Have you ever had a friend who you trusted completely? For reasons of time and circumstance you thought–this person has my back.
Or something…
Most of us would like it if God were a glorified Santa Claus, providing winning lottery tickets and easy answers.
He is not. He is “not a tame lion.”. And this is a dark world.
But if you get to know Him well, you learn something–God is completely trustworthy.
Lucky for us His love never fails.
What we know is scant:
A little girl plays in the snow
In a trailer park
In Ohio
She goes missing
They look for her
Only to find
Her too late.
Years ago I lived and worked in a community where a little girl was found murdered and discarded in a dumpster.
This seems to be defining: how do we respond to any story of any child murdered and treated like trash?
Do we mourn? Do we demand justice? Do we search for answers?
Or do we distance ourselves from our poverty–moral or tangible, and say,
not my kid, not my problem?
The news is grim.
In North Korea it is a capital offense to watch movies or own a Bible.
Recently I have read several articles about genocides in Africa, the lingering tragedy of the holocaust, and the absolute scourge of human trafficking. This world is full of human cruelty, and no country on the planet typifies the extent of this darkness more than North Korea.
What can be done?
Prayer is essential. But make no mistake, prayer is the earnest supplication of authority. We should pray to the King of kings for those whose lives are marked by misery and injustice.
But we should seek justice from lesser authorities as well. Where is our moral voice in this? Why is the world so mute when atrocity is at our doorstep?
Who will speak for those who already reside in hell?
And what cost to our souls if we stay silent?
Rain comes down
After the rush
After the game
Someone, always someone has to
Drive home in the dark
Defeated
Whilst the victors go to Walmart.
You bring rain
You always God
You bring rain
And with it midnight lullabies
For an old insomniac like me
I understand the darkness
In his voice
In his shared sense
Of humor
How “finishing the job”
Could seem so reasonable
To a monster-
o-us–
She listens to the darkness
The rain
The lullaby for a child who would not
Ever
Relent
Now become a man
Face your god
Face your God
No wonder you do not believe in
One
When the other is something so unspeakable
If I had a dollar for every time someone argued that expanding the definition of legal sex was NOT going to end in disaster for our kids, I would actually have enough money to opt out of the Cap’n Crunch ads that defray my blog costs.
In a week when the DOJ makes a show of shutting down a crucial child advocacy website this story out of Virginia should put everyone on notice.
An aggressive endophile was allowed to walk free by Virginia courts precisely because sodomy laws no longer applied and the judges involved did not deem the aggressive solicitation of sex from a minor to be a crime that mattered to them.
If you have children you care about you should take note of this case.
What follows hereafter will be more of the same–courts and justices deciding not to pursue legally valid statutes against sex between adults and minors.
We are not far from the end of civilization and we are already a failed state.
You may want to start disguising your kids as pets. They will get more legal protection from PETA and the SPCA than from our courts.
His mind is broken. I know this, but it doesn’t mitigate the pain of what he did to us–his adopted family and especially the young children whose innocence he violated.
I told people about this and they had the uniformly shocked look of a colonoscopy patient.
Especially when I articulated my anger.
I put it this way–
I want to take him to a biker bar and tell them what he did then let then deal with him.
As though I had been to a biker bar…
As though this were a real thing I could do….
As though it would help…
Our relationship has been winnowed down to rare, monosyllabic emails.
Are you ok?
Love,
Mom
I am ok.
Happy bday
We do not trust each other.
So I do not tell him what I would tell you–
the hurt goes on in the lives of his victims. They grieve. We all grieve. And there is a terrible loneliness as well.
I understand that while the bikers are imaginary, a way for me to substantiate the demand for justice, justice itself demands an accounting.
Leaving me the free time to mourn. To grieve for what has been lost and a future in this most uncertain world.
There seems to be a new trend in excuses for rape–pastors who claim their illicit and immoral acts were somehow motivated by a desire to “cure” their victims.
This, of course, like so many of the insidious blurred lines of our debauched culture, is from the pit of hell.
These men, or anyone who uses the mantle of spiritual authority to harm children, should expect judgment.
But how about the antidote to wolves in sheep’s clothing? Where are the good shepherds?
I have read tragic stories lately about violence in Kenya and Chicago, about livestock suffering at the hands of people, about grief coming unexpectedly from a simple water accident.
Each story of violence and loss reminds us of the importance of good shepherds.
We live in a perilous world and we ourselves are the most dangerous element of that world–polluting, raping, murdering, and neglecting.
Yes. Neglecting.
Sometimes the worst thing we do is not direct harm.
Sometimes it is a terrible enough injustice for us to walk away from our flocks, our children when we know there are predators lurking in the fields.
Imagine you were five.
And everyone else had a tooth fairy.
But when your teeth come out your mother and father congratulate you. Keep it. Celebrate. But no magical reward.
You might ask some questions.
Tooth fairies are good, right? The Tooth Fairy is good, right?
Not in our family.
In our family the tooth fairy is absent. My son asks why? I tell him the truth. It happened like this…
Sometimes grownups do bad things, say bad things. They get angry at the victim of a crime instead of the person who commits the crime.
In those cases, when a grownup gets angry at a little kid for something that was not her fault… well, he might not say it was because of the crime done to her, because he was shamed by it’s proximity to him.
He might say it was because she did not eat all of her veggies.
But the strength of his anger would let you know. Let you know he was not safe.
So we don’t see him anymore.
Because we don’t want him to hurt you–any of you–again.
This is the part I am sure of–he would do it again.
And every child deserves to have a safe tooth fairy.
Or the truth, and none at all.
Recently I have wanted to find a book, a blog, a map for what happens to reactive attachment kids when they grow up. I haven’t found it yet and it’s absence in my life has been a reason to keep writing.
No two human beings respond to the same life trauma in the same way. One dude with a lonely, difficult childhood invents physics, another robs banks.
Same with RAD kids. Everyone gets a chance to write the story of their own lives. “My” RAD charges are not writing great stories.
In addition to a tendency to lie rather flagrantly and manipulate people without shame, the RAD adults I know are bullies, using the force of emotion and accusation to intimidate.
I worry about the children in their care.
Children whose babyhood and childhood begin to mirror the lives of their mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts–young people who have not come to terms with their own childhoods and the toxic wounds created by the absence of love.
There is a personal story I have written about privately but never published. A man I knew well once confided in me that he fantasized about the torture and rape of children. I tried to raise an alarm about his dangerous thinking and Internet searches.
As far as I know it did no good. He made a joke out of my concerns and continued to be allowed access to children at his church.
Frustrating.
My primary conflict with him came down to a showdown in my dining room years ago. I put a piece of blank paper in front of him and demanded that he write down the names of the dark and destructive sites he trolled online.
He refused and accused me of being unchristian–not like Jesus.
I thought about him yesterday when I wrote Jesus whipped men for less, because that is what I told him that night–
Oh yeah? Jesus raised havoc to clean the temple of people who were using it to defraud and cheat. How much more would his anger burn towards anyone who hurts a child?
The only–only result of my conflict with that man was more broken relationships and some really memorable character assassination of anyone who questioned this man’s access to children.
The church in question “remedied” the situation by sending him to a family camp.
I digress. I know.
I am writing this now because I want to say two things–
Let us all take note of what Jesus said–
there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed
And
Men may ignore the prayers for the relief of children for years, but God hears and answers. Justice is coming for Eric Eoin Marques and every last person who aided or watched or stood by and did nothing in the face of monstrous evil.
I pray for justice for the innocent. I pray for their healing.
And I thank God today for the FBI, Anonymous, and anyone who wrote code to reveal unthinkable evil.
Amos 5:24
Carrying Light 