Category Archives: child advocacy

Pebble Parable

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It was a simple thing

The man reached in and snapped off the treadmill

Came in very close to the boy’s face

Told him “the rules”

Only it turned out “the man” didn’t know the rules as well as he thought he did

Rules like the way a single pebble can make a concentric circle across the whole chest of a river

Or the way the question about what you would do with a time machine

Might just define a person

Forever, forever is how wide and how deep and how long I will

Love you like a pebble

Thrown right at the heart

Of moving water.

Ah, the tattoo!

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When I was dealing with the trauma of finding out that a little boy I had taken in as a toddler had grown up to become a terrible person I

Had three things

I decided to use as grief-points:

Get a nose ring

Shave my head

Get a tattoo.

This week I have had to face that sometimes “a tattoo” is a luxury item

In a pandemic

In the way grief

Can worm its way into the fabric of who a person is

I am losing something else

Like a tattoo, a marker of the grief

And I found what I would put on that tattoo–

Love is

Unmistakable

The case of the disappearing email

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I have watched (read) coverage of a big (really big) powerful (really powerful) Entity which has been recently caught out lying.

This particular lie involved a lot of people, maybe all of us. The Entity is pretty powerful.

And I have lived in the place they do. So I shoot off an email detailing my pain over the lies, the way victims’ voices were suppressed, the great need for western journalists to hear and report the truth.

When I went back to my sent folder the email had been erased. No content.

What happens when Big Brother can silence little sister? What happens when we, the free, let him?

This Little Girl

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I want to say so many things to

This man who does not really see

“This little girl”

But I know You

See her, see me, see them

All the little ones who

Need a God like You

Take my sins away, heal my wounds, stay until I am well, bring justice in your wings, never blame the victim, never stop searching for treasure

You

who were, who are, who always will be

Just You,

and “this little girl”

When the masks run out

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“Can you sew? The medical masks are running out or have run out where Covid-19 has hit hard. Please consider sharing this post.

Simple cloth mask tutorials are online and on YouTube.

Please sew and share.”

That was the original post, after news that Texas is already able to calculate when masks and other PPE devices will run out–in weeks. not months.

I get that “the economy” is important, but without some significant investment in the life and health of the millions of people who are and will be hit and the healthcare workers who will also be hit by the devastating consequences of Covid-19, just opening America for business may not be the wisest and safest way

To fight this contagion.

I do think that short of lockdown (best plan), we need to discuss store hours for seniors and the immuno-compromised, husbanding ventilator resources, and yes,

We are probably going to need those homemade masks

More than ever.

Matthew 24:7-8 KJV

[7] For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. [8] All these are the beginning of sorrows.

Our last pandemic

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A couple years ago my family went through a pandemic. It was a bad year for kitten parvo or panleukopenia, and we were kitten fosters.

We lost them all and watched the feral kittens at a local park disappear one by one.

It was devastating. Some shelters were euthanizing kittens on arrival. It changed everyone who was involved.

And I stopped fostering kittens. My kids couldn’t take it anymore.

Everything felt normal on the outside that summer. Humans all around us lived totally unaware of the chaos and brutal death we experienced.

I think about that summer every day. The numbers on this pandemic are not as catastrophic as the panleukopenia, but each death represents a wound to family, friends, and community.

I believe in hand sanitizer and sterile fields, but I believe in our eternal nature more.

We need to pray, to sing loud to God. We need to make our lives count for something eternal

Every day we have

Together