Category Archives: adoption

God of the Impossible

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John 11:4 NIV[4] When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”

What is impossible?  Is gravity?  The suspension of gravity?  Space flight? Sea urchins?

We live in a world filled with wonder and darkness.  The wonder feels improbably miraculous until the darkness throws an extreme curve ball and bam!

Death takes all.

Or so it seems.

When Jesus says this sickness will not end in death it seems like he knows what he is talking about.

Several days later when he weeps with the mourners he seems like a total nut job.  Until…

I am going to hold that until–single note sung in the dark.

Some of the untils we weep through are excoriating, catastrophic…terminal.

It is important to pause at Jesus’ pronouncement.  If you know the story you might be tempted to breeze through to “the good stuff,” but in this case time takes the stage–time for Lazarus to go from well to unwell, time for Lazarus to go from unwell to fatally ill.  Time for Lazarus to die.  Time for Lazarus to be prepared for the grave.  Time for grief.  Disbelief.  Sorrow. Anger. 

And the apparent  absence of Jesus.

But…

He is not absent.  He is impossible.  He is the God of the impossible.

Wait.  Impossible means powerless, the opposite of able.  

How can God, by his very nature omnipotent, be defined as not able.

Deliberately. He was intentionally…

“not able” in death.

“not able” on the Cross.

“not able” for us.

Jesus called Lazarus out of the grave in preparation for his own death.  He gave his followers an impossible four day route through death and burial so that when it was his death they would only have to wait three days.

The three darkest days of history.  Three impossible days.

Until…

Sunday morning and the God of impossible things walks back in.

When you were little your foster father would throw you in the air above him.  Within one second your face would register fear, exhilaration,  joy, laughter.

It has always been a picture in my head–this God of sea urchins and dwarf stars throws us high up in the air for each single looped thread in the seam of  all eternity.  

The fear and uncertainty only bearable when we know, know, know…

He will catch us in His arms.

As He has already caught your beautiful mama, let Him catch us too…

Forever.

Safe in the outstretched arms 

of Love.

Luke 18:27 NIV

[27] Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

Poem

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“Poem”

would be a 

Beautiful name for a child

The kind of child 

You must imagine with

Ringlet curls,

Head bent over a book 

Or just the small legs dangling

From an open-armed tree

We forget that the word itself means

Create

Like fiction or the epic 

Story of lost children

We created, engendered, if you will

Then destroyed 

Through shear absence

Of imagination 

The Real Girl

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You always used to say I was not 

Your “real mom”

And I say,

“Tropes!”

What you really need to study are tropes.

For instance–

all the insinuating places

Fairy godmothers turn up:

  • Mitigating curses
  • Magically changing  the appearance of the most ordinary pumpkins
  • Mending what has torn and broken
  • Saving a girl from “steps” of one sort or the other

(…Or in your case just your own lost-girl soul)

  • Changing epithets into flowers 
  • Or mirrors into enchanted doorways  for the…

The forever, the divine, the set-free, the 

Real girl you 

Should recognize in the faces now of your own

Bewildered children.

(Wake up, sleeping beauty…wake up)

Trauma Litany

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I have swaddled my hands, wrapping the knuckles and the wrists, the wrists, palms, and knuckles again until they are bound.  Then I have pushed these bound, mummified fists into gloves curved, padded, slightly weighted.

I don’t swing at people.  I have, I can, but when I do I hold back, talk too much through my mouthguard, obsess about trauma.

Agent-causing-trauma.  I-am-the-agent-causing-trauma.

On the bag I do not hold back.  I aim for speed then alternate with power punches, slugging at the heavy, impassive face of a leather bag filled with sand or rags.  Its resolute, anthropomorphized gut, its impassive reserve.

I do not worry unduly about traumatizing the bag.  I can–am allowed to–wail on it in repeated, staccato acts of catharsis.

Because of trauma.

Because when you live long enough you have stories.

Stories linked to the pain of a very broken world.

The puzzle of trauma is the why and the injustice.

So I will call the why the jab and I will call the injustice the cross.

You see where I am going with this–the cross.  The strong-right-arm move of a superhero God.

Whose go-to power punch so far was allowing the trauma to wash over him.

The trauma of the trial.

The trauma of the desertion.

The trauma of the betrayal.

The trauma of the kangaroo court.

The trauma of the beating.

The trauma of the spitting, the mocking, the shame.

The trauma of power in the hands of bad men.

The trauma of the broken-hearted God.

The trauma of the family.

The trauma of the thorns.

The trauma of the nakedness.

The trauma of the carried weight.

The trauma of the pierced extremities.

The trauma of the hours.

The trauma of each breath.

The trauma of blood loss.

The trauma of being forsaken.

The trauma of out-poured wrath.

The trauma of the grave.

The trauma of hell entire.

The prophet Zechariah gives us a picture of how we will respond to this trauma–

They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child

This litany of blows.  This way that we must walk through the swaddling, the trauma, the raw lonely pain.

Because when He said it is finished, He meant it.  In the oddest k-o win ever, the victor takes the blows, both jab and cross and appears to lose it all only to give each of us the power to 

Fight trauma

Oh-Rescuer-God-

Jesus.


Chinese Box

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some stories hold

Such trauma

That in order to 

Tell them

You have to use a Chinese box

What, you ask, is a Chinese box?

A Chinese box is a 

Story

Within a story

Within a story

Not to be confused with 

Chinese handcuffs

(Which is a very different thing indeed)

For example:

Once there were some children who lived in an apartment with their (biological) mother and father.  They did not always eat.  Sometimes they were left alone.  The father beat the mother.

The loss was unbearable, said their foster mother.  The boy was mute.  The girl was cagey.

So small.  So damaged. So angry.

They called her bad mommy, bad mommy, bad mommy.

Because there was only the one.

One room, one closet, one subterfuge, one million wrongs

In the circuits of his mind

He tells the story of the bad mommy, who was (he says) too much drama.

As she pieces together the past she neglects the symmetry of hearts, circles, and peanut butter sandwiches among the survivors

Because, as an ordinary prophet once said–every trauma has its own story…

Within these concentric 

Chinese boxes.

Reflect the sky 

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some things remain dark

Obsidian dark

No matter how much you try to put distance between

The two of us

The video footage cannot, will not excise your presence

Obsidian dark

Is not your chicken-scratch handwriting

The horrible story I made you write down

Or the things you left out…

That so many people helped to…diminish

None more than you

The damage which will always be

dead dog on my chest

Ghosts of dogs should haunt us both

But let yours bark incessantly outside the grainy film of your transgressions

While mine 

Returns whole, resurrected even,

To the cement driveway by the old house where the children played with the water hose and the blue plastic wading pool 

Joy

They fill the screen with joy

For a moment even you could see

The way the thinnest layer of water poured out on rough cement

Reflects the sky

Reflects the light from the endless sky

Reflects the glory of this endless day we

…walk toward the sun, my one-time-child

Before the night 

Falls forever

Hey Miss Veronica

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When I first saw Finding Nemo it was so much about you.

And after all these years, Finding Dory is much the same.

I may have been your brief and most arbitrary mama, but I will love you forever.

And your foster dad and I will never stop laying down the shells…not just for your way back to us, but as a mosaic for how you changed us forever.

You, beautiful girl.