I think I’ve written about Keith Green’s Song For Josiah before, but today it seems particularly fitting; today is the 28^th anniversary of Keith and Josiah’s death in a plane crash (Keith’s daughter Bethany was also lost, as was another family of 6, and the pilot of the plane). Keith was just 28 years old, but he’d already had two careers that made him famous in his short life. He had been a child star, only to grow out of favor. Then, as adolescence made the rejection he was already feeling even keener (because don’t all kids feel rejected and alienated to some extent?), he conveyed his musical talents into a second career, eventually developing a relationship with Jesus and God and becoming an unapologetic Christian and music minister.

I was 18 when I discovered Keith’s music, some 14 years ago. As another blogger posted today, it’s not that Keith sings about Jesus that makes his music so infectious; it is the love, the passion, the relationship that is so clearly evident in his music and in the life he was leading that makes it so powerful. It spoke to places in me that I didn’t even know were broken, providing me with a healing so effective that it prepared me for what came next and then the next step and the next, and so on. Keith’s music, because it was built on a living relationship, because it was built on loving and being loved by a God who is Love, served to connect me to the God of Love I needed so deeply.

As a result, there are things in his music that have radically shaped the way I feel about my faith. Am I saying that I built my faith whole cloth from Keith’s music? Absolutely not. But because of the way that his music spoke to me when I was at such an impressionable age, he had a huge impact on me, and even on the way I think about what it means to be a parent. That’s where this particular song comes into play.

I’ve heard a speech that is often attributed to Paul Harvey, though whether he is actually the author or origin, I could not say. In this piece, the author says that instead of wishing that his children will have everything they want, he wishes they will have enough, and goes on to explain this. He hopes they will have enough joy to understand the power of joy, to be happy and satisfied with life, but not so much that they become complacent and dissatisfied, expecting that everything will be handed to them on a silver platter because it’s always been so. He hopes they’ll have enough sorrow to appreciate the joy when it comes, but not so much that it comes to dominate their existence. He hopes they have enough money to not have to worry about it, but enough want that they never forget what it means to be in need, to lose touch with those who are not as fortunate as they are. He continues like this for a while, but I think you get the idea.

I love this idea. You see, by giving in to our children, it’s easy to make them soft. Now, while it’s important that our children be allowed their innocence and childhood, it’s also vital to remember that childhood is also the time that teaches and trains them for the life that comes after. If we coddle our children, we fail to equip them to face the challenges that life inevitably brings to us all. If our daughter never learns that goldfish die, how is she supposed to cope when she is faced with the loss of a family member or friend? If our son never learns that knives are sharp, or that falling down hurts, what’s going to happen when he tries to parachute off the roof of the house with his sheet, or dive into the pool from the corner of the garage?

It breaks our hearts to watch our children suffer. Let’s face it; only someone who was mentally ill would look at someone in pain and have no empathy, no sympathy. It’s right to want to protect our children, and we should. Our children need us to guide them through life, to allow them to explore this world and the dangers that it offers at appropriate ages with appropriate supervision. You don’t let infants play with matches or stoves, but your 6 year old can help you put on a pot of water for tea or her favorite snack with your supervision, and your 12 year old should be able to navigate a kitchen largely unaided (though you’ll probably still need to stay put to supervise if he’s doing anything but his few favorite staples, or she’s trying a new recipe, and it’ll take both of you to clean up afterward).

Keith acknowledges this dichotomy in his Song For Josiah: the need to protect to his son, but the need to let him have only enough so that he has the strength necessary for the life ahead (even though neither of them got to live it). He’s particularly addressing the spiritual battles that he fears lie ahead for his son, but these concerns poured out from the heart of a father for his son are beautiful and universal if you allow them to be (and I’ll be honest, I see both levels, both the concern for my child’s spiritual health and the other, more quotidian concerns).

And actually, let’s look at that concern for Josiah’s spiritual life. These days, it’s popular to say that we should let our children determine their own spiritual direction for their lives. That we shouldn’t attempt to force our own religion on our children; they’re too young and impressionable to be coerced by our religious beliefs. It’s not right, says pop culture, to warp a child’s mind, with your own limited notions of the divine, if a divine even exists.

Except, that’s a load of relativistic hogwash, isn’t it? I mean, think about it: we’re expected to teach our children right from wrong, correct? We teach them to share, to be honest and not to lie, not to take things that do not belong to them, we teach them acceptable social behavior and even where it’s acceptable to put their body waste and where it isn’t. We define behavioral norms of right and wrong, of good behavior and bad behavior, rewarding right choices and discipling wrong choices in an attempt to shape our children in to the sorts of people who will easily and successfully navigate civil society in the future.

Aren’t we, in shaping their definition of right and wrong, of good and bad, of acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, aren’t we shaping children’s minds? Even the structures we put in place, even the code of ethics and morals we teach them, whether we call them that or not, have an origin from somewhere… there’s an absolute that described them at some point, and more often than not, that origin is religious in nature. So by teaching our children acceptable social behavior, we are shaping their religious life, developing the beginnings of their spiritual life, even accidentally. And if we refuse to teach them these behaviors, then we are left with rebellious, anti-social, poorly socialized children who are ill-equipped for life and who struggle with every aspect of life; their education is at risk, and their risk of incarceration is increased.

So we do, actually, shape their religious ideas, even when we aren’t meaning to. It’s just that some of us are very intentional about it, that some don’t apologize for pointing to their own faith as the source for their beliefs of what is right and wrong. Is this always a good thing? No. There are suicide bombers who are raising children to be suicide bombers. There are children being raised to be racist and hate-mongers. It’s a tragedy. But neither is being intentional in shaping my child’s faith always bad; it was the exposure to church that I got growing up that gave me the strength I needed to hang on and keep going and that shaped me into the woman I am today. My great-grandmother’s faithfulness was a very active and intentional influence on the woman I am, even from the time I was tiny.

We have Keith here, then, pledging to Josiah, his beloved son, that this life will be difficult. He’s promising that the faith that Keith has chosen and plans to raise Josiah in will be very difficult… but that the final reward will be worth all the trouble. He’s telling his son that he’s been there; he understands the struggles his son will face… and as a result, he will do the best job he can to be a good father and a good confidant, too, to understand his son when he needs that most. And he promises to let his son grow and develop into the man he needs to be, even if that takes him away from his parents.

That’s the kind of parent I want to be. I want to find that line that must be walked, the one that gives my children enough… enough freedom to let them discover the wonders of this world, and enough limits to protect them from harm, but enough danger to shape and discover the diamonds they are deep within. I want them to come to know and love the God I do, the one who gave up the glory and immortality of eternity and heaven to woo them into a relationship with Him, who took up His power and rolled a stone away to walk out of tomb. I want to walk the balance between holding my children close enough that they never doubt for an instant that I love them heart, mind, and soul… and yet enough to let them go when the time comes. I want to be godly mother to my children, so that once they’ve grown and become adults, we can be more than mother and child, we can be siblings in the family of Christ. It won’t be easy, and there will be days when I’d rather duct-tape them to the wall than to patiently deal with them (but I won’t. I promise. No taping the children with anything other than a video camera). But being a parent is an honor and a privilege, and I’ve been aching for that opportunity for years. Oh, my Beloved Child, I will show you such wonders in this life, if you will listen, and I promise I will listen too. And I love you. I have never met you, and still, I love you with every beat of my heart. I can’t wait to meet you.

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Image courtesy of Randy Elrod, 2010

If you follow my twitter feed, every once and a while, you’ll see comments from me raging against the Iranian government. If you know me in person, you may have noticed that I’ve always got green on (or you may be one of the ones that’s heard why I’ve always got green on). Or maybe you’ve seen my avatar, currently tinted green. You may wonder what it’s all about, why my twitter location is set to Tehran, why I keep going on about a place that the news has long since forgotten about, why I do something so small and unimportant as wear green in the larger scope of things.

Let’s face it; I’m a housewife in the middle of the United States. I’m largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. I mean, sure I’m important to the people who love me and care about me, but outside of them, I have very little influence. I’m just another voice in the six plus billion people on this earth, right? What does one voice matter?

Except, Beloved, I believe that every voice is precious. Yes, even the ones I can’t stand are precious… they are a son or daughter to someone; none of us exist in a vacuum. In fact, it’s my belief that every voice is precious that drives my passion for the people of Iran and against the government there. If I consider every life invaluable, a treasure of inestimable worth, then the casual destruction and oppression of those lives is going to be highly offensive to me. That’s exactly what’s happening in Iran right now, and that’s why I’ve been speaking against the government.

I wear green to remind myself to think about the men and women in Iran who don’t have the basic freedoms that we take for granted in the United States. I keep my icon green to remind myself that people where given the illusion of freedom of choice and then brutally denied that freedom. And I protest publicly the inhumane treatment and the continual loss of freedoms in Iran as a way to keep attention on the lives of these people, so that they are not ignored and silenced by a despot who seeks to dehumanize them and control every aspect of their lives.

A little bit of history so that you understand why green, and why I protest this government:
In 1978, the Iranian people went through a revolution that overthrow the monarchy of the Shah of Iran and replaced it with the Islamic Republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Under his leadership, the nation became more of a theocracy, or a country that was governed not by a political power but by a religious one (in Iran’s case, Islam and their faith in Allah). Under Khomeini, in 1988, the government executed political prisoners in Iran. Estimates of how many people were killed vary widely from as low as 1400 to as high as 30000.

When Khomeini passed away in 1989, Khamenei was made the new Supreme Leader by the dying Khomeini. (In the past, I’ve mistakenly thought that Khomeini and Khamenei were different spellings of the same name. This is not the case; these are two different men.) The dying Ayatollah, whose position had been strengthened early on by the taking of US Embassy personnel, also changed the constitution before dying. During the 1990s, the president of Iran was a relatively reform-minded body, and the people enjoyed freedom while the government focused on building its own economy, infrastructure, and undoing the damage of the wars in the past. But as the late 90s ended and the 2000s dawned, the clergy began to tighten control over the country, and changes in the presidency eventually led to the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. There were already anti-government protests in 2003, before Ahmedinejad was elected, but after his election, the people protested against Human Rights violations as well.

But what brought things to international attention in a new way was the June election in 2009. There was a reformist who ran against Ahmedinejad, a man named Mousavi. His party was marked by the green color on the Iranian flag, so those who supported him wore green on their clothing, carried green flags, or were otherwise marked by green. As the election results came back, the official Ahmedinejad counts were reported as granting Ahmedinejad “a landslide victory”. Mousavi and his supporters (and even those who hadn’t actively supported him, but now wondered at the results) questioned the outcome. There was a recount of 10% of the ballots, and the Supreme Leader declared that attempting to overthrow the elected government was immoral and that the election was closed, despite the fact that some areas reported voter turnouts greater than 100% (aside from other questionable outcomes).

But it didn’t end at a disputed election. Both peaceful protests and riots were declared illegal, and the pro-Ahmedinejad paramilitary Basij group instigated violence against students and Mousavi supporters. Within a week, the Basij had murdered a woman on camera, and when this footage was shared over the internet (because it was the only way communicate the real events coming out of Iran without the censorship of the government interfering). It continued to escalate. By June 22nd, riot police were using live ammunition fired into the air and tear gas to break up crowds. By July first, over 1000 people had been arrested, and at least 20 people had been killed in the violence. Basij troops were marking homes during the day and going back after dark to attack reformist supporters, raping the women, kidnapping and killing the men. Protests have continued, and Mousavi’s nephew was assassinated in December 2009.

More, the oppression of the people in Iran has continued. The people are more and more limited in their freedoms; not only has their right to determine their own government been interrupted, but more reports emerge as time passes. The government in Iran has legislated which hair styles are acceptable. Why does a government get to dictate hairstyles?

More, in 2006, a woman named Sakineh was arrested and charged with adultery. In a theocracy, this is a serious charge, and her sentence is stoning. This sentence has not been carried out yet, but there is no evidence that suggests that the government won’t take carry it out quietly later. She has confessed to her crime, but her confession came after she was tortured, and she has since recanted that confession.

Ladies and gentleman, how can we, as citizens of humanity, share this planet with the people of Iran, and not be concerned about what is happening to them? How can we not care about the way they’re being oppressed by their own government? These men and women live in fear of their own government arresting them, falsely charging them with crimes, beating a confession out of them, and then stoning them to death for this crime. They are being told how they may wear their own hair! It has been said that evil prospers when good men do nothing… if this government isn’t evil, then what can we call evil? If this level of oppression isn’t evil, then what is? Or do you deny evil exists? Still… how can we allow our fellow citizens to be so oppressed?

I wear green for the party that opposed Ahmedinejad. I wear green for the people who were murdered for daring to speak out against the government that oppressed them. I wear green for the woman murdered on camera, Neda. I wear green for Sakineh who is facing being stoned for a crime she was tortured into confessing to. I wear green because although we have different faiths, I believe with all my heart that the God who formed the world and died on the cross and loves me, loves them just as much. I wear green, Beloved, because we are no different when it really matters. I wear green to remember these men and women whose lives matter every bit as much as mine do.

We’re all just one voice in the vast cacophony of billions. But where one voice can be silenced, many have far more power. Many voices united can have a much larger effect than any one of us can. So I invite you to join me. Join the chorus of people on the internet that are raising their voices against the oppression of the men and women in Iran. Speak out against the stoning of Sakineh. Maybe we can save her life. Maybe we can make a tangible difference for change.

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There is a constellation of mental health and behavioral problems that experts expect to see in the lives of abuse victims, particularly sexual abuse victims. These problems serve as they symptoms that experts use to demonstrate or prove that the victim has been abused in courts of law, particularly when it’s difficult to find physical proof for whatever reason (for instance, if a little girl is a gymnast, she may have broken her hymen in a fall on a balance beam, making it harder to prove that she was the victim of ongoing sexual abuse. Or if the abuse was by making the child pose for pornographic pictures, or exposing them to pornographic images, then there wouldn’t be physical evidence on the child’s body, but there’s still going to be a psychological and emotional toll on the child).

Growing up and going to therapy for the abuse, I learned about these problems. I was prepared for them, watchful for them, so that I could combat them. I have never wanted to be another statistic, never wanted to be another number on a chart that someone could dutifully tick off and pass over and be done with. So when I learned that depression is a common problem, I watched for it. I learned that sexual abuse victims tend to go to one of two extremes of sexual expression… very repressed, reserved, almost incapable of expressing themselves at all (the “prude”) or over-expressive, very free, even to the point of being self-destructive with their sexuality (the “slut”). I watched for this, trying to walk a middle ground.

More, it wasn’t just that I was trying to find any middle ground. I was very much invested in finding a well-defined, easily followed path that would provide me with the solid mental health foundation that my history of abuse had robbed from me. I didn’t want to find a middle ground between normal and abused… I wanted to find healthy. I wanted to find the place that was the right balance of sober and silly, of freedom and service, of grief over what I’d lost and victory over what I’d gained in the process. It had to exist.

I blundered for years, and I wouldn’t say that I’ve found that place now, but I would venture so far as to say that I’m closer to it than I have ever been in my life, closer to the place of balance and healthy than anyone would have ever believed possible for anyone, much less for a survivor of abuse… even less for all of the abuse I endured.

That brings me to the second portrait of a physical illness that we can compare emotional traumas to. Just as I’ve never been shot, neither have I ever had cancer, but I’ve watched as it stole loved ones from our family, and I’ve watched as loved ones fought it successfully. Unlike a gunshot, which is an immediate threat and kills swiftly, cancer is a slower threat, growing insidiously in the body, turning your own cells against you, your body betraying you from the inside out. Sometimes, you can catch it early and intervene before it has a chance to spread and do too much damage, and in those cases, you have a great chance of survival. But if you don’t find the cancer before it’s had a chance to grow and spread, then your chances of overcoming shrink radically.

Abuse is the same way. If it’s found early, then people can intervene, interrupting the pattern of emotional and psychological trauma before it has a chance to do as much harm as if the abuse continues. But the longer abuse continues, the more forms of abuse a child endures, the more difficult and complicated it becomes to overcome the destructive patterns that children establish just to survive. They’ve learned to lie to protect themselves, so they have to unlearn deception as a habit. They may have learned theft to provide for themselves, so they have to learn to trust others to provide for their needs. They’ve learned not to trust anyone, so they have to learn how one even begins to take the steps to trust before they can actually trust. They’ve learned fear and pain; they have to unlearn that to learn love.

So here I am, a teenager, understanding the challenge I face, and yet determined to fight. Beloved, how am I any different than a cancer patient being told that there’s almost no chance of surviving this tumor, but who refuses to give up? I know the odds are against me ever finding normal. I know the odds are against me ever finding healthy. I know the challenge I’m up against. Just like that cancer patient, the chances of me ever getting out from underneath of all of this are slim. But just like that cancer patient, I don’t want to give up. I have something to fight for. At the time, it was my sisters. But that was enough. It gave me a reason to keep going.

And because, in all that my mother did wrong, she did one thing right, I had my path. I had found my road to healthy. She kept us in church. Now, I believe my mom did that for selfish reasons; churches tend to be generous to single moms raising daughters in need, and the more involved with a church, the more generous they’re willing to be for a while… they see you as one of their own that they’re taking care of. Now, after a while, they realize they’re being used, or they see the situation the kids are in, and then Mom would move on… but it still served to keep me in church.

Now, I know lots of people would look at my situation and say “How could you go to God after all He let you go through?” The truth is that, because I was taught from the time I was little that we all have sinned, I never saw God as responsible for what was happening to me. On top of that, I saw that the rest of my mother’s family wasn’t like her, that my father’s family wasn’t like her, and my father and his wife were frequently trying to teach me that I was responsible for the choices I make, and not to repeat the behaviors I saw in my mother. It was an intentional act on their part, and it worked. Add to that the fact that I was hungry for something that would provide me with that path to healthy instead of damaged, and church was water to the parched, food for the starving, and medicine to a cancer patient out of options.

In church, I met people who loved freely. They gave of themselves and invested in me. They were genuinely interested in me and in seeing that I found my healthy. They hurt with me, they grieved with me, and they celebrated with me. Church was an escape from the hell I lived in at home, and they worked hard to make sure that it was always available to me. It’s also where I met my adoptive parents.

But church wasn’t just the people, though they were a huge part. It was also the teaching. It was the message printed in the book I had grown up with, that I had started learning from when I was tiny, that those people were living out to me. It was the message in the sermon every Sunday. It was the salve to aching wounds, the challenge to wrong-headed attitudes, and the path to healthy I was looking for.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” -Matthew 11:28

Oh, Beloved, I was so tired. And the burden of abuse is so heavy. Do you know what an assurance that was to me? And that’s just what I unpacked out of there the first time. There was so much more I’d take from that verse later… but that’s for another time.

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. -James 1:5

For someone looking for answers, to be told that it was there if I only asked? Oh, Beloved, I wasn’t used to getting what I asked for. But God never failed me. When I asked, He answered.

I could sit here and pull out verses all day long. Then Ten Commandments directed my behavior; how I should treat God and others. The Beatitudes in Matthew were the Be-Attitudes… the attitudes you should have in life. The fruit of the spirit that demonstrate themselves in the life of a believer. 1 Corinthians 13, that talks about Love, and how we should behave if we want to be loving. The rest of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus took the Ten Commandments and illustrated not just the letter of the law defined in them, but explained how to comprehend and live out the spirit of them, too. And then there were the verses that comforted me, that told me who I was in the eyes of God… Isaiah 43, that called me precious, and beloved. Zephaniah 3:17, that told me God sings in joy for me, and watches over me. The 23^rd Psalm, where God is my shepherd, and Luke 11, where I am the sheep he seeks out and celebrates with a party.

Beloved, that book told me about a God who had loved since before I was born, who had been watching over me and protecting me even while I was in harm’s way, who had a plan for my life and had been unfolding it for me all along. I found a God who put off immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and even innocence when he took on sin on the cross, in order to put on humanity that He might understand what it meant to be human, and then to win us back to Himself. I saw humility exemplified… for love of one that had been so broken by abuse that she believed she was unlovable. In that book, in God, Beloved, I found the healing I needed.

My middle ground, the path I follow that I call healthy, is the one in that book, the one that God walked for us when he put on humanity. I don’t follow it perfectly; as long as I draw breath on this earth, I will make mistakes and be imperfect. But my goal is to be like Christ, to see people through His eyes, to love them with His heart, to give as freely and generously as He gave, and to leave this world and the people I meet better than they were when I found them.

Let’s go back to that cancer patient, facing a terminal diagnosis. They’ve been told they don’t have long to live, and there’s almost nothing that can be done. They find a medicine that is in the early stages of trials, and they try it. It works. Beyond all expectations, this medicine does what nothing else could have done. It shouldn’t have worked, but it does, and they go into complete remission. There is no sign of the cancer anywhere. Sure, there’s still scars where it was and where other treatments failed, and they remember having it… but the cancer is gone.

How do you think that patient is going to feel? Depressed? Or maybe they’ll be happy at the news that they get to live with their family longer, that death isn’t coming for them tomorrow, like they expected? Do you think they might get excited by life again? Do you think all the depression that came with facing the end of their life might begin to fade when they’re given it back?

Beloved, that’s how I feel. I faced a constellation of problems thanks to the abuse I survived. No one expected normal from that outcome. But like the cancer patient who wouldn’t give up, who tried something radical, I found healing instead of death. I found strength instead of weakness. I was given normal back, Beloved, I was given my life back. Why wouldn’t that make me a happy, positive, joyful person? I’m partying with the Shepherd, and I’ve decided I’m not going to let anyone rain on that. After all, it’s my party… I’ll celebrate if I want to!

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My great-grandmother, my mother’s father’s mother, went by many names. I knew her as Gramie (my mother’s other grandmother was Namie), but my baby sister called her Me-Me, unable to get the “Gra” sound out at the beginning. My cousins called her “Who-who”, because the family who lived in town with her would go by, open the front door (it was always open), and call out for her: “Yoo-hoo? Anyone home?” She usually was, and would come out from whatever room she was in to visit or to head to her appointment with them (she didn’t drive). My cousins misheard this as children and she became “Who-who” to them. It didn’t matter… she loved us all. She was Mom to my grandparents and their siblings, Alice to my grandmother’s parents, who were as welcome as any other of the family, Gram and Gramie to the rest of us, and Mrs. Arnold to half the town, to whom she’d taught Kindergarten.

66 when I was born, Gramie was still grey headed for a long time, not going white until I was 9 or 10 years old, I think. Grampa Arnold, her husband, passed away shortly after I was born, leaving Gram a widow. She lived in the house he built her, right next to the school she’d taught in, until she passed away. I grew up playing on her acre lot, eating wild strawberries from the little square box garden in the back (the one spot my great uncle let them grow), walking through the barrier of pines to the playground in the schoolyard next door, or across the street to the new park, even after it was devastated in the 1986 tornado that left Gram’s house undisturbed… but required a complete rebuild of every stick of playground equipment and tore out more than 1/3 of the trees.

Gram’s house had 3 bedrooms, and we almost always stayed with Gramie when we came to town. We rotated through who stayed in which room; the front bedroom usually went to the grown ups, and then the kids tended to rotate in and out of the back bedroom or the bed of honor. I’ll be honest… I never remember sleeping in the back bedroom. I know I did… I just don’t remember it. My world existed in that other bedroom.

That third bedroom, you see, was Gramie’s room. She had a twin bed on one side, and another on the other side, a bed side table in the middle, and a tv on a dresser on the other side of the room. Gram had a glow in the dark rosary that hung on the bed post, and in the wall closest to the living room, the pipe from the boiler ran up the wall to heat the house… so in the winter, when it was cold, you could rest your feet up against that spot in the wall and keep yourself warm all night long. Every one wanted to sleep in Gramie’s room and sleep next to that pipe. Me? I just wanted to sleep with my Gramie. The pipe was bonus.

Gramie always came to bed after I’d fallen asleep, and she was always awake before I was. Somehow, she knew the moment I woke up, because I’d open my eyes, and there she stood in the doorway. She had a glass of juice or chocolate milk waiting for me… exactly what I wanted, even before I knew what I wanted… orange juice, tomato juice, or chocolate milk. Before I could even decide what I wanted, she knew and was waiting. I’d sit up in bed, tuck my feet against the pipe, and she’d bring me my little drink. At night, as I fell asleep, I’d say the Lord’s prayer on the rosary, lulled to sleep by the nightlight it provided. There was nothing special about the beads, and I didn’t pray the rosary, but the light it provided was a comfort, and saying the prayer was a connection to faith between us… something we shared, even if I wasn’t Catholic, and she was.

I said that Gram’s door was always open. I have a hard time thinking of anyone she ever turned away, with one exception… but we’ll get to that later. Even when my mother and father divorced, my father and his wife were welcome in my Gramie’s home at Christmas. He was still part of the family. I know my father loved her and respected her, no matter what happened between him and my mother. When you came to my Gram’s house, you were offered a soda if you were under age, and a beer… a Pabst Blue Ribbon… if you weren’t. It was who she was. It was hospitality. And it wasn’t that she drank to excess… Gram started with coffee, sweet and blonde. But beer was always an option. I never grew up thinking of alcohol as anything exception as a result.

She was level-headed, too. In the 16 years of my life that I knew her, I saw my Gramie angry twice. In 16 years. Now, granted, by the end, I wasn’t seeing her all the time, but from the time I was 4 until I was 10 or so, I saw her every other weekend, every summer, and most major holidays. Even after I turned 10, I saw her every summer and many major holidays, and I still only saw her upset or angry twice, and both times, she had good reason.

I’ve told you about my growing up. My poor Gram… I still don’t know how much she knew. I know she wasn’t completely in the dark; it was her house we went to when I was 6 and we were taken into foster care. We were driven to her house, where the police met us and took us away… and I just wanted to stay. More, I’ve been told I talk in my sleep; at least once, I held an entire conversation, agreeing to watch my sisters while my mother went out (or so my mother says) and didn’t remember a word of it the next day. So I may have said things in my sleep all those nights sleeping next to her in my favorite bed. I don’t know.

One afternoon, after my younger sister (not the baby) and I had spent the day picking at each other all day long, my Gram finally snapped at us. She’d been under stress all day, and while I don’t remember what was going on exactly, I feel like she was dealing with more garbage stirred up by my family than any saint should have patience for. She turned and looked at us and snapped. “Can’t you girls just GET along?!?” I don’t think she was angry with us, really… just at the entire mess, and the evidence that it was influencing our behavior. She just wanted peace, and she couldn’t find any. It worked… seeing my Gramie upset was enough to shock me into silence and I was on my best behavior after that.

The second time I ever saw my Gram angry is also the only time I ever saw her turn someone away. It was Christmas. My mother had brought her husband/boyfriend person, the one who is serving prison for his sexual assaults, with us. He had the only car. Mom decided we needed to go meet his family, so we all piled into the car and went off. We went to a town I’d never been to, met people I don’t remember, and Brian left us with them to go “take care of something,” saying he’d be right back. I think he said he was going to get us lunch or something. I forget.

An hour passed. Then two. Three. The sun was setting. My mother finally gave up on him and I think we hitch-hiked back to my Gram’s place. (I know we hitch-hiked all the way home one year, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this was just the first time). We got in, went to bed, still knowing nothing about where Brian was or what had happened.

The next day, as we played in the parlour, Brian walked up to the door. My Gram met him at the front door. She demanded to know where he’d been, and when he didn’t have a satisfactory answer, (I’m not sure anything short of hobbling up on crutches or rolling up in a wheelchair would have satisfied her, actually), she refused to let him in. My quiet, calm, sweet Gramie chewed him out for leaving her granddaughter and great-grandchildren in a strange town, alone, without a car, hungry, overnight, stranded. He was never welcome in her home again. Ever. She was a lioness, and he’d crossed the line when he endangered her cubs. She was done.

All of those things have been enough for me to look up to my Gramie all this time. I’ve wanted to be the kind of loving, selfless woman she was. I’ve wanted to have the strength of character I saw in her. I saw Jesus in her life, and I’ve wanted to live such that others would see Jesus in mine thanks to her. And then… as I remembered another story, one I’ve remembered all along… I realised she’d lived Jesus to me in a way she never even realized, giving me a strength and protection I’ve taken for granted all this time, and yet is the most beautiful sort of sacrificial love that exists.

My Gramie didn’t banish Brian the first time he set foot in her house. No one realized the danger in him until too late. I was too afraid to speak up, my mother was too busy playing her games to see or was too codependent to care (I’m not sure the first really lets her off the hook anymore than the second, though), and abuse carries a powerful mantle of shame that makes secret keeping mandatory. I remember Brian coming to me once and asking. And I said no. This was my Gramie’s house! This was my sanctuary! My safe place! For some reason, the man who refused to take no for an answer anywhere else… walked away this time, and left me alone in the one place I felt safe.

There’s a passage in Matthew where Jesus talks about the division of people into groups, like a shepherd divides sheep from goats. He says that the way that the people will be distinguished from one another is based on how they treated “the least of these”. “Whatever you do unto these, you do unto me,” he explains. One day, as I was doing my Bible study, he let me see that in a new light.

Beloved, we’ve seen that as a verse that talks about doing for people or not doing for people. But I believe that Jesus is also talking about whatever we physically do to one another as well. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at Isaiah 53, when it talks about how the suffering servant will be wounded and bruised on our behalf. That’s usually talking about salvation, and I believe that’s a right interpretation… but I think it’s also right to see in that that Jesus does something radical for us. Jesus stands as a scapegoat, placing his body between ours and what would come upon us… and I think that’s true not just of our punishment, but it can be true of abuse, too.

Beloved, I believe that Jesus lays himself between our abusers and our bodies, so that every blow they strike must land on him first. That he carries the weight of it, to spare us, to protect us, to guard us from the worst of it. When it comes time to answer for our actions, those who heaped abuse upon us will be surprised to find that it was Christ who took the brunt of the blows… because whatever they did to the least of these, they did first to him.

So how does that come back to my Gramie? Gramie’s house was the one place where my “no” had merit. In that moment, my words didn’t have just my weight behind them… they had hers, too. Without realizing it, she’d placed herself between me and my abuser, defending me and protecting me in a way no one else ever had… and she likely never knew about. She may not have had to lay her physical life down on the Cross to save me, but she saved me that day in a way that was very real to me all the same. Her home remained a safe place for me, and that memory, that one time I could say no, gave me the courage to say it again, and even when he ignored me, it gave me the power to break the secret finally.

You may never know the impact you have on a person’s life. It may be decades before the person whose life you changed fully grasps what you’ve done for them (if they ever do at all!) but there’s one thing I’ve learned from my Gramie. You don’t have to be perfect to make a lasting impression, and even the smallest things make a big difference. I love you, Gram. I’ll see you in eternity!

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I’ve said before that there’s nowhere on Earth I don’t want to visit. There’s some places I’d like to keep my visit short, or only go with a qualified guide for various reasons (Australia, I don’t mind snakes, but how did you wind up with the booby prize of all the most venomous snakes, spiders, jellyfish, and whatever else can kill you? I’d love to visit, but this arachnophobe is seriously uncertain of how to work out the whole spiders and scorpions in the down under thing. How do I go visit koalas and wombats and kangaroos and avoid the deadly beasties?) Still, I can not think of a single place that I don’t want to see. That it wouldn’t be exciting to say “I’ve been there, I’ve seen that with my own two eyes, I’ve seen the beauty that this world has to offer in that place!”

We bought the Planet Earth series on Blu-Ray (the one narrated by David Attenborough, of course) and we watch it every so often, and instead of sating my appetite for certain places, or leaving me convinced to never go there, dear GOD, what was I thinking?!? it only whets it, sharpening my desire to see these beautiful places where the mountain peaks reach above the cloud layer, or the flood plains where the elephants come in to drink and wash and refresh themselves after a year of drought.

When I was growing up, we used to “go crazy”. Daddy would pile us into the car and we’d go driving. He might have picked a destination in advance, but we didn’t know. It wasn’t about where we were going… it was about the journey there. We drove through Hart’s Content, a national wildlife preserve in the Allegheny National Forest before we went berrying on the Tidioute Overlook, and stopped at a roadside stand for ice cream on the way home… because that stand had peacocks. We went to Chapman Dam and the Reservoir there, enjoying the sights out the window on the way. We pulled over to pick wildflowers and hang them up to dry when we got home. It wasn’t about where we were going… it was about seeing the beauty in the world around us, and enjoying the time we had together.

“Going Crazy” is a tradition John and I have picked up. He may pick a destination, or he might just pick a direction. Sometimes, we take the dogs, letting them hang their heads out the windows and just smell the smells as we go. Sometimes, we just go crazy as we come home from somewhere, instead of taking the same way home that we always do. It’s not about where we end up… it’s about enjoying the sights of the world around us and the time we have together on the journey.

We’ve also made it a priority to travel together. We took a cruise in the Caribbean in 2006, and one in the Mediterranean in 2008. We’ve been to St. Louis, to Chicago, to Dallas. We detour through cities on the way back from other places; we detoured through New Orleans one year so I could go to the French Quarter and stop at Café Du Monde for beignets and chicory café au lait. We travel with our families, and we’ve traveled together for work. Even on our honeymoon, we traveled to Orlando, Florida, marking John’s first time on a plane!

A Sunset in July in Owasso, OK

So why do we travel? What is with this desire I have to see this world we live in? Look at the pictures sprinkled in this piece. I took them tonight. Living in Oklahoma, you learn to watch the sky, and particularly, the color of the sky… sometimes, if the color is off, it means bad weather is coming. Tonight, the color of the sky made me nervous, so I went out front to see what it looked like outside. That’s when I saw the cloud bank in the pictures. I was facing east, with the sunset behind me. The way the setting sun lit up those cumulonimbus clouds was breathtaking! I pulled out my phone (it’s got a great camera in it) and snapped the pictures you see.

This is a beautiful world. Oh, I know, we hear lots of doom and gloom these days, especially with the oil spill in the gulf. But stop for a minute and really look at the world around you. Look at the way the clouds form and shift and play in the sky. Look at the grass and wildflowers and trees. Look at the majesty of mountains reaching high into the sky. Look at the amazing depths that the seafloor reaches. Look at the wonder of life at the edges… the bacteria and mussels and kelp and shrimp and fish that live in places where photosynthesis is impossible, and they rely on chemosynthesis, on the conversion of the chemicals boiling out of the ocean floor!

When I consider this world, I have a few thoughts:

What is man in the scope of all of this wonder? Who are we next to all of this? In the grand scheme of things, what do we amount to? If we were to crowd every human being alive today into the space it takes for us to stand up, so we all crowded in together… we’d fit on one continent. Not just one continent, but within one of the smaller countries. We’d be smooshed, but we’d fit. We’ve barely explored the oceans, and they cover the vast majority of this planet. And that’s just ONE body in the entire expanse of space! If you go outside and look up, even in the cities you can see the stars, and around them circle other planets. We have 8 more planets in our solar system (I refuse to accept Pluto’s demotion!) and that’s not counting the planet-sized moons and asteroids! We hardly count for anything against the vast scope of all of the cosmos!

And then, as I consider how small we are, I wonder how much gall it takes to assume that we have the power to break our planet! I know, this is a radical idea, and there will be those of you who disagree with me, and point me to the gulf. We’ve had asteroids hit the earth, and the earth survived. We’ve had volcanos erupt and wipe out cities, and humanity survived. We’ve had plagues that wiped out one third of a continental population, and humanity and the earth survived. Mankind cannot be both small and minute and amount to nothing in the cosmos and still be so big we can destroy the planet. We can’t be so infinitesimal we don’t amount to anything and yet still have the power to destroy everything. The two ideas are mutually exclusive. At most, we can wipe humanity off the earth, and while that would be a very bad thing indeed, we still didn’t destroy the earth. We still haven’t wrecked the planet beyond the planet’s ability to recover! Nor am I completely convinced we can completely wipe ourselves out… I’m sure there are enough genetic wildcards to survive whatever we unleash, or enough survivalists that have buried in enough to breed themselves through the holocaust we create. It’s what humans do. We survive.

But… and this is the big one… I believe that God spun this all into motion. I don’t know if it was through a big bang, or through literal spoken words that formed existence from a void. I don’t know if it took 6 days or 6 millennia or 6000 millennia. None of those details matter to me. I believe there was an Uncaused Cause that caused this all to be. And I marvel at the creativity that spun this into motion, whether that creativity did so by actively painting the sunset, or by setting in motion the natural laws that create it. Mankind cannot do what nature does the way nature does it on the scale that nature does it at the energy cost natures does it. We sit and plot and plan, and our best efforts might come close, but we’re still not quite there. We’ve not yet engineered anything that will do what a blade of grass does the way a blade of grass does it… and yet, grass does it all without any premeditation or intention (so far as we can tell).

Beloved… if this is what happens when God speaks existence, what do you think Heaven is going to be like, when everything is perfect, unspoiled by death or decay? What do you think we get in Heaven, when God sings for joy over the works He has made?

I want to see this world, Beloved… because this is the Shadow, and Heaven is the Form. This is just the rough draft. As breathtaking as this world is, Beloved… it gets better. I want to see the best this world has to offer, so that when my day is bad, and my heart is heavy, I can look at the wonders around me and know it only gets better from here.

A Sunset in July in Owasso, OK

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Years of infertility found me questioning if I should keep waiting patiently for the Lord to answer my prayers and miraculously allow us to conceive, or if we should pursue extraordinary means (fertility treatments, in vitro) to try… and if my body was even healthy enough for such measures. Late fall of 2008 and all of 2009 found me struggling with my fertility and health so severely that by September of 2009, I had a hysterectomy, a move that was actually a relief to me, at least until I got yet another ovarian cyst in November. It’s enough to break anyone, and it was only the latest chapter in my story.

You see, I grew up in a severely dysfunctional home. Removed from my parents’ custody as an infant, I lived with my mother’s parents for over 3 years before a legal snafu sent me back to my parents. This meant I got to know my Dad, which is probably the best thing that happened in my childhood. But it also meant I lived with my Mom, and she spent my life terrorizing me, beating me, emotionally traumatizing me, and tearing me down nearly every chance she had. Even after my parents divorced, she had custody, and we were removed again when I was 6, placed into foster care for several months before my Dad got custody back. But in a custody fight, my Mom got custody back… and promptly moved us 2 states away to keep us from him (by this time, I had a sister who is 4 years younger than I am).

This pattern would continue for the next 10 years, only getting worse every time. She lost custody of us again at 9-10 when we got head lice and she didn’t treat it, so we missed too much school. Her parents, living in the same town, got custody of us, and my Mom did what the courts told her to do to get custody back. But a dark secret began to grow: Mother’s Day weekend, 1988, her boyfriend/husband (I forget if they were married yet at this point) molested me. My sister says he started about the same time with her. When I told, my father tried to get custody… and failed. And my Mother’s husband grew bolder. If I said no, he took by force. For 4 years, my sister and I were his play things.

I told, of course. Over and over I told. But each time, my Mom made it my fault. She would throw me across the room and scream in my face that my sisters and I (when I was 12, she had another baby with him, so I now had 2 sisters) were going into foster care, we’d be separated forever, and there would be no Christmas, and they’d be abused in foster care and it was all my fault because I’d lied about him. She knew how to play me, how to guilt me into doing exactly what she wanted me to do, and I did it.

It wasn’t until he’d been gone for 6 months, having left on a ship and we didn’t know why he wasn’t back, that I finally had the courage to stand behind my accusation and not give in. Of course, all this time, the physical abuse from my mother never stopped. The emotional abuse never went away. The belittling never stopped (“If you had a brain, you’d be dangerous!” “If it was a snake, it would have bitten you!” “If you can pinch an inch, you’re too fat… that’s my garbage mouth, old MGM. She’ll eat anything.”) This was my life.

When we were ordered into counseling, she dated a man who was in her therapy group because he’d taken pornographic pictures of his own daughter. He had the audacity to tell me that, when I got angry in court after being accused of making up the accusations because my vocabulary showed I was coached (I shouldn’t have known what a penis or vagina was, not at 13), I’d nearly caused the case to be lost.

Her habit of dating questionable men continued, and I started running away. I called my grandparents for help, or a family from church who had befriended us. I became suicidal, wanting any way out of this insanity I could find. If this was life, I wanted to no part of it. But the burden of my sisters weighed heavily on me… when I overdosed, I fought to stay awake until I could put them to bed and then I just wouldn’t wake up in the morning. I threw up first.

When I was 16, my Mom was convinced to let me stay with the family friends from church for the night… to cool off. The night became the weekend… became the week, became the month, became the rest of the school year, became the summer… and while they were letting me have a safe place to live (with my grandfather intervening for us, too,) they were finding safe places for my sisters, too. And while I didn’t know this at the time, they were fighting to make those placements permanent. But my Mom wasn’t working with them. So right after my 17^th birthday, I went back to her. My dream of normalcy was over, and I reawoke in the nightmare.

Worse, that was the year my father died. My mother smirked when she told us the news. She tried to keep us from attending the funeral, claiming she couldn’t afford the time off of work. My Dad’s Dad offered to let her go back to work, keeping my sister and I so that we could stay and say our goodbyes, and then he and his wife (my step-gramma Joan) would be responsible for getting us back…we’d miss more school, but Mom could get back to work on schedule. That wasn’t acceptable. With my father’s dead body in the next room, having heard my grandfather’s offer, my mother told me about the arrangements she made, and how I was putting her family out and inconveniencing them for something I’d known I wasn’t going to be able to do in the first place.

When we went to court a week later, a date that had been set before my father’s accidental death, my mother claimed that the families seeking custody of my sisters and I were doing so to get the Social Security money from my father’s death. His accidental death. A week earlier, when this court date had been set a week before that, and they’d been fighting for custody far longer. Worse, the judge wouldn’t listen to us, and it wasn’t until the Guardian Ad Litem (the lawyer appointed by the court to represent the children’s best interests) told me the decision that I recognized the peril I was in.

The judge had signed a piece of paper saying my mother couldn’t abuse us. 10 years earlier, my mother had a piece of paper ordering custody visits with my father… and she’d moved 2 states away to get around obeying. I knew that this order was my death. I recognized that I was at the point of breaking, and told him so… that I was at the point that I was running away all the time, and one of these days, I was going to run into the wrong people, and wind up dead at their hands. Or my mother, not remotely bothered by a piece of paper that said she wasn’t allowed to beat us, was going to beat us to death, or choke me to death. Or the despair that accompanied my every waking moment at her house would lead me to attempt suicide again… and one of these days, I’d succeed. I told the lawyer that if they sent me back into that house with that piece of paper, they’d be taking me out in a box. My 13 year old sister chimed in “Me too!”, and the judge reconsidered.

At 17, I was finally removed. I was told I could live with the family I’d been living with until they changed their minds or I changed mine. My sister was given the same deal. My baby sister, too young to speak for herself, was not given the same chance. The sister who moved out was back before I graduated from high school, and in foster care again. My baby sister, too, was in and out of foster care. I, on the other hand, took my life line and hung on for dear life. That family became mine. Their daughters are my sisters, and they are my Momma and Daddy.

Why do I tell you this story? Why do I share this tale of heartbreak and woe with you? Because I’ve overcome. Because I have every reason to be a victim, to be broken, to be lost in grief and in need of serious help just to function every day. And yet, somehow, I am not a victim. I am not broken. I grieve, yes, and there are times I need help to overcome the hurt, but they are moments, hours, not days or weeks. I have found healing, and Beloved, that is all the difference.

Healing. What a simple word, and how obvious it sounds. And yet, when we’re dealing with psychological or emotional wounds, I don’t know that it’s the first thing that comes to mind, even though it should.

Think about it, Beloved. If you’re standing in the street, and you’re shot, you don’t just stand there and bleed to death. Indeed, if you’re wise, you try to avoid the person with the gun shooting you in the first place, and once you’ve been shot, you try to avoid getting shot again, and you go seek medical treatment. Pressure is applied to stop bleeding, and then surgery is done to correct the damage and recover the bullet(s) if needed. All of the treatment done to correct the initial harm of the gunshot hurts as much or more than the gunshot, and yet, without it, death is almost certain. You’ll bleed to death, you’ll get an infection in the wound, or if the bullet didn’t go through, the bullet could poison you or travel and cause a fatal blockage and more damage. Without immediate treatment to bring healing, wounds cause death.

And it’s not that you won’t carry a scar; even the best surgeons we have are going to leave some scarring behind. But if you get to it fast enough, and the doctors are good enough, you might be able to minimize the amount of damage that you carry with you forever. It only makes sense. All of this is just common sense. Even gang members who can’t risk the police attention that treatment in a hospital brings know that they can’t leave gun shot wounds untreated… they find a way to get them taken care of.

So, if it’s so obvious that physical wounds require treatment, even if that treatment might be more painful at first, why is it so hard to remember that emotional wounds are no different? Granted, we can’t see a physical wound or physical evidence of the wound on a psyche when the wound is emotional, but there’s no ignoring it, and if the wound is deep enough, there’s no ignoring it. It offers signals of its presence in different ways; inappropriate behaviors, depression, suicidal ideations or talk, cutting, manic behaviors… the list goes on and on.

Not only that, some wounds actually seem to act as a sort of infectious disease. Instead of being like gunshots, these are more like tuberculosis or typhoid or another deadly contagious illness. Some people, when wounded, act out in ways that serve to wound others around them. Thus they seem to spread an infection of emotional or psychological wounds to others, instead of seeking out the treatment they need. An example of this would be someone who suffered abuse and then turned around and repeated that pattern of abuse on others. They serve to spread the contagion, instead of quarantining it and ending the cycle.

I’m not trying to pretend that emotional and psychological wounds aren’t life-shaking. I’m not trying to minimize the effect that abuse has on the person who suffers it. Why would I? I’ve lived it first hand! No, instead I want to point out that just as a gunshot wound is clearly and obviously a deadly wound that needs immediate intervention, so too, do the insults we face that don’t leave physical scar. Worse, many times, the kids who are abused aren’t in a situation to get the help they need; like me, abuse is piled on abuse. If you see physical abuse, I’d about guarantee there’s psychological abuse going on, too. How do you intervene in the life of a child and get them the help they need? And how do you explain to a child how desperately they need this help… and that it’s not their fault they need it? And yet, if we can’t get to them when they’re children, how much more difficult it will be to help them excise those wounds, to treat and heal those scars they’re carrying as they grow!

As an adult, the biggest thing I’ve learned is that I need healing. I needed a doctor to cut away the scar tissue, the death and decay that lived in my spirit and allow new life to grow in its place. For some people, that can only be done under the supervision of qualified medical psychological professionals.

For me, I was able to do it with Bible studies and prayer, letting God peel the wounds away. I had counseling as a kid, and I saw a therapist a few years back when we hit a rough spot in our marriage. Most of the work, though, has been done by thinking things through, by reading deep into the Bible and in studies by people who relied heavily on the Bible (meaning, they weren’t pulling stuff out of somewhere else, and then adding a few verses… they were exploring the verses of the Bible, and demonstrating how the culture, history, and language of the Bible and times would have been received then… and sometimes, how that could be applied today… but often, my brain did the modern applications).

It has been through that deep study, through the deep healing I’ve had that I’ve come to this understanding of God as Love in flesh. It’s how I’ve come to this view that our first call is to love one another, and our second is to forgive each other, because we’ve been loved so freely, and forgiven so much. Because of this healing, I no longer feel worn thin by my life, thinking I have to earn my right to live and be loved… a view which also gave me a view of myself as loved and beautiful, prized and treasured. A woman who’d struggled with her self image her entire life, now I’m confident in ways I never thought I could be. The miraculous love of God reached into this life, this one who has every reason to be broken, a victim, lost and dead, depressed or just plain insane… and instead, I am whole. I live, I sing, I laugh, I love, and I invite you to join me.

Oh, Beloved. Life is hard. Life can be brutal. On your own, it could break you. But you don’t have to be broken. Won’t you find healing? Just reach out. Reach out, and ask for help. There’s no shame. There’s no condemnation. The beauty of Hosanna, Beloved, is that it is a cry for salvation that is immediately answered. Ask for help, Beloved, because Help is ready and waiting for you.

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I saw a friend the other day, and as I gave her a quick hug, she warned me she had shingles. Ooops. I’m pretty sure I only touched her clothes. Tonight, though, as I lay in bed itching like mad, I wondered if the itching could be chicken pox, since the two infections are related. I dismissed it, though; I’d had chicken pox as a child, and this isn’t acting like that. But it did get me thinking about my life as a child, about the places I’d been as a child.

I mentioned our upcoming trip to Pennsylvania to my husband, and how much I was looking forward to going with him… to sharing with him the places I remembered living. I mentioned the first house I remembered, then the apartment we’d lived in, then the one we’d moved to before I went into foster care… before moving in with my dad and then being taken from him and moved to Virginia.

When I was a child, I was asked who I wanted to live with. My father emphasized that I needed to tell the truth, that I should say what I really felt. I really wanted to live with him, I desperately wanted to stay with my Daddy. But once I was in that little room, I knew that if I said anything other than my mother… I knew there’d be hell to pay. Terror seized my tiny body, and I acted against my own desires, my own self-interest, and I said the one thing that would make my mother happy, hoping against hope that if I just made her happy, she would love me. That she wouldn’t beat us any more.

Children, of course, have no way of knowing that nothing they say will change their abuser. That they have little power over their situation. The only power the victim of abuse has is terrifying to exercise, because it requires them to do the one thing they know will enrage their abuser and bring down worse abuse: They can tell. They can speak up and tell other people what is happening. The only power a child has to break the power their abuser has over them is to break their silence… but they do so at a terrible and horrifying cost.

If no one believes them, they must go home to the same situation, and now they have no hope of escape. They tried to escape, but they were not believed.

If they are believed, but are not immediately removed from the situation, and must go back to it while the reports are investigated, they know that their abuser will be in a rage… one that will be taken out on them. They will get everything they normally get, and more, for daring to break the silence. Even if no one reveals who spoke up, or if someone sees something and the accusations are denied, still the retribution comes back on the victim.

If they are believed, are removed, but the abuser is allowed contact, the abuser will do the best they are able to manipulate the situation. They will promise to change, to reform, to never repeat the behavior. They will play all the right games to show that they have done what is expected of them… only to repeat the same habits of abuse as soon as the spotlight is off.

And if they are believed, removed, and contact is limited as it should be for the good of the child, the child suddenly finds himself or herself cut off from the only home they’ve ever known, from the only family they’ve ever known, and with aberrant behavior patterns that have been beaten into them, unable to understand what acceptable or normal behavior looks like.

I might have been 7 when I was given this impossible task: choose between the father whose love is certain, or the mother who will certainly beat you every chance she gets… and who may get custody of your sister no matter what you choose. In a fit of terror, I chose my mother, and I spent over 20 years hating myself for it.

As I lay there, in bed tonight, I wept for children. Courts go them, trying to find out where their hearts are, trying to be fair to the child… and instead, they put these tender hearts into impossible situations. The courts may not even know that abuse is going on… how can they ask a child where they want to live, when that’s so loaded a question? And yet, how can they ignore the wishes of children who come from otherwise healthy homes?

I don’t know the answer. I know that my heart is breaking. Our children are being broken and torn apart by the very people who should be protecting them. We’re losing their tender hearts to the scars of abuse and neglect as they harden themselves to survive. They learn that the system that’s supposed to protect them fails them, so they find ways to survive despite it. We are losing tomorrow because we’re too afraid of offending today.

Oh, Lord, forgive us. Wrap these sweet children in Your arms. When it seems there is no one to defend them, stand between them and harm. Be their strong tower, their ever-present refuge in the storm, their Comforter, their Shelter, their Shield. Lord, You can preserve their tender hearts, You can heal their brokenness, You can teach them that they were always loved, always. Oh, Lord, let them feel the Love.

Raise up people who will stop at nothing to defend the innocents, Lord, who will not accept “good enough” when there is more to be done. Embolden our hearts to step out in courage to defend the helpless and the hopeless, to give weight to the words of the powerless. Give us strength to embrace these children who, though they may have flesh and blood birth parents, are orphaned by circumstance and abuse. Oh, Lord, if the children are the harvest, Lord, the fields are white, ready for harvest. Send us laborers for the field, strong men and women who will pour out their hearts and their lives for the least of these.

Thank you, Lord, for the marvelous ways you intervened in my life. Over and over, Lord, You put men and women in my path to give me courage, to hold me up, to come alongside and help me never give up. Lord, You took this one, this broken child, this heart broken beyond recognition, and You made me whole. You healed me and gave me life and love beyond anything I could have imagined. Oh, Lord, the wonders of Your mercy, and Your grace. It’s because of what You’ve done in me that I can be confident that You want the same for the others, for all the other children, Lord.

In the name of Your own Son, The Ancient of Days, the Lamb who is worthy, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Yeshua, the Christ, God with us…

So may it be on earth as it is in Heaven, when every wound is healed, and all tears are wiped away, where You are our God, and we are Your people. Amen.

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Let me warn you: I was a huge fan of LOST (though I don’t like the name “lostie”) and when I think of what I want to explain, imagery from the last season comes to mind, so this might be a bit spoilerish. Forgive me. I will try to keep it to a minimum, but if you wish, close this now, go get caught up to the last season, and then come back. I promise, though, there will be no references to the numbers, the smoke monster, or unanswerable questions. This isn’t about LOST… I’m just using images and ideas presented there to explain and illustrate my point.

Very early in the last season, we encounter Desmond working for Mr. Whitmore. He’s being sent to go pick up Charlie, who’s scheduled to play in a concert with Whitmore’s son. Charlie, however, has no interest in anything so pedestrian. He’s had an epiphany. On a flight from Sydney to LA, he had a near death experience, during which he had a vision of another life, a happier life, one where he had love and a life with a beautiful woman. He knows there’s better. He knows that life can be fulfilling, and that the life he’s living now is empty and meaningless and he wants nothing to do with it. He tries explaining this to Desmond, but it’s not until he forces the car they’re in into the water than he’s able to trigger a similar experience in Desmond.

As Desmond has his own near-death experience, he, too, remembers another life, another time where he had love, joy, something more fulfilling than just being an errand boy. It becomes his mission to help others remember this other life, to help others he’s met to reconnect with this purpose and this life they’ve had, this love, this joy.

In the course of his mission, Desmond does radical, criminal things: we see him run down a man in a wheelchair, hitting him at full speed, only to return a few days later. Confronted by another, who believes he’s back to attack the wheelchaired man again, instead he emerges from his car and beats the other man… only to then tell him that he was helping them both, and then turn himself in to the police, while orchestrating a jail break.

All of this is not normal behavior. None of it is sane. And in truth, outside of a television show, it’s completely unacceptable; even as I’m discussing it, I’m not advising it as a means of reaching people. But it serve its purpose very effectively: in every case, the “victim” of these crazy attacks, the one subjected to Desmond’s crazy behavior, comes to a place where they see the truth of their existence, and they are ready for what comes next.

No, I’m not going to talk about what comes next. It’s not important to what I’m trying to get at. What I am trying to say is this: In the show, one man went to radical, crazy lengths, to demonstrate truth to those around him. He had the courage to lead the sort of authentic existence that left him with no regrets.

That’s an idea. A life without regrets. It’s a crazy idea. Have you ever thought of what it might be like to live a life without regrets? I’m not talking about being sociopathic, where you disconnect from the rules and niceties that make life in society possible, the lubricant that keeps society functional. No, I’m talking about living a life where you love freely with no expectation of return, so that when it’s not returned, you aren’t disappointed… but you never wonder what might have been if you had just taken the chance… and hey, if it is returned, wow, what a blessing and a bonus! What if you gave without expectation that you’d receive? What if you gave, instead of lending? What if embraced that impulse to live an authentic life, to risk losing a promotion that means more hours away from your family to spend that time with them instead? What if you passed up another night in to go out and spend time with your friends? Or what if you passed up another night out with your friends to spend a night in with your spouse? What if, instead of chasing the next best thing, you stepped out of the rat race and stopped to enjoy your life? What if you settled for less, and found that less actually was more?

It’s crazy, I know. To defy the standards around us. To say that I don’t have to keep up with the Jones? To say that I don’t have to get my kids into the best colleges by guaranteeing I get them into the best daycare before they’re born? To spend myself into debt, to work myself into exhaustion, just trying to keep up with a race I’ll never win? It’s crazy to insist that I don’t want to be part of that… and yet, the more I describe it, the crazier it sounds to be part of it.

So you tell me? Which is crazier: to chase an impossible dream that leaves you empty, unfulfilled, and without the time to spend with the people you care about most… or to defy the social conventions that say you must chase that dream, and settle for less stuff and gain more in the process? I don’t know… Maybe I’m crazy. Possibly. Still… I’d rather lead the life I want to live, than chase the one I can’t have.

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Nor is it just nature that strikes us so harshly; we ourselves are rather unforgiving of one another. How many times have we been wronged by someone and found ourselves so wounded that we thought we could never forgive the offense? Or have you ever thought “If he (or she) is in heaven, well, I just don’t want to be there.” Or “They couldn’t possibly go to heaven. That was just too bad. It was unforgivable. Some things just guarantee you can’t go.” We’re just not ready to forgive some offenses.

And yet, we long for forgiveness ourselves, don’t we? We need grace ourselves, for someone to grant us unmerited favor. When we make the mistake, we long for the pardon, though we know we deserve the punishment. We long for the favor, though we dare much to ask for it. It’s why we beg forgiveness. Forgiveness and grace aren’t about what we deserve, it’s about what we need but can never earn.

Even in human relationships, forgiveness can’t be earned. Let’s go with an example: My child breaks a vase. He was being careless and knocked it over and broke it. He knew that he wasn’t supposed to be playing around the vase, or that he wasn’t supposed to be throwing balls in the house, or whatever it was that he was doing that ended in the breaking of the vase. What can my child do to earn forgiveness for breaking the vase? Any tasks he does are things he’s supposed to do anyway. Being obedient to his parents are things he’s supposed to do anyway. Any money his father or I give him for tasks he does around the house are still a gift from his parents; it’s still us paying to replace our own property. He could go do things for other people to earn money… but it would be better if he hadn’t broken it in the first place, and he’d rather have the money for himself. Anything he does is punishment for the broken vase. He can’t do anything that fixes the problem on his own.

But, on the other hand, if his father and I understand that sometimes, boys are boys, and children are going to stumble and fall, and he didn’t mean to knock the vase over, and we forgive him for the broken vase without making him earn the money to replace it, then we’ve demonstrated unmerited favor to him. Any time we allow an offense, a mistake, or a transgression to go without punishment or discipline, we are teaching our child about grace, about unmerited favor that forgives when it is undeserved.

Paul Simon talks about this longing for grace in the title track from his album “Graceland”. While it’s ostensibly about the estate of the late Elvis Presley in Memphis, TN, the lyrics suggest that what Simon is actually looking for can’t be found in any earthly location. I think, instead, it’s about looking for a place where one’s past no longer haunts, where offenses can be forgiven and left behind, where the burdens of guilt can be unshouldered in favor of the freedom of the unmerited favor found only in grace.

He describes the other pilgrims on this journey as poor boys, as ghosts and empty sockets. These are people who’ve been broken by life in this unforgiving world. They’re looking for a place that will offer a haven of peace. They can’t explain what they’re looking for, why they’re going, they just know they have to try. He even continues: “I may be obliged to defend every love, every ending, or maybe there’s no obligations now. Maybe I have reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.”

Oh, Beloved, I want to assure you that there is a real graceland. It’s not an estate in Memphis, and you don’t have to walk an inch or drive a mile to get there. You can reach graceland from where you are right now as you read this. And I promise you, just as Simon was confident we all will be received, so too am I.

God, the Creator of all things, the Unmade Maker, the Unmoved Mover, the Source of all things, God prepared a means for our brokenness to be made whole. He knew we would fall. He knew we would make mistakes. Just as parents know that our children will make mistakes and need us to love them and reassure them that no mistake will ever take our love for them away, God knew we would make mistakes. He knew we’d need a way to be assured that He never stopped loving us. He stepped into time to make certain that was possible, and in the person of Christ, God made a way for us to come back into relationship with Him.

Do you want to come to graceland? Do you want the freedom that comes only from forgiveness and unmerited favor? Do you need to know that you’ve always been loved, and that nothing can ever take that from you? Oh, Beloved, do you need graceland? Won’t you stop falling and flying, tumbling in turmoil and let the arms of my savior catch you? He promises He will never leave you or abandon you, that He will keep you safe and secure in His embrace through the end of time. He promises to wash even the worst of your offenses whiter than snow. Grace is yours. Reach out, beloved. I’m living in graceland, and I’d love to have you join me.

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Maybe you don’t want them to go away forever: perhaps they were good memories, the last time you saw a loved one, or the summer you spent with them, carefree and happy. Maybe you want those memories, but they seem to haunt you now, and you can’t move forward with your life because those memories are all you have left.

Or maybe they’re the words you regret. The things you said in anger, and didn’t mean. Or the ones you did mean, but not the way they came out. Or the things you did, but can never undo. The things unsaid that can’t be said. Maybe the memories that you want to erase are regrets that haunt you, guilts that hound your every step, robbing you of peace.

Whatever the reason, we’ve all known what it’s like to have something we can’t let go of. We’ve all been there. We’ve had the hurt that seems to take over our entire existence, that will never heal. When we’re told that “time heals all wounds,” we scoff… time can’t heal this one, we think. And so we long, like this song, for some peace, for a place of rest. For even a temporary amnesia that will let us forget the ever present pain and let us find a way forward.

Oh, Beloved, I’ve been there. It’s surprising what will take you there, and at the times you least expect it. A glimpse of something takes you down a road you’ve managed to avoid for a long time, and you find yourself standing before the scar in your life, at a memory of pain you’d rather forget, but you can’t.

This past December and January, Oklahoma was hit with some of the heaviest snow it had ever had on record. They brought out pretty heavy equipment to dig the roads out, stuff they save for digging on construction sites… or for digging graves. And so, one day, as we got off the highway and I saw a backhoe parked in the snow, I was taken back to the days surrounding the death of my father. I still had almost 2 months before the anniversary came; I wan’t expecting the pain of missing him yet. But there it was. You see, my dad had died in February, in the cold northeastern mountains of Pennsylvania, and with the snow on the ground, it was the first year in a long time that they could not safely dig into the ground to prepare the hole to lay him into. My father lay in a vault until spring and the thaw, when they could dig, and then they laid him to his final rest. So those backhoes in the snow took me all the way back to that cemetary, where they couldn’t dig, because of the snow.

Oh, what a scar it is in my heart to come back to the memory of my father’s death. To know that he’s gone, and he never met my husband, he never met my sister’s children, he’ll never meet mine. It might be nice to have amnesia wipe that scar from my mind, to give me peace when I see the strange things that trigger the pain again.

And I know, Beloved… your heartbreak may not be so jarring as the death of a parent. That doesn’t matter… pain is pain. If it’s enough to disturb your peace, it’s valid and real and pain. I don’t tell you my story to diminish yours, just to illustrate. I tell you mine because it’s near at hand to tell, but it doesn’t make your story any less.

So, what do we do when we come to these moments when our pain steals our peace? What do we do when we long for amnesia, but cannot have it? I’ve learned a few things I do, and I hope they help.

I’ve learned to turn my attention away from the hurt, away from my pain, and focus it elsewhere. Sometimes, that’s as simple as remembering the joy I had with my dad… laughing at the silly jokes he told:

(Read aloud, and pronounce the capital letters separately.)

AB, CD EDBD ducks?

M R not ducks.

S A R. CD EDBD wangs?

L I B. M R ducks!

Sometimes, it’s listening to music that acknowledges my hurt, but also recognizes that there is a healer: there are Christian artists with songs that don’t pretend for one minute that life is all sunshine and roses, and sometimes, the bumps along the way raise questions we don’t know how to answer. Some of my favorite songs for this are listed:

Natalie Grant: Held

Nichole Nordeman: River God

Steven Curtis Chapman: God is God

Sometimes, it’s just plain trying to sing songs that have nothing to do with me, singing praise songs to God. Anything you can remember. Just the act of trying to think up the song and remember the lyrics and the tune will force your mind onto something else.

Are you running from your problem? I don’t think you have to be. If this is a scar that can’t be dealt with, then there’s no point in worrying over it. And if it can be, you may not get anywhere if you’re picking at it when you’re already in pain. You might need to come back to it when you can think clearly.

I do know this: we can have peace and joy even when we carry scars. We can put our pain behind us and walk forward in a new life. We may not find amnesia, but I do believe we can find a way back to rest.

John 14:27- “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Zephaniah 3:17- “The LORD your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, He will quiet you with his love, He will rejoice over you with singing.”

John 15:11- “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

Psalm 30:5b,11- “weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning…You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy…”

Psalm 94:19- “When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul.”

If you’re longing for amnesia as a means to find peace… maybe all you need is the peace. I carry the scars. And while they still surprise me, I wouldn’t give up my memories of my father. I wouldn’t give up the scars that I carry, because they’ve given me the strength to be who I am. They shaped my character into who I am. I don’t want to forget what I’ve learned; I just want the peace that comes despite the pain. And fortunately, I can have both. So can you.

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