Out of Fire
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Category Archives: grief
The narrow road
We talk about the two roads: (notice there are no others) one narrow, one broad.
I picture the broad one littered with neon signs, carnival-lit and well-paved.
The narrow one is hard to find, off the the side, obscured by overgrown vines and branches. Because, let’s face it: not much traffic.
You climb through the overgrowth to get there and once on the Path the going is any but easy. Rocks, besetting ills, humiliations, and the echoing loneliness of it all.
But always the figure of the Man in front of us. Stick close to Him. After all He is the way itself. The narrow path to life–home waiting at the end.
There we will belong.
Foley and Sotloff
I grieve for these lost men
Think about their brokenhearted mothers
Avoid an accounting of the days and the pain and dogs of souls
who could exact such cruelty on…ordinary men
It is easier not to go
To the places these men went
And the place where they were
Cut to pieces
But we must
Ask ourselves what has become of
Us, the Geneva Convention, the boundaries of
Words, only words
strung words together
No guns, no knives, no ammunition
Pictures taken of war
If you can even call it that
They say they got Capone for tax evasion
Not murder
And I wonder if these boys who hide their faces and play “gods and men”
Like a game without a score
Know the second commandment (say nothing of the 6th)
Still applies to their eternal souls:
Forget all else you have done
And understand you owe God for life
For these pictures you have taken
Of Foley and Sotloff
There will be
Forever
Nowhere to hide.
Changing the paradigm for protecting our young
I am haunted by an image on a nature program–a young zebra stallion savages a newborn foal to death because the foal was fathered by a predecessor.
We turned the television off, but not before the narrator states that the foal’s “ordeal is over” and will not survive the attack.
I understand the rules of natural videography: don’t obstruct the narrative. I just believe it is time we change the rules for animals and men.
I have little doubt that the film crew could have saved the foal and found a place for it in sanctuary. They simple did not.
We simply do not as well. We avoid conflict with humans even when it is their own children they savage to death.
Abortion is an extreme form of child abuse. Yet we treat it with temerity, speaking gently of “a woman’s right to choose.”
Some choices are unacceptable: cruel, inhumane, deadly.
It would have been humane and appropriate for the men who watched the foal die to intervene on its behalf. They did not because they wanted the narrative, because the paradigm has not been sufficiently challenged.
Time to challenge it.
If we stand by and watch children, anyone be savaged, victimized, or harmed by another and do not intervene, we are culpable.
If we stay quiet in the face of injustice, then we must own this narrative. The crime belongs to all of us unless we are willing to speak up, intervene, challenge the paradigm for our dead and missing children.
My Monster
My monster sits
At the kitchen table
Gnawing on the hollowed bones
Finding scraps of meat left on them
they say you can choke on these broken shards of wings, thighs
The breasts of flightless birds
Few eat their filigreed
Hearts
But when they do you can see through
Each vivisected chamber
He mutters only phrases
Like girl, you know…girl if only…
If only you had..
He is so very clever to leave out
All the
Proper nouns
Dependent clauses
Merciless verbs
years and years of completely merciless verbs
Ellipses for teeth
Never dulled to the task
Of separating bone from marrow
You tell me the vultures
Are being decimated
By poison and other modern perils
Leaving the dead all alone
In their towers of silence
And I know this must be true for Rizpah will shoo them off
Until God chooses to relent…
This drought will define us
Cotton-mouthed and bone-dry
So cavalier about our own now-
Forgotten prayers
For rain
Dearest Triplet B
When I lost you
I knew you were never really mine
You have your mother’s face
Your father’s hair
Eyes all your own
For years I marked the days
Knew when your birthday came and went
Saw your face in every crowd
Missed you and wished you well
Because that is what love does
It never stops beating
Down every door for you
I saw every fairy tale through a different lens
Knowing how easy it could be
Excuse me, was…
For Rumpelstiltskin to steal a child
And teach her a world of untrue stories
But in real life
Truth
The Truth
Always sets us free
Do something (brave)
My blog is littered with drafts. I haven’t published anything for awhile because I struggle with–why bother?
In the aftermath of what happened to my family, a lot of people let us down.
It could have been because I was too vocal. It could have been because we were too risky. It could have been a lot of things.
It took a toll on my evaluation of humans. How could so many “nice people” run like rabbits? Or worse. There was always worse.
I battled insomnia. If a person you have fed peanut butter sandwiches can hurt children, the world feels permanently unsafe.
I wrote. I wrote and then wondered why?
Then I began wakeboarding.
I like wakeboarding because no one tells me I can’t do the things that terrify me. In fact, they show me how.
I like it because the people there are brave.
Not just spin-in-the-air brave, but also push-yourself brave.
Many of these brave people restore my faith in our broken world.
Which leads me to “ordinary brave”–
Men who are faithful to their wives are brave.
Judges who prosecute pedophiles are brave.
Health officials who fly into an Ebola epidemic are brave.
Paying your bills and your taxes on time
Holding a lackluster job to provide for your family
Befriending the powerless–
All brave.
When I see brave, I want to be brave.
The Ebola epidemic
I have been praying for the victims of the Ebola outbreak in Africa.
My prayers have led to fasting and also web research. The result of that research is so disheartening that I am not linking.
Ebola is a plague with the devastating symptoms and prognosis of a plague.
People die horrible deaths and the death rate is high, very high.
So I am asking for prayer. Please pray for the people exposed to the disease and their families.
Pray for healing, but pray for this as well–
Many people in the countries this virus inhabits do not believe in it or believe health workers are infecting them.
So pray for healing and truth as well.
And thank you.
Up Late
There is a great TED Talk about the “museum of 4 a.m.”
Apparently 4 a.m. is the nadir of time–so late no one would chose to stay up. Too early for decent waffles.
I am up at 4 a.m because of…
Two dogs
A nocturnal animal prowling the yard
A list of unbearable memories.
Dog A barked
Dog B followed suit ad infinitum
And mom C remembered.
In the days and weeks and months after M and C were placed with us, C had night terrors.
He also had fits of unbearable rage.
His sister was no picnic either.
But the seconds, minutes, hours of darkness in which he kicked, screamed, pounded his fists against objects, slammed doors, wailed….
In the utter darkness.
They stay with me.
Day or night, a thousand times a month I longed for monkey tranquilizers to calm those kids down.
Since it was not an option, we hiked, walked, ran, and frequented parks.
It was my daily task to:
1. Stay sane
2. Wear those two out.
Now that I am older, now that I have lived through every part of the growing up story of those two precious, deeply wound people, I would say this–
I know enough of the neglect and the violence that led to their howling childhood. I know enough of the condition of their brains, concussed from the absence of love, to know that for every minute of solitary wakefulness that I endured with them–for them, every moment of public humiliation in a grocery store or restaurant, every crazy scene, all those years of lost peace.
Worth it. Worth the risk, the agony, the relentless void.
But why did no one else come to our assistance?
Why such violent, unending loneliness? No cure. No concern for the survivors.
Nothing.
Nothing at all
Alone each 4 a.m.
Simple Rules
The day I found out my adopted son was a pedophile was a rough day.
It remains with me with the grim clarity of a plane crash.
As I moved past simple shock and devastation I sought advice from Jesus.
How do I do this?
His advice was simple–the truth will set you free.
We all have the right to tell the truth, and yet there is such an extreme pressure from other humans to hide it.
We are afraid to acknowledge our monsters. As though they will befriend us if we just pretend they are not real?
There is a dark side to adoption. Not only are we adopting parents sometimes a rum bunch, we also are trusted with children who have been profoundly changed by their own biographies.
And the result can be quite difficult to parse.
“Normal” people may not get it.
But Jesus has never been normal, so he does.
The injunction to let the truth set us free can be terrifying and lonely.
But truth is the seminal condition of heaven.
And what is heaven if not the cure? The safe haven? A place where hiding things will be impossible and unnecessary forever.
Carrying Light 