John 2:9-10 (NIV)
and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside [10] and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”
Pour the water first
Jesus is coming
Joy.
His mind is broken. I know this, but it doesn’t mitigate the pain of what he did to us–his adopted family and especially the young children whose innocence he violated.
I told people about this and they had the uniformly shocked look of a colonoscopy patient.
Especially when I articulated my anger.
I put it this way–
I want to take him to a biker bar and tell them what he did then let then deal with him.
As though I had been to a biker bar…
As though this were a real thing I could do….
As though it would help…
Our relationship has been winnowed down to rare, monosyllabic emails.
Are you ok?
Love,
Mom
I am ok.
Happy bday
We do not trust each other.
So I do not tell him what I would tell you–
the hurt goes on in the lives of his victims. They grieve. We all grieve. And there is a terrible loneliness as well.
I understand that while the bikers are imaginary, a way for me to substantiate the demand for justice, justice itself demands an accounting.
Leaving me the free time to mourn. To grieve for what has been lost and a future in this most uncertain world.
She tells me a story
That haunts me all day
And into the night
About ordinary love
I run a line down memory
Not just mine but hers
Especially hers
All that I did not see
Plays out in normal…
nightmares sometimes happen in broad daylight
Chatty conversations with the devil
Always
Turn into shouting matches
I beg God, please…
Rain down mercy from heaven on these little ones
They do not deserve this
Heal us.
When I catch a glimpse of Him
No threadbare God
Ever
Again.
This is the anniversary of tragedy in Mogadishu.
But my sense of loss over these events has bled outward through the years.
When it happened I wondered why Clinton waffled so badly not just in Somalia but even more tragically in Rwanda.
The gruesome loss of American lives in Africa would eventually be overshadowed by the meaninglessness of their sacrifice–no one came to save the Somalis and no one came to save the Rwandans.
And really, Who will save any of us?
We call ourselves a rich country but we are debt-soaked and impoverished, too spoiled and weak to pass a balanced budget and live within our means.
And yet our moral deficits outstrip our fiscal woes. Clinton was a moral-less man yet so many revere him. All I can see is the people he let down–people who expected him to use his office to protect the innocent not debauch young women.
And that is where the story gets personal. In 1998 when I was losing a foster daughter to a fixed adoption, Clinton was embroiled in a sex scandal. I wrote his wife asking for a federal review of the illegal activities I witnessed as a foster parent.
Months later I got a form letter from her telling me to appeal to one of the people I had reported.
I got the message; I lost the child.
My remaining adopted children craved violence. They did not have much to work with at our house. Most of our movies were kid-friendly.
But the three my adopted son ferreted out because of their violence?
Tristan and Isolde
Blackhawk Down
The Passion of the Christ
Now both he and his sister glory in their horror movies.
Not perhaps realizing how close they are to autobiography.
Blackhawk Down….
In the spring of 2007 another Blackhawk helicopter came down near Opp, Alabama. This one had my father in it. He was on an accelerated schedule to train pilots for our foreign wars.
People whispered that Bush was at fault. The army had rushed training. The pilots my father taught were too green. There were flaws in the flight simulators.
His students walked away from the crash, my father did not.
Some accidents are “unsurvivable.” They change who we are forever.
There are two parts of the movie I cannot forget. In the first a fatally wounded soldier is told he will survive as his life bleeds out in the darkness.
In the second the survivors reach sanctuary.
In the end we will all face the unsurvivable wreckage of our broken lives. And when we do, only a Mighty Fortress will save us.
The word games on Facebook drive me crazy. Really, people? Really?
You really don’t think I and 300 million other people cannot find a state, a drink, a dog’s name that doesn’t have “a” in it?!?
Yes. I know these games are just for fun, but their cloying recurrence on the Internet becomes a mild irritant to a reclusive evangelist with an ax to grind (me–a pronoun without an a).
The truth is there is a question we cannot afford to neglect and it has nothing to do with spelling.
It is this–name anyone or thing other than Jesus that can save you.
Yep. I said the j word.
Everyone is looking–money, sex, fame…combing our small and brief horizons for anything, anyone who can save us.
When like milk, Connecticut, and Rex, the answer is right there before us–
Jesus.
A savior with no a in his name. Only love in his eyes.
There seems to be a new trend in excuses for rape–pastors who claim their illicit and immoral acts were somehow motivated by a desire to “cure” their victims.
This, of course, like so many of the insidious blurred lines of our debauched culture, is from the pit of hell.
These men, or anyone who uses the mantle of spiritual authority to harm children, should expect judgment.
But how about the antidote to wolves in sheep’s clothing? Where are the good shepherds?
I have read tragic stories lately about violence in Kenya and Chicago, about livestock suffering at the hands of people, about grief coming unexpectedly from a simple water accident.
Each story of violence and loss reminds us of the importance of good shepherds.
We live in a perilous world and we ourselves are the most dangerous element of that world–polluting, raping, murdering, and neglecting.
Yes. Neglecting.
Sometimes the worst thing we do is not direct harm.
Sometimes it is a terrible enough injustice for us to walk away from our flocks, our children when we know there are predators lurking in the fields.
I had a dream a few nights ago. I had no money, no means of buying things. I had been given the task of engaging my adopted daughter (who has disowned me) in a conversation.
Because it is a dream, I choose to discuss an array of roasted and cooked chicken that is behind a butcher’s counter.
I try to keep the conversation very neutral, very chicken-focused.
Because when your kid is RAD that is how you learn to roll…even in your subconscious.
I am going to start laying out my memories of life with my adopted children. Like an old woman pulling sweaters from the attic. I need to organize this thing….the life we lived together.
The first thing you should know is the last thing that happened–she cut me off because she suspected I had reported her brother….suspected him of child abuse.
Ironically, as with so many things before, she unleashed her anger on the alleged reporter instead of facing the crime.
The terrible crime.
Imagine you were five.
And everyone else had a tooth fairy.
But when your teeth come out your mother and father congratulate you. Keep it. Celebrate. But no magical reward.
You might ask some questions.
Tooth fairies are good, right? The Tooth Fairy is good, right?
Not in our family.
In our family the tooth fairy is absent. My son asks why? I tell him the truth. It happened like this…
Sometimes grownups do bad things, say bad things. They get angry at the victim of a crime instead of the person who commits the crime.
In those cases, when a grownup gets angry at a little kid for something that was not her fault… well, he might not say it was because of the crime done to her, because he was shamed by it’s proximity to him.
He might say it was because she did not eat all of her veggies.
But the strength of his anger would let you know. Let you know he was not safe.
So we don’t see him anymore.
Because we don’t want him to hurt you–any of you–again.
This is the part I am sure of–he would do it again.
And every child deserves to have a safe tooth fairy.
Or the truth, and none at all.
It is easy to rejoice in the death of a monster. It is easy to see Ariel Castro’s suicide as the final word on the life of an evil man.
But is that enough?
I don’t think so.
I think I must grieve.
Grieve for his countless victims.
Grieve for the irreparable harm of his years of sin.
Grieve for broken justice, in this case blind for too long.
Grieve because he was once a baby whose life, like all small humans, was once so full of potential…
Grieve because all he did to hurt, disfigure, and destroy was his choice.
And he could have chosen light instead.
Sometimes things I write will stick in my mind. Today it was Jesus whipped men for less.
I wrote it and then I really thought about the implications.
Jesus whipped people. And not only was it not sin, it was holiness.
Why did he whip them? They were using the name and worship of God to lie and defraud people. The worst sins are often cloaked in the church. We lie, cheat, and steal in the house of God.
But He does not forget.
We cannot see Jesus as he really is unless we can see all of him –suffering and beaten on the Cross, angered and righteous in the temple.
Our God is a man, but no ordinary man. And just as most of us have not experienced enough of his love, his tenderness, his mercy, none of us has really experienced the full challenge of his holiness.
One day
One day it is coming.
The clean fire of love.
Carrying Light 