The wind is strong and I am compelled to go down to the river. It is dusk, when the blue light left by a departing sun is the most like the color of heaven and the girls come with me.
Em imitates Elijah, repeating his litany of praise to the God who rescues us.
She is a survivor, improbable survivor, traveling across from river to river
State to state
Improbable spitfire
Proving her life matters.
We saw Sound of Freedom yesterday and it sparked a day-long conversation.
My adopted daughter was “trafficked” by her own biological mother, who gave her drugs and sold her for sex.
She died of a drug overdose in 2021 at the hands of her abusive boyfriend who bought her for sex.
We are now raising her daughters who were also exposed to abuse.
Child pornography is real and devastating. Trafficking is real and devastating. The movie is worth seeing for that reason, but I have profound questions about this narrative and this organization—which seems to have claims which are hard to verify or even possibly not helpful in terms of de-incentivizing human trafficking.
I began to question the OUR narrative when I read Katherine Ballard’s gloss on their adopted children. I have fostered and adopted a number of trafficked children and none of them have showed me “pure love” (nor do they need to). They have had deep wounds and have needed structure, love, and constancy from my family.
Do I “adore” any of them? I don’t think I should adore anyone but Jesus. But I have stayed in the trenches with them and I have learned that real love is just doing the best and wanting the best for someone, especially when their behavior reflects their trauma.
Christians may be willing to accept any Christian-adjacent narrative when we need to ask the hard questions even as we acknowledge that many of the stories of the predations of children happen inside the economy of poverty and addiction and maybe Ballard’s methods and efficacy need to be questioned by all of us.
OUR promises that they can, do and will go into the darkest corners of the world to rescue children. I hope they do. But we all need to be rescuers and often that is less flak vests and cameras and more quotidian commitments and truth-telling.
Jesus leaves the 99 for us. He expects all of us to be the hands and feet of his love.
All of the below round up is just for others to have more information about a flawed but ultimately valuable movie.
I am not advocating for anything but the Truth.
https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/sound-of-freedom/
I tell my kids that I had strange dream—in the midst of a banquet there was a duck, laid out on a platter, but the duck was still alive, and seemingly unaware that it was already served up as food.
I spent the rest of the dream trying to mediate some kind of restoration for the duck.
That is when my daughter told me about the Live Action story from my previous post. It hit me hard for a number of reasons. I had a beloved foster daughter who was premature and needed NICU services to survive. I would have adopted the baby in the story. Survivors of abortion should get all the benefits and services other neonates would receive.
I believe that Jesus died for my sins and the sins of a broken world. He died for the pain and he died for the grief and he died for the injustice and he died for the hate and he died for the tyranny and he died for the cowardice and he died for the willful myopia.
We are all the duck and we will get no other God -Rescuer willing to pay for our lives.
We should listen and follow him
The way a duck would if it were given a restored life and the rights of a child, not a meal.
John 3
Luke 11:1-2 KJV
[1] And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. [2] And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
As he was praying in a certain place—why not tell us what place? Does the author not want us to know where he was praying? Was it too personal? Was he aware of the human tendency to enshrine geographical locations?
Jesus was an expert on prayer. The word prayer for most of us is tied to the supplication to someone in authority over us. Jesus is the King of kings—no greater authority exists, so his prayers are far more about homesickness and heart. He misses his Father and his home, so he calls home frequently.
As John taught his disciples—this is interesting. The Bible does not tell us what John told his disciples about prayer, but we could examine his lifestyle and biography for clues.
John was a relative of Jesus, but his parents were at least 2 generations older than Mary, meaning it is highly likely they are not present in his public ministry years. He was some kind of orphaned prophet. Many of us experience real or emotional orphanhood, and we need to know that God longs to be our mother, our father, and our home.
He ate locusts and honey—food he can forage for and that does not depend on human donations. Eating locusts feels confrontational—eating pestilence. Eating honey feels celebratory and hope-driven. Milk and honey are the signifiers of abundance and heaven. I like to believe he dipped the locust in the honey to make this extreme diet slightly more palatable.
Our Father—while humans might have been invited to use this term for the God of the universe, it is a borrowed and honorary title until Jesus has given his own life for ours. The crucifixion is our Adoption Day, yet Jesus gives the gift of this intimacy in this prayer. God is our Father—what a powerful blessing.
Who art in Heaven. Heaven is his home and as his children it becomes ours as well. I like to think of this as the address line on a letter, as well a the revelation of key components of God’s personality. What is Heaven? Home, God’s home. He defines Heaven by his attributes and we know a little more about him because we have some concept of the conditions of Heaven—safe, saturated with goodness and light, but also almost certainly beyond our full comprehension. Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah all give us glimpses of Heaven and later so will John.
Halllowed/holy is your name. None of us can venerate the name of God enough. We can only approach what it means to be holy and hallowed—pure, light-filled, powerful, undiluted, intense. When you really sit in the presence of the idea of holiness for even a few minutes it can make you uncomfortable. We would all be consumed by holy fire if it were not for Jesus’ sacrifice for us on the Cross. We can come close to holiness only by way of his saving and protecting blood sacrifice for us.
Thy kingdom come.
We see God’s kingdom come any time humans comfort each other, sacrifice for each other, confront injustice for each other, fight darkness with light and expose lies with truth.
We have been commissioned to bring the kingdom, not just wait for it to come like a train rumbling into a station.
Thy will be done. See above—we are supposed to listen to God and do what he tells us.
As in Heaven, so on earth. We practice our citizenship rights whenever we do anything in the same way it would be done in “real” Heaven. I say real because we live in such chaos, sometimes seeming so far for Heaven. By giving us this sentence—thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, Jesus tells us that we can live heavenly lives now, but what does that mean?
Put the most simply—it means spend time with Jesus. He is our best friend. Talk to him, sing to him, ask him for help, ask him for more. Pour out your grief and anger.
If he is new to you, ask him if he is real and what to do next. Read the Bible, especially the Gospels, and if you already know how much he loves you, ask for more, for yourself and for a broken world.
A few months ago I found my first rapture dream video on YouTube. Not every video on this subject feels sincere, but most do. People tell stories about Jesus’ imminent return and many of the things they say seem to fit with what the Bible says about how the Church Age or Age of Grace will end.
Jesus unleashed his changing, saving power on our broken world when he came and died for all of us, rose again to give us eternal life,, then poured out the Holy Spirit on any of us willing to take Him in.
Jesus tends to change the narrative. He comforts us but also drives us to do uncomfortably things like preach, serve, and take in the orphaned.
The description Jesus gives of the Rapture is a description similar to Noah’s Ark or Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt—make haste, go quickly, don’t look back.
So this story about a website for messages after the Rapture—
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=5029712&page=1
got me thinking.
Wouldn’t it be better to say things now?
This is what I would say—
Nothing matters but Jesus and all of us have our value raised and our lives secured because he paid for us and our sins.
He wants to be your best friend.
His answers are good and his love is transforming.
And the Holy Spirit comforts and galvanizes those who let him into their lives.
Ask him if he is real now. Ask him to hep you feel and see his love.
Don’t wait, because Jesus is worth finding and pursuing.
—John 2 and 21, and everything in between.
She was a strikingly pretty college student with a disconcerting way of saying truly disfiguring things as though she was doing an elevator pitch for a rom-com puppet movie.
She said the “idea was based on a childhood friend,” and that the horror movie centered on the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence of the Christian God (wait for it)…being the malevolent antagonistic killer!
Quite. A. Plot. Twist!
Somehow in the process of writing a home-cooked horror movie she managed to pull off an egregious character assassination of both her childhood “friend” and mine.
I listened aghast as emblems of rescue and redemption were suborned for a Mean-Girls-meets-The-Shining revenge plot.
At one point the thinly-veiled childhood-friend-turned-megalomaniac-killer-omnipotent-deity murders the protagonist after repeating a common Christian invocation of the Trinity.
She got a fan-girl response from many in the audience with questions about whether her movie was going to be produced, possibly with the support of the university?
Afterwards, I broached a few questions—
Was she concerned about alienating over a billion Christians?
Had she shown the manuscript to the “childhood friend?”
Had she considered making a fictitious murderous-god-antagonist to vilify instead of the explicitly stated Real One?
Had she or would she run all this by Him?
It is a gut check to have to listen to someone you love get raked through the fire of untrue and scourging misrepresentation.
But this was not Jesus’ first rodeo.
He paid the price for my ransom and hers, and whether she could or would see it, his drowning snd destruction in the abyss of human violence and folly was, is, and will be our only way out of it.
It is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” not primarily because we are so broken, but because he was-for us, and that should require a response.
My childhood friend has saved me from the deep end so many times. I would be lost without him.
Thank you, Jesus.
In my mind I have a picture of my maternal grandmother, mother of 11 children, flawed but beautiful
She looked like a grandmother—skin settling in, soft. Her hair went gray early but her face was always delicate and lovely
I am a grandmother now, and many of the adjectives apply to me—soft, round, wrinkled.
Fat to be blunt.
I am fine with all of this. I made a deal with myself years ago that I would see my aging process as an experiment in entropy—eventually gravity will have its due with us all.
I went on a deep dive this morning looking at a host of cosmetic procedures—surgeries, lasers, radio waves, deep tissue this or that—all promising to make a body toned, sculpted, and smooth.
I don’t really believe most of them work, but even if I did, I don’t believe they are for me.
I am supposed to “know God and glorify Him forever.”
https://www.apuritansmind.com/westminster-standards/shorter-catechism/
When words are inaccurate, or worse yet, dehumanizing, then we should change them
Let fetuses become young ones
Let blastocysts become our sons and daughters and let us consider that if the dividing line between protected and unprotected in the lives of young humans is the womb, consider calling our littlest ones the be-born.
Make it a blessing to each one-
Be born, little one
Be-born
“Unborn” is not enough
Not enough of an acknowledgment of the inimitable beauty, power and purpose inherent and irreversible invested in each human life.
https://theexperiencedmama.com/bible-verses-about-unborn-babies/
I usually call him Jesus, like to think I am “his girl” and rarely live up to what he deserves.
Yesterday the daily Bible reading was Isaiah 53 and it brought me to tears, as it always does. “Crushed for our transgressions”? I think of the ordinary atrocities we humans endorse on the reg as well as the ones which will forever radiate darkness in our history.
He took them.
And he offers such untrammeled friendship. King of kings, yet he is the friend of every yet-born child.
I should stop there. Benign, seek Jesus stuff, right?
But that is not all. Isaiah’s view of the Messiah is polarizing. He is not depicted as the universally recognized cool guy everyone loves. He is depicted as “despised and rejected of men.”
Why?
Because we do not usually like to be told we are wrong, helpless—supine. We like to be in charge.
Jesus is our, wants to be, our friend, but ultimately that should be on his terms, not yours or mine.
Does that galvanize or offend you?
I do not enjoy thinking about Jesus’ crucified death, his humiliation, blooded and broken and naked and alone, but I know
That and worse was to be my lot without him.
Towards the beginning of the pandemic a man in our town died. He was young and his death sent a ripple of fear and disbelief through our community.
We stood on his widow’s driveway in the sunshine as she told us about the progress of his disease and swift death. It was as terrifying as the plague.
Eventually so many others died.
I was nearly one of them. After my life was given back to me, I told God I would always give Him credit for the miracle of my life returned.
I was surprised at how few of my extended family and friends seemed to believe me. It was shock? Or the fact that the recovery seemed commonplace to them?
It also troubled me that at least one of my friends thought that if I could survive it, so would she.
And she did not.
I carry her mistake with me. I feel her absence still, with all the others we have lost.
People have been telling us about their rapture dreams. “Rapture,” in this case is a shortened term for God taking a bunch of us home, ending the age of Grace.
Back in 2020 it felt like watching a tsunami rolling towards us on the horizon.
Jesus is coming soon. Find him. Buy oil for your lamp. It is minutes to midnight.
Matthew 25:6 NIV
[6] “At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’
Carrying Light 