Category Archives: history

Losing people

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A few days ago I received an email from a family member–normal right?

I could tell this person’s email account had been hijacked because s/he and I do not have a family relationship anymore. S/he joined the ranks of friends and family who were so chagrined by me that the relationship could not be repaired.

Close relations of crime victims often inflict terrible secondary wounds.

They are ashamed of me and my story and to preserve their “normal” life they do really wretched things.

Friends can be equally painful. They stop being friends, shrinking quietly into the shadows, not calling, not inviting our family to events. That familiar blanched look of fear…silence…gone….

I had a friend who was a sister to me. Unlike many she stuck with me through the shock, grief, and early period of survival, but she deeply disapproved of my public efforts to draw attention to what happened to us. Too public…to noisy…

She is gone. It hurts.

The list gets longer and more erratic after that–people who make their money from shepherding other people–gone or worse–cruel.

You start to rethink people. The world seems increasingly lonely.

Yesterday the Christian Post asked if it’s readers experienced loneliness. A bunch vehemently denied it–

Never! I have God! Ditto!!! Double that!

But of course I have to be the lone dissenter. I said,

Jesus experienced loneliness, why shouldn’t I?

That is my motto and I am sticking to it. But I won’t lie to you–I wish I had kept my mouth shut for my children.

They had a shot at “normal,” if it weren’t for my big mouth.

The truth will set us free…no one said it would make us look normal.

Normal is the lie.

For all of us…not just mouthy me.

OJ Simpson, Trayvon Martin, and Justice in America

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When OJ Simpson was on trial for murder I worked in an elementary school in a poor, urban area. Most of my colleagues were African American.

We huddled around the tv at lunch to see what was going on. I remember the day of the verdict. Most of my fellow teachers cheered as though their football team had won.

I wondered–

where was justice?

I really doubt that many of them actually thought Simpson was not guilty. What they thought was

life is not fair for black men in America.

It isn’t.

And now we see it not being fair again. We see justice again faltering–this time the victim is African American and the team cheering is white.

This is not a football game.

It is not right for any of us to be so blinded by the outside of another person’s life that we rejoice in their pain, their murder, or their injustice.

Do not tell me God is in charge in the world today if He is not in charge of your heart.

When we bay for blood, hate, and bottled feces in a world shot through with agony and loss we prove we know nothing about love.

And make no mistake. God is not our little Santa Claus, He is not the captain of the white folk football team.

He is love and He is coming soon, with justice in His strong right arm.

That should make us all pray hard. Because not not one of us is holy.
Not one.

Just: a book review

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No one in their right mind writes a book review of their own book so people don’t have to read it.

So here goes:

I wrote Just because books had helped me through some tough times.

It is not a work of literature. It is a cry for help. I wanted to add to the voices of men and women who had helped me–mostly celebrity survivors who had been courageous and told their stories. Oprah, and Ellen, Sugar Ray, Ashley Judd, and Todd Bridges…

What would have I done without them?

So this the story: we fostered and adopted children damaged by neglect and abuse.

Life with them was so hard. It became even harder when we found out my adopted son had molested some of my children and others.

We pushed for legal consequences.
We dealt with the damage.

I was surprised by how little protection the justice system gave us. The book was a cry for help and a warning.

What I would add to that as an epilogue of sorts is that there is another book too painful and personal to write about what I call the shunning syndrome.

If you are brave or foolish enough to speak openly about being victimized by sexual abuse, you lose almost everyone you love.

Tough book to write. Even tougher to live. Par for the course for humans–we let our wolves drive our flocks.

But beyond the lonely places, we are fine (thank you).

Cocktails and BOGO with the esteemed Dr. Gosnell

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Wait a second, we all remember what we are talking about, right?!

I mean so close on the heels of Kermit Gosnell’s house of horrors…we are all clear, right? We are advocating for or against a process wherein a living baby is forced out of her mother’s uterus in cut up pieces to be reassembled like a bloody puzzle…

I mean, with all the well-heeled ladies thumping their augmented chests over women’s rights and all…

It started to sound like y’all have forgotten that half of the human beings who go into abortion mills come out in bloodied pieces.

What I remember

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My father was a southerner of the same generation as Ms. Deen. He did not speak directly to the question of the “n” word and his culture. As a child I knew these stories:

His father owned a hardware store. He was taught to call people “sir” and “ma’am” and so he did so until his father told him these terms did not apply to the African American customers who came to the store.

Why? My father wondered. He never, as long as I knew him, treated anyone with partiality. He was not convinced by prejudice and racism. Always fair at all things except cards–in which case the man played to win.

Or the stories of the black women who raised him. They loved him, put up with him, nurtured him, and gave him his taste for butter on rice and pinto beans. A taste that is sewn into who we are and what we call home.

And then there was Tav–Octavia, the subject of the most explosive argument I remember between my father and his parents.

They objected to loans she got from the government to renovate her shack. She was their employee. If they had paid her a living wage then she could have afforded her own linoleum and shingles.

Hardly luxuries.

But this last story is mine: I was 4 or 5 at most and a relative repeated a familiar rhyme that often has the word “tiger” in it. Only she used the n word. I did not know at first what it meant.

My parents (Paula Deen’s age and no angels) explained that it was a derogatory term we did not use.

If you can teach a 5 year old that some words are painfully off-limits, well…you can teach just about anyone.

Trick is to get’em to understand God sees us all the same–His beautiful children.

Joe Stalin’s Sunday School Teacher

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When Lee Harvey Oswald was 14 he read a pamphlet denouncing the Rosenbergs’ execution. He reported later that it was this pamphlet that stirred his interest in communism.

You could argue that the Rosenberg execution was responsible for the murder of JFK.

I used to have a theory that there is always someone who stands in the path of evil. I called this theory “Joseph Stalin’s Sunday school teacher” because I had read that he had been exposed to Christian education when he was young.

I thought–what if one of his teachers had been able to show him Jesus? What if the love of God had changed his life when he was still young?

Yes. I know. It did not play out that way. And yet I believe still in the dangerous power of interventionist love.

And the even more dangerous power of fear. Love is nothing if not courageous.