Go for a run in a safe, well-lit place
Sing your God songs, loud if possible
Kick around in the Gospels, the Jesus stories, the Bible project, CS of course
Ask Him direct questions
We love you sooo much
But He is love–
oceans-are-small-compared-love
No-story-too-small-love
Big-sky-love
Lonely awful die-for-us love
Lend us a child like you, Love
Arms wide open love
The stars are more than fire love
In the dark sky they admonish/love
He will never leave you, never walk away
I keep thinking about the video of you when you were wee, all dumpling, sass, and wild curls. You were getting ready for something, and judging by your cute little dress, something liturgical. Your dad told you to say goodbye to the camera, but you misunderstood him and thought it was me.
You protested, but she’s my mommy!
Seems like both yesterday and three lives ago.
There are no words for how much you mean to me.
No words for how hard it is to close the book on the always with you chapter of your life.
I love you
All you have been to me
All the joy you are to me.
Poured out perfume which fills the room
Forever.
Love,
But-she’s-my-mommy
Recently I took an online “course” designed to protect Christian ministries from lawsuits arising from child sexual abuse.
I knew it was going to be annoying, but it was worse than I had anticipated.
Here are some (but definitely not all) of the curriculum deficiencies:
I contacted the company directly after I took the course and asked them for information on their source material and bibliography.
No answer.
I am not a rape victim, but I was targeted by at least one pedophile when I was young, and I have children who are childhood sexual assault survivors.
I am not “low IQ,” and my children are all smarter than I am. Had any of us been “low IQ” (term taken directly from course material), we would still deserve help from the law and relief from abuse.
Our individual and collective intelligence was not the reason my children were molested by my adopted son, but it also did not save us from protracted and compounded grief.
First from the felonies,
Later from the way “good people did nothing,” or worse still, did things to let us know they wanted to silence our story.
Jesus said, tell the little children they will always be safe with me.
Yet in order to protect their legal asses big, well-known communities and institutions all over this country are serving up biased, unsubstantiated defamation of childhood rape victims and their families in place of solid, simple procedures to ensure that children are safe in church and that the law is followed.
It should never be “protect my ministry,” over protect the children.
Matthew 18
I remember you
I remember when you ran into the waiting room with your sister
I remember all the warnings and admonitions I got from Martha-the-caseworker and your recently relieved first foster mom
And your blue-as-the-sea implacable gaze across a very misguided table
I remember your speech therapist and her fairy godmother-like delight in seeing you make eye contact and in watching your self-inflicted facial wounds
Heal and not return
Storms all over the place
Storms in you swirled all around us, even when I tried to contain them.
Luke 12:32-34 KJV
[32] Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. [33] Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. [34] For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
What would you tell a dying world? A lost child? Or the person who
Won-hands-down-the Complete Ass of the Decade Award?
You are my treasure
Because where my treasure is, my heart is also.
For weeks now I have watched the tree thirst to death, unable to tell it that there is very little hope. Its auburn hair has cascaded around us, weeping, and I have felt both inadequate and way too nonchalant.
So I crafted a fictional me who did all the desperate things the real one should–buy yards and yards of burlap, soak the naked roots with water scooped from the river, gather the seedlings, cut careful branches and apply growth hormone to them, explain all this to the dying tree
The real tree gestures up to the mother tree, deeper into the soil, the manicured lawn, sources of man-made hydration.
And then down to the clay and rocks, blanketed now in the reddish needles, strange nourishment
sufficient to grow
Saplings
once she has gone
I break the second commandment all the time, sow dragon’s teeth in this suburban front yard, draw the greenest leaves down and through my fingers loosing embryo acorns and the shifting compass of the setting sun. It is the girls who say these most beautiful things, white linen things pinned to a line and lifted by the wind beneath a slivery moon
“It looks like a stone rolled away
Like a stone in the very act of being
Rolled away”
Matthew 2:1,2 and 28:1,2
Yep, I know-who?
Bear with me.
Ten years ago we discovered that our adopted son had molested some of his siblings and their friends.
I went to my friend and asked him what I should do and he said,
The truth will set you free.
So I told people the truth
Church
Work
Neighbor
Community
Family
Truth
And most people stopped being our friends.
So not who, what
A good friend never leaves, never forsakes, never hides your sin, but doesn’t abandon.
Jesus is a good friend.
What is Love
What is justice
There were times we all faced this extreme solitude of the truth. People who had been out friends could not risk the chance that we were contagious.
But Jesus was always there, the sojourning older son, back from afar, standing on the other side of the street, in sight of the house, I-am-here-darling present with us
never alone because
What a friend we have in Jesus
Within a month of each other, several things happened–
I know how much you believe in abortion. I know how little you believe in God, yet I believe that the first abortion happened when a literal and real woman (like you and me) murdered all of us with a powerful and deadly choice in a garden we call Eden.
She made a choice, we make choices
As women, as mothers, as friends
To intervene for either life or death.
I believe in a literal hell, literal hells, already clearly delineated in our history of meat shields in steppe conquests, gladiatorial death matches, the ridiculous and deadly crusades, the Inquisition, bubonic plague, and in our case the body of every one of those meticulously harvested prenatal humans, old enough to live outside their mother’s wombs long enough for the doctor to use their pieces and ignore the sum of those parts.
Because livers are so necessary to scrub the toxins in the blood…even the flooding, momentarily excruciating wasp toxin.
You will think it strange that I thought of you and others who do not believe in Hell when I reeled into the pain of that single sting. I thought about how terrible it would be not to believe in the soaring truth of 1 Corinthians–“Oh, death, where is thy sting?”
No accident I write this to you on Father’s Day. When I lost my father it was so devastating–how could death have lost its sting if that single death hurt so much?
You know what I believe–I will see my father again one day, because Jesus took the real sting.
Catastrophically painful, eternal, and all of our faults. Sometimes no bigger than a wasp’s sting in the dark, or smaller than each prenatal human’s carefully extracted extinction.
But there in the Cross–
Our hell, our iterations of hell
Whether we believe in them or not.
Dear, you will and always and eternally be, dear, very dear to me.
So much so that I would risk your real and legitimate anger if it might spare you the measure of that incomprehensible Corinthian sting.
Carrying Light 