Category Archives: child advocacy

Silverfish

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What happened to me, that in a moment of gargantuan hubris, I smudged it out? So what if it lived in the books or the play things? So what if it preferred the damp and closeted nocturne?

The moment before it was a glinty, wriggling alive

Then it was just an undoable regret

A life I should not have taken

We all have them–

Our ghosts, the ones we wish we could

Bring back whole

A parade of The Returned–

Uriah, John the Baptist, Stephen, Joan of Arc

Leaping and unfettered procession

Amidst the boundless sea of

The Redeemed

these trees of life

Splendor through the fence

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I could be a quark or an hurtling star,

A duck or a chicken

Living on one side of a beat-up plank fence

With knots in it, and scooped out holes

Signifying they all used to be trees

and the fence and the yard and the girl are just

Another kind of spaceship

Prone to sunset

Nothing can stop the Splendor from breaking through

Every hole in the fence.

Talitha

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It’s not rocket science, I tell myself, still present with my former self in the iterations of the supplication–old and unglamorous skills get unfolded like the swords beaten into plowshares.

Or the plowshares years later, back into

Swords where there might have been a daughter or two

You know I would have took that many and more

Or tried to sow or shape them from whatever you can make into a girl

Not dragons, not the teeth of dragons

But words stronger than all of my

Misgivings

Isaiah 55:11-12 KJV

[11] So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. [12] For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Who protects the wary?

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John 5:3-4 KJV

[3] In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. [4] For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

My first question for you is–do you believe there was an angel who came down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the waters?

So one person each time could be healed?

Crazy, right?

But no crazier than believing that Jesus healed the man who had been at the pool so long, who does not turn out to be the most grateful healed man.

I have skirted the issue of the angel at the pool for years, choosing instead to focus on Jesus and the man and the religious oligarchs who made it hard for Jesus.

I understand that angel complicates everything–messenger of God who brings some healing, brings some hope only

In a certain season.

Another Pandemic

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The summer of 2018 was hard on us. We lost beloved kitten after beloved kitten. People in the community who fostered kittens talked about PTSD and loss.

The agony of hope and grief was indelible, but so too was the change in my experience with veterinarians.

Some refused to care for the kittens; others failed to tell us what was really killing them. I had always thought that veterinarians were doctors for animals, with the same abiding principles of integrity and common good.

That is what I thought before.

Now I know that for many it is just an income stream, a path to selling things in order to make a living.

I think about that summer. It was a bad summer for panleuk. There was a terrible tragedy unfolding for the most vulnerable among us. Back then, the people were ok, but the wee kittens had no chance.

Now I think about it because the pandemic we face this summer is counted in human lives.

Let us all hope and pray

That the people we trust with our lives

Are in this for the right reasons

And for the distance.

Treasure 2,3,4

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Exodus 19:5 KJV

[5] Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine:

Deuteronomy 7:6 KJV

[6] For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

Deuteronomy 14:2 KJV

[2] For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.

These three calling out verses are similar in many ways. God calls us. We are supposed to listen to His voice. If we do listen we are considered by Him (and often others) as special or peculiar.

Special sounds good, but peculiar can raise some eyebrows. Peculiar is different, not like the others, marked out.

We might not want all that, but it is what it means to be God’s treasure.

He tells us we are his valuable prizes, and we, as the valued prizes, do what he tells us to do,

No matter what

Treasure 1

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Genesis 43:23 KJV

[23] And he said, Peace be to you, fear not: your God, and the God of your father, hath given you treasure in your sacks: I had your money. And he brought Simeon out unto them.

Joseph was sold as a slave by his brothers. He was not their treasure. He was, at some point, so despised by them that they would have killed him. They went to great pains to get rid of him, and then let’s face it–life as a slave was no picnic for Joseph. He had so many days of servitude, imprisonment, and darkness. All because his brothers did not see he was treasure.

The similarity between Joseph and Jesus is strong and intentional. Many of us are like Joseph’s brothers, just trying to get Jesus out of the picture so we don’t have to deal with him, all while he has willingly taken on our enslavement, our imprisonments, our being left for dead.

And yet Joseph restores. He gives both life and treasure to his brothers when they had deprived him of his own

In the same way Jesus does, turning rejection into blessing the moment we realize

We can’t live without him.

Eternal Sea

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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

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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.

Simile

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Prayer is like a huge dirigible, you can see the basket, but not the balloon or the weightless lift

God is the air, the world all around

Prayer is like a child standing in the tip of an iceberg, can’t see the ice beneath the water

God is all the ocean

One day we will see all

we cannot yet