Forty-Two

Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Girl,

Fourty-two years ago today you bravely gave away your newborn baby boy to a hope and a future.  You had no idea what would become of your decision.  I imagine it was made out of a mix of what was best for him as well as what was best for you, or perhaps what was best for your parents as they continued to raise you.

I don't know your story, your situation.  Only your decision.  I'm told that you left your baby boy in the hospital to be cared for until his new parents arrived three days later. I'm told that you delivered him early while they were away visiting family grieving a passing. Into their grief, your baby boy was born. Giving him into a new family surely created some grief of your own.  Though perhaps your relief was greater. I can't surmise which.

Your baby boy was placed in good hands.  And he grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and humanity. In his twenty-second year I gladly committed myself to be his wife 'till death do us part.

You gave me a gift when you gave him.  While I don't believe that there is only one person for each of us to love and marry, I do believe he is a match for me that doesn't just suit me, but teaches me and gives me opportunities to give, to serve, to grow.  You gave me a loyal, so loyal, husband; a man who always assumes the best of me, values my words, encourages me, shows me a side that no one else sees.  And he kisses me every time we part.

He bonded with his family and doesn't question his origins.  But he thinks about you every year, on this day.  What do you do on this day, etched in your biological memory?  Every birth is traumatic to the body, but yours, too, was traumatic to the heart.  We women don't just walk away and move on.  But he could.

And he became a sweet, intense presence in my life.  A father of my three sons -- the last looks just like he did as a boy.  A seeker of God.  A pastor to many.  A mentor to some.  A leader.  He's invested in marriages, in families, in communities, in everything, really, that he didn't come into the world having.


I don't know how you did it.  At sixteen I was thinking about hairspray and individuality and black and angst and poetry and fear.  I was not thrust into thinking about bigger words like courage and perpetuity and mission.  You were a woman of strength and I pray that you have only continued to be so.  Statistics don't support it, but I do.

I want to say thank you for protecting him while he was yours so that I could love him while he was mine and see the hand of God in his life.  So that the church could be blessed: youth could be taught and fed and cared for, communities given a hope and a vision, the Kingdom played out in a thousand ways. That three more boys could come from him and be brought up to move into grace-filled vocations and dreams.  That a widowed woman could be cared for in her old age, that woman into whose arms you placed him 42 years ago and changed her life.  And that a man would grow to intimately know the words of courage and perpetuity and mission.  Just like his first mother so many years ago.

Greater Things

I read through the gospel of John.  I see the seven signs:

turning water into wine    healing the official's son at a distance   making the paralytic walk   feeding 5,000 with loaves and fishes  walking on the water   healing a man born blind    raising Lazarus

Are things missing in his first steps toward making all things new?  There wasn't a creation salvation: he didn't protect the coral reef, the melting ice caps, or the species' we've lost since then.  He didn't harbor a child, a battered woman, or an oppressed slave.  And, of course, he didn't create any political freedoms. But there's also this:   Jesus didn't lift anyone out of poverty.  

In John's story, healing takes priority and changes four stories.  That Roman official spreading the news.  The paralytic at the center of a Sabbath controversy that would cost his healer dearly.  The man born blind walking away from darkness to light.  Lazarus making the most of his second chance sharing a table with Jesus again and again.  Certainly new legs and new eyes could now give a man a living.  Mary and Martha spared destitution with the return of their brother's strength.   A field of people were given a meal, but just once.

He was here to point to himself, the rescuer.  He was here to usher in a new creation trickling it out to our grasping hands. First things first: draw hearts, shift thinking, give choices.  

He didn't come to make us rich, but to make us reach.  For him.  For one another.  Perhaps the poor won't always be with us and we can move to eradicate poverty in my lifetime,

Today we would ask for all the other things -- communal salvation, global relief.  We'd beg, "Help all the sheep. All the folds."  That was his intent all along.  We just weren't ready to join him.  He wanted us to be a part of the process.  He's left some miracles for us to do.  Rescue and redeem all of creation through the work he's already done.  And even greater things than these.

{Giving out of Poverty.  Lent 2013}

Monday's Oxymoron: Writing About Humility

February came and blasted us.
as February is prone to do.
Winds of opposition.
A weeklong blizzard of misunderstanding.
Mistrust.
It's the last hard push into Spring to make us alive again.
Death loves to whip its tail around while we crush its head.

The tapes in my head say: don't make major decisions in February.  Don't disengage, disavow, distort, disable, disband.  It's only the weathering of February.  It will pass.

When winter storms hit around here, snow pack below average, it's only a moment before the first person says, "We need it so bad."  We speak this need while it's all falling beautiful and white or days after when getting out is easier and we can make our own choices again.  But when shoveling happens two or three times in one day just to keep up, when slickness keeps us home, when we cancel conversations -- that's not the thought I choose.  Did I need this?

Perhaps yes:  my muscles thankful for the workout.  My children thankful for the yard's fresh canvas.  My calendar thankful for the rest.  When everything is falling all around I have to let all slide out of my hands and ask, "What has this storm brought?"

What do they all bring?

Perhaps the reminder that I don't have the market on assumptions.
Perhaps a different kind of desperation.
Perhaps a practice session of having less.
Perhaps something that I could not have done.

...Humility is not a thing that will come of itself, but that it must be made the object of special desire and prayer and faith and practice. (Humility, Andrew Murray)

I walked into Lent with three ideas: humility, detachment and generosity.  Generosity was going to be, hands-down, my favorite.  Detachment was necessary for generosity -- so I could hold my breath for 40 days while I gave.  But humility just sounded good.  I'm not sure I really wanted it to go beyond just living poor.

But that's what I have in front of me.  Pushed in by a storm.  Unsettled air.  Laying it out and holding out everything precious to me: my skills, my identity, my calling.  Offering them to be reshaped by the storm.  Left trusting, more detached.  More generous with my listening, and hoping, and unity.  Shoveling out wasn't fun.  There's still some frozen places to remove, but I can make it in and out again.  Grateful.  Dependant. and Free.

{Giving out of Poverty. Lent 2013}