I told myself I would
Swim the coldest days
Knowing the river runs
Warmer than the air making it
Rise in Holy Ghost waves
I turn to watch the tide
Tell me you remember
Every day you stayed with me
When all the cool kids
Left town
She once gave me a raft of hand-me down clothes.
Of good quality, and competent craftsmanship
But off somehow
I tried to alter them
To make them
Something a young woman could find comfort in
But this has never been a story about
Young women finding comfort
From what is cast off and
given away
The little boy in the picture wore the most adorable overalls
And brand-spanking-new shoes
He approached the chicken in the unfamiliar garden
With the utmost deference,
The pears still hung on the trees, each carefully wrapped in old newspapers to shield them from pestilence
An unseasonably warm day to worship one’s ancestors and
The food at the restaurant was good
Something about historically accurate food
In the last few moments before
The two little red-headed children
Reported
All they saw–aggressor-accomplice-victim
The little boy in the picture wore the most adorable overalls
It would be an ordinary basking day for the spiny and the green
Lizards who sun on the rocks and the fences
We would beat the palms of our hands on the opacity of windows
Before we opened them to warn off
night so late that morning is just a nap’s distance
Away
The fans would beat their wings
Now while we can
Let us forsake
all our wasted days.
John 5:3-4 KJV
[3] In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. [4] For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.
My first question for you is–do you believe there was an angel who came down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the waters?
So one person each time could be healed?
Crazy, right?
But no crazier than believing that Jesus healed the man who had been at the pool so long, who does not turn out to be the most grateful healed man.
I have skirted the issue of the angel at the pool for years, choosing instead to focus on Jesus and the man and the religious oligarchs who made it hard for Jesus.
I understand that angel complicates everything–messenger of God who brings some healing, brings some hope only
In a certain season.
When I wrote the slim, hasty, typo-ridden memoir Just, I used pseudonyms.
I chose to link my adopted children’s pseudonyms to their first initials C became Sea,
Sea like the color of his eyes
Sea like the cold ocean we stood in together
Sea like the depths, the hidden things both beautiful and terrible, the bigness of it all
Sea, placeholder for the God who makes seas then makes them evanesce
C is lost to me for now. He has disowned both me and the God who made me
But I can still remember
The time you hit your mouth on the hard metal of the seesaw and we had to rush you to the dentist
The way we would wait until you were sleeping to exclaim over your cuteness because
Most times when you were awake there was both sturm und drang
The time we went to the shore and I carried you on my back and you pummeled my head all the way back to the car
If I had a dollar for every time you hurt me or someone else I love dearly
It would not begin to be as much as you are worth
Of your eternal value
Of the Light you can become forever
If you just
Turn and face the Sea.
A pastor told a story about a priest or monk whose brother was a fighter pilot. The pilot took his brother to the flight simulator. In the course of learning and crashing in a computerized model of flight, the non-pilot commented on the steep cost of learning to fly, the risks, and what happens when there is a crisis.
The pilot said, people train to a level and in a crisis they revert to that level–to what they know or have already mastered.
Rarely more.
We don’t rise to a higher level in a crisis. We revert to what we have trained for.
That is what the pilot said, I tell myself
When what we have trained for
Happens
Like never reading the love letters I wrote you
Words scattered all around
Like never seeing how
I let the blazing suns of a thousand remote
Solar systems blink your name
Like ignoring the food on your plate
The clothes neatly folded and pressed
The hands that kept you there
Breathing in, breathing out, wanton flowers
The messages painted on the billboard of the world
Child come home,
Rain come down
I’ll never stop looking
Across this field for you
The idea that a person whose sole job it is to cut out and exterminate living humans from their home by force is “a real doctor” is directly related to the Rabbits of Ravensbruck, the death camps of Hitler, the medical experiments conducted on unwilling victims by “licensed doctors” in WWII German and Poland, to Pol Pot, and ultimately to all the forced, anti-disability, and sex-attributed abortions around the world.
Real doctors try to save life, not crush unborn patients. So I get why the Supreme Court would be a little confused about the Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges.
But it is a good and appropriate law and should have been upheld.
If it is not, then we must ask what the five ruling justices think will happen when the mothers in these clinics face the physical trauma of an operation or procedure that is by its very definition violent?
They will face it alone, because the person who did this to them does not live in their community. Does not reveal their true identity. Does this thing to them and then leaves them alone.
When our courts are unjust and our moral compass has been knocked out by nearly 50 years of acquiescence to legal and institutional murder, it is no wonder that we have lost our way.
We will not find it again without facing what we have done and what it has cost us–
Our very souls and our own children.
Abortion is murder, not medicine, and SCOTUS has just proved it by shielding practitioners who perform it from the full and appropriate licensing and credentialing process.
Shame on us. Shame and mourning.
Job 4:7 NIV
[7] “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?
Abortion. That is where.
He is gone now
Gone to me, anyway
But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–
Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended
What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair
Forever/
Just
… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes
All your regrets all your missed chances
To cry like a baby
Wail for a Savior
Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent
Shaken finally by what you
Would have been without Him
Carrying Light 