

Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended

What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair

Forever/

Just

… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes

All your regrets all your missed chances

To cry like a baby

Wail for a Savior

Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent

Shaken finally by what you

Would have been without Him