Deep porch for rocking. Wrap around so that the boy with the ol’ stick horse can barrel around each corner. A telephone nook even though we both know nobody calls anymore. And the unwieldy kitchen in the heart of it all-ghost-kitchen attempting to take natural light from the living and sun rooms respectively while even the closets have seen things, terrible things
As if an old house could ever just stand by and
say nothing at all.
After being accused of lying, or at least not stopping? lying, I looked it up–were CPCs nefariously posing as abortion clinics in order to dupe the unsuspectingly pregnant into not killing their unborn children?!
Maybe.
Interesting because it has not been my experience that they did that. I went through a CPC training course many, many years ago and was very impressed by the quality of the training. The leaders emphasized that the CPC counselors were there to
They seemed wise, kind, calm, and their cookies were warm and homemade.
That being said, let us be very straight on this–as far as I can tell (from the internet) not one single human being–ambulatory or prenatal–has ever been deprived of life by the machinations of any Crisis Pregnancy Center.
So perhaps we should ask ourselves this–if your pregnant mother had walked (in crisis) into either a very truthful abortion facilitatory or a very deceptive crisis pregnancy center, which would have given you, the still pre-birthday you, a chance at living long enough to read this blog?
We will all be judge by the sign makers of Auschwitz for we have had the power to speak freely on the behalf of our murdered unborn daughters…
Unwilling or unable to acknowledge which side Harriet Tubman, Corrie Ten Boom, or Anne Frank would take in this brouhaha over deadly truths and life-affirming deceptions.
I tire of us
Top of the food chain (for now)
And rendered myopic by shear foolish thinking
You think you will be made immortal by
What?
Clever rocketry, singing voice, signature ass?
Naw. We all just be
bits of fur
Here for a minute
Gone tomorrow
Best prepare for when we go
up or down
Yonder.
Sometimes I can hear them through the digital quilt of my son’s smartphone, San Antonio songbirds not unlike the full-throated prophets I hear in the backyard, not minor prophets, like Micah or Nahum, although come to think of it these would be good names for the night birds. No. They are small, easily overlooked, not altogether heard which leads me to my theory about Isaiah, not a minor prophet at all but must’ve wanted to be for awhile in the naked days when his voice competed with the spectacle of it all–ordinary-man-naked, not rendered complete until the blood-and-agony Redeemer he sang about
Proves true.
I can’t help but stare at the picture of this family swept out to sea. I know what it is like to attempt to parent children from “hard backgrounds.”
And yes, I have often tried to assuage my deep grief about the damage caused by my adopted children by telling myself that we have survived (so far).
None of this is fun to talk about, but I did talk–sometimes unsparingly, because I hoped that if people heard our story they could do something to prevent tragedies like ours.
More than the average mama, I can put myself in the shoes of these mamas, and I have two things to thing to say–
Just: a story of the lost and found https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468123459/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_JPNWAbDZT3TR5
It is a small label inside a second-hand London fog. Sez “waterproof” in a way that means tell the dam story. Which I tell in my head in one way or another
Every day
Protagonists too vivid to fictionalize and actual jackass antagonists who are surprisingly two dimensional for real people in a small
Awful story I don’t want to tell, but my lovely black raincoat says I must.
I have always marveled at the risk involved in the parable of the lost sheep. In fact, I can actually see the economists in the crowd shaking their heads and coming up to J. afterwards and trying to convince him that it just doesn’t make sense.
One lost sheep? Who is gonna watch the others?
I have a tendency to worry about all the sheep. What if there are wolves? Wolves stress me out. But J is unswerving. He leaves the 99 and goes to find the one. lost. sheep.
Of course he knows some secrets.
Like: the 99 are actually supposed to watch out for each other.
Like: a few stubborn jackasses in the flock help keep the wolves at bay.
Like: I am the one lost sheep. You are the one lost sheep.
We are all lost without him.
For J every last flipping one of us is that solitary-witless-easily-confused-fluffy-lost sheep.
Sometimes the only thing one needs to do to be found is to admit that one is lost.
Real lost
Without him.
After a solid fudging week of losing thumb wars to the god of grief I decide to change my stance.
Fine, I say, keep me up if you want, but we are going to do this together.
Make no mistake. He is not my friend. He is the quiet satellite tech on the slow train north. He is the Russian student who used to try to beguile me with roses and sweet talk. He is the dark standing just shy of sunset. All these years I have avoided his gaze, pretended I didn’t notice him at the same parties, never wailed and pummeled his dark, cold chest.
You win, I say, snake hole, only to realize he hasn’t, can’t because You have already–no matter how many days to resurrection.
They say that JC fought hard until he saw Brutus among his assailants. How well-thought-out is death by a thousand cuts? And would it matter to us if he had called him child in the dying hour? These are my ides-of-March musings, as if we were not warned he was the god of war, not love hanging over us. I do small calculations–how old was the world when Julius Caesar died? How long until that other kind of King? Easter is coming, sure as each sign of spring, but there has never been a resurrection without some kind of dying first.
When Billy Graham died there was a minor brouhaha about a young woman who wished him fun in hell.
Whatever you or I may have thought about BG, he was an unabashed Eternalist. Stephen Hawking was not.
It is my belief that they both are now.
Which reminds me of a story…
A long time ago a rather counter-cultural day laborer was executed by the Romans apparently for some sort of political expediency.
His rag-tag followers were devastated (naturally), until a few days later when he came back from the dead and started appearing to people!!! (Rather supernaturally)
Although not initially to Thomas, a contemporary Aramaic friend of his, or Stephen Hawkins, a science-type from the 20th century B.C.E.
But after a bit,* he fixed this by showing up. For Thomas it came in the 20th chapter of the Good News of John. For Stephen it happened today.
Worship science all you want, or money or sex or power or fear.
But on the day we die we all turn into Eternalists…regardless of whether the science was every really on our side or not.
John 20, 21
*eight days
Carrying Light 