I can’t have coffee with Tara, the stuff she drinks is way too strong for me now, but I wait for her anyway, keep glancing out smudgy windows at the passing clouds, shafts of light, signifying every
valley filled, hill made low, road made straight, and all these rough, rough ways, smoothed at last.
Luke 3:5
Tara B.
Revelation 21:1 KJV
[1] And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
The whole world just a shotgun shack with the big fig tree in the backyard. We used to swing there on the old swing set, first for just us children, then the one even old people could sit in.
So clear in my mind
What passed away meant to you, meant to me, its euphemistic weight gone with all the passings, you, then grandpa, then dad
Passed away you would say then, whereas now there are no euphemisms, no ways of hiding
What the new looks like
All filled with glory.
Ecclesiastes 4:1-2 KJV
[1] So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter. [2] Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive.
I generally chafe at the wisdom of Solomon. I want to measure my “wise guys” by their lives–faithfulness, sobriety, compassion. S-man seems to fall abysmally short on all categories.
When I read this verse from Ecclesiastes it resonates with my own sense of the fragility and tenuousness of life, but then I cannot help that Solomon had so many powers the ordinary dude did not have to:
Stop oppression
Comfort the bereaved
And use his power as a monarch to generally improve his culture
He had the power to live a different life, to show a different way. I am no king, but I will be judged by how much better or worse I use my power
To change things.
He says that I have lost my chance with him, as though he is a lottery ticket torn from my grasp by a strong wind in a storm, fluttering away with its winning numbers and it promise of untold riches.
I have lost my chance with him.
A week ago I stood in the Salvation Army and showed my youngest daughter a tee shirt–got love? Become a foster parent.
Her face clouds. Her life was radically altered by my decision to foster parent.
You had your chance with me…
He was small and scratched his face into bloody tiger stripes, he did not speak at almost two years of age. He did not potty train until just before kindergarten. He once desecrated a couch in a strange feral way.
The stories of my chances with him could fill terrible books.
I get it kid, you have a new god now.
But I am haunted by what will happen to you if you don’t have the guts to contemplate
The hell you unleashed on all of us and all it’s damning consequences.
I once knew a man who said it should be the parable of the prodigal father, which, of course, is true. We are not very prodigal with much but our father’s treasure.
I have been the younger son. I have been the older son. Jesus knows that we are all really not great sons–judge-y or profligate or both, so he gives a story where the two great characters are an old man and a fatted calf.
The man who saves the world makes himself the main course at a feast thrown for a loser.
I am that loser. The shining moment of clarity in any human life is when we realize we are all the prodigal child.
And so we should know the rules for prodigals–
I have done nothing to deserve this inheritance I have squandered
I have made little account for the days my Father has grieved on my behalf
But he never stops hoping I will come home.
What pride, what fear, what foolishness can withstand the power of love?
Luke 15:17-20 KJV
[17] And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! [18] I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, [19] And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. [20] And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
The girl-child mama ties her daughters to her–kites, they rise
Aloft in the summer breeze
Curl, swirl, dip, and sing
Bird-children
While faraway grandmother
Ponders apogee
The furthest point one can be from another.
I see the man making models of planets in his meticulous, scienc-y basement then lining them up like a photographer arranging and rearranging a family portrait,
Mercury, you stand here…Jupiter if you could squeeze in by the ping-pong table
Or the final run and podium judgment of the Westminster Dog Show
It is a neat trick
Of human folly to think we can order the objects floating in an infinite sky, make them feel smaller than they are, more manageable
When even the moon is beyond us
Its insistent pull and reflective splendor
Missed so often in the ordinary
Night sky
As we pack all the objects of this solar system
Between us
Furniture against the door of Love
Go for a run in a safe, well-lit place
Sing your God songs, loud if possible
Kick around in the Gospels, the Jesus stories, the Bible project, CS of course
Ask Him direct questions
We love you sooo much
But He is love–
oceans-are-small-compared-love
No-story-too-small-love
Big-sky-love
Lonely awful die-for-us love
Lend us a child like you, Love
Arms wide open love
The stars are more than fire love
In the dark sky they admonish/love
He will never leave you, never walk away
I remember you
I remember when you ran into the waiting room with your sister
I remember all the warnings and admonitions I got from Martha-the-caseworker and your recently relieved first foster mom
And your blue-as-the-sea implacable gaze across a very misguided table
I remember your speech therapist and her fairy godmother-like delight in seeing you make eye contact and in watching your self-inflicted facial wounds
Heal and not return
Storms all over the place
Storms in you swirled all around us, even when I tried to contain them.
Carrying Light 