Category Archives: grief

Signs and Wonders

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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

Lord, teach us to pray

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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.

What would you do with the end of “normal?”

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In the early months of 2021 I formulated a plan based on the return of my life to me. I had almost died of Covid and had spent some time tethered to an oxygen machine.

I decided I should move slowly—literally. I felt like there was a sense of my own human fragility that had to be acknowledged—drive carefully, walk carefully, acknowledge the fog of your recovery.

Give some stuff away. I am a thrift store shopper and I tend to hold on to clothes. I went through several bags of clothes and was able to give them away with the acknowledgment that I had survived something and did not need that dress or that shirt in my new chapter.

Use the gift of a life given back for something. We took in our adopted granddaughters, whose lives have been pretty traumatic. I told myself—if I have been given more time, I need to use the time for brave things. That is not the easiest decision to make when your brave decision changes the lives of your entire family. But I can’t imagine my life without my granddaughters now.

I feel like we are all on the edge of change. Economies are brittle, wars are on horizons. Have we even really recovered from the trauma of a pandemic?

What would you do if today or tomorrow or Sunday was the last day of “normal?”

John 13

Childhood Friend

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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.

Yeshua

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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.

She is not the same

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There was a canal outside the city where we would go with cookies some afternoons after school had released us. Watch the boats glide past the steep bank, press down among the long grasses—brittle spun gold—punctuated by poppies

She is not the same anymore

Neither the woman on the canal nor the one in the hospital bed

She has been set free

And I feel the silence

A migratory grief

Sometimes in the head, other times

the heart

Hidden Cameras Prologue

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It was at his youngest child’s birthday party that I saw what at the time was one of E’s distinctive “celebrity” qualities—he used his pitcher’s arm to lob a beach ball into the splash pad pour bucket—ball, plunk, fill, pour, repeat. The crowd of summer park goers reveled his ability to beguile and entertain.

At the time I took his boyish self-confidence as the contributing factor—he had an athletic gift and had been praised and admired for it for years.

Why not use it for harmless fun?

I look through all of this with grief and anger now. All I did not see or understand about him that day, who he had been for years, and what was to come.

What would you paste to doors of cathedrals?

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Over a year ago we found out that a family we knew had been devastated when they discovered that their child had been the victim of rape at the hands of a former MLB pitcher.

The rapes were recorded and shared. There is strong anecdotal evidence that other children were harmed this way as well.

The local police bullied and intimidated the victim, made no arrest, and closed the case.

As did CPS.

The FBI ignored requests for help as did the office of DPS and the Texas Rangers.

Oh, and President Biden too.

I have begun to think about Martin Luther and letters pasted on the walls and doors of cathedrals.

What would you say or do if you were haunted by the damage done to one child? Dozens?

We are all abandoned houses

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I can close my eyes and see the road, the house, the caged tigers at the roadside pit stop. I can see the cities and the precipitous bridges, the waterside parks and the places we have been before—with the very people lost to us now

What I would give to tell the mother to let the girl go

Like a beloved but hopelessly tangled kite

And tell the girl to just

Untangle toward the sun,

We are all abandoned houses

Without him anyway

Advice for the dictator

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Lately he doesn’t seem to smile much, hardly a surprise when his latest hobby is world domination.

I pray for him, but how?

How do you pray for a monster?

By acknowledging we are all monsters, only some monsters do not obey the voices in our heads which

Reduce cities to rubble and children to dust.

The advice is simple–

You are a man, just a man

And you are dying

You cannot, no,will not, outrun God

Repent and change

Leave everything but your soul behind and say you are sorry for what you have done

Replace your illusions of control with the acknowledgement of your weakness

For we are all monsters here

Debtors all to grace