I am grateful for the rain
On this dry patch of earth
I know the difference between
Accidents and miracles
And wish to thank
The God of ordinary sadness
Who sits next to me
on the sinking-in-the-middle
Patched-with-a-heart
-on-the-back
$35 couch
Willing to abide in the center
Of my vertiginous grief
He says
Take courage
It is I
Do not be afraid
I have a friend who fights. She has brightly colored hand wraps that she uses to protect her hands beneath her boxing gloves.
She bandages each hand so that the knuckle is protected, the wrist and all the space in between.
When I have watched her wrap and unwrap her hands it has reminded me of Jesus.
I think of him as a baby. In the primitive conditions of his arrival, the Bible records his swaddling–wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger.
Descriptions of ancient infant swaddling talk about cleaning the newborn with oil and salt, then wrapping the child in strips of torn cloth.
Lazarus was swaddled when he emerged from his tomb.
The ancients swaddled their newborns and their dead, wrapping both in the same strips of cloth, washing each for the journey ahead.
The story of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany bears striking resemblance to his washing as a newborn and is a stated preparation for the soon-to-be swaddling of his dead body.
Three days is a long time to wait for a resurrection, four days is even longer. But for many of us 20, 30, or 40 years is how long we have waited for our dead to rise to life.
And if eternity is the span of human existence, then it is also the length of time we must measure each human soul, inside or outside our dark and solitary tombs.
To believe in the resurrection of the dead is to believe in the extreme triumph of Life over death, heaven over hell, good over bad.
To stand at the mouth of the tomb and know that someday each of us will be called to walk out of our tombs into Light.
I see him addressing
An undiluted crowd–
You are the light of the world
We are?
Sheep, maybe
Or chicken (I know my coward heart)
But surely not light
Too strong, too bright, too burning
We must burn on
This Mount of Olives
This Garden of Gethesmane
This history and geography of light poured out in the crushing weight
Upon olives rendering
Oil and salt rubbed on the skin of the newborn child
Anointing a king
The King
Of light
Who holds
Each burning
Coil of a star,
The core of fire within each churning planet
Our ordinary souls
In the palms of his stretched-wide
Hands
Dante, in his fictional portrayal of hell, put traitors at its dark, tortured core.
To betray love and abandon those close to you was a big deal for Dante.
As a writer, that is…as a man he was no hero.
Few of us are. We are all unfaithful to someone or something–our high school crush, our diet…something.
To be human is to cheat a little, I guess. But we must acknowledge this–we, each of us alone are responsible for the lines we draw around what we hold dear.
Draw the lines wrong and the “dear” slips away.
We tell ourselves–I will not go past this point of demarcation–a line drawn just past a “something” we should already not covet or consume.
We say to ourselves either–
I will not do this
Or…
I deserve…
It is the “I deserve” part we should pause to examine. Sinners (a quaint old word for all of us) tend to justify their infidelities with deserve and must have. Then cloak the indulgence in the illusion of secrecy–no one will know.
But Someone always knows.
He knows because He is God, and by definition omniscient.
He knows all our secret stories of unfaithfulness, squalor, and sin because they were poured out on Him
In the rictus of the Cross
In the jeers of the crowd
In the agony of physical abuse
In the final unbearable…
In the final unbearable He bore to make us
Faithful.
love don’t say
Whatevs, Girl
Love plays for keeps
Wraps itself around the words and places where you been
Leaves the have out on purpose
Because when you were young, you…
But when you are old you will..
Know this loss
Feel what it is
To not be found
Without you, Girl
when discussing
Atrocity
I find that it is best to begin
With scenes (at least a single scene)
Of domestic tranquility–
A sister reads a children’s story to her little brothers who have memorized the words. They punctuate the story with lines of dialogue and laughter…
Because
If you do not see them–real
Alive
Vivid
Indelible
Then you won’t understand the tragedy when they go missing
Completely legally, of course
The voices in support of holocaust of one sort or another are always quick to point out
Everything they did to destroy the wee ones was completely legal
–The stripping of their rights
–The dehumanizing monikers
–The methodical pillaging of their history, family, identity
–The medical framing of their naked deaths
–The sanitized commodity of their skin, blood, stems, and cells
–The clinics where they do their tinkering
Piecemeal
Tiny pieces
–All government sanctioned
–Legal to trade in and cultivate small
Parts
Tell me again
How
Piles of skin and hair and blood
Can be so..
Bought and sold.
Where was the conference room? In what hotel?
They served a light
Lunch/over the topic
How to separate the spine of a…
living soul
The way a man would gut a fish
A story of a 14 or 15 year old brother deliberately, repeatedly, invasively preying sexually on his very young and helpless little sisters is a nauseating, nightmarish scenario, not a frickin’ altar call.
Yet the Duggars claim it led them all closer to God.
Perhaps the god of celebrity, self-deception, and pride, but categorically not Jesus.
I know this because I too was once horrified to find that my teenage son (adopted from foster care) had preyed on his younger siblings and their friends.
Devastating.
I wept and I sought God.
My husband reported him to CPS.
I took my babies to forensic interviews, their doctor, and a licensed therapist.
And we fought to have him incarcerated for his monstrous crimes.
I sought out every parent whose minor children had been exposed to Charles. I treated his behavior as a public health hazard.
Because it is.
I asked Jesus–how do I get through this?
His answer was calm and incisive–the Truth will set you free.
It has. No one tells you how excruciating that kind of truth and freedom can be.
I look at the Duggars’ response to their son’s crimes and marvel at the damage they have caused to their children and their own souls.
Mrs. Duggar profoundly abused the content and intention of a portion of Matthew 18 in her interview on Fox. Tragic, offensive, and ironic….because Matthew 18:6 is the verse she should be quoting–
Matthew 18:6 NIV
[6] “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
I am haunted by the grief caused by the murder of a girl.
I am not convinced Sarah is. She seems to have an almost Capote-esque crush on the alleged the murderer.
Understandable. Why would he talk to her if she did not establish rapport? But in establishing a cozy rapport with the alleged killer she may have jettisoned her objectivity and an accurate métier for the humanity of Hae Min Lee.
Sarah says she read Hae’s diaries. She has surely interviewed dozens of her classmates. She should be able to paint a better picture of this young woman who…
Believed rather recklessly in love
Made good grades
Had a solid plan for her future
Played lacrosse and helped the wrestling team
And left a hole in the heart of her community.
If you cannot conjure up the living girl, you cannot comprehend either the depth of her loss or the demand for justice.
A life was taken. What good is clever reporting if the one who lost the most is but a cartoonish shadow of the young woman who was Hae Min Lee?
The sky was very blue in Beaver, PA on November 13th, 1998. There was a cop car parked down the block. I looked at it and wondered–did they put it there for me?
Had I planned a run to Canada I would have take off already.
People from our church came. Reporters came. They gathered around us in our pain.
Then the caseworker came.
I will never forget what happened between the house and my last glimpse of you in that car, but even after 16 years I don’t want to write it down.
Still too painful.
All of it, too painful.
She uses the word justness
As I sit stilled before these haunting pictures
I don’t know
Quiet only the voices of the past
No present or future here in the waiting room I remember
Paperwork when you believe is different than when you just go through the motions of
All these empty words
But you still
Expect me to believe them
Carrying Light 