All Resolved, A Christmas Story

Today was a poignant day for me. What seemed like a routine doctor’s visit became something else altogether. It was an ebenezer, of sorts, a remembrance of where my family has come from, of where I have come from. You see, six and a half months ago I met a little girl, a beautiful but fragile little girl. On the other side of the world. In an ancient city called Pune. In a little white orphanage with cracked walls, with faded paint and a dusty cement floor. She’d been born of another woman but was ordained to be my daughter from the beginning of all time. A mystery I still can’t fathom.

I will never forget the first time her mahogany eyes looked into mine. And I will never forget how I saw myself in them, a reflection of bittersweet joy. Because I had longed to hold her for so long, and when I finally did I saw the full extent of her desperation.

She cried. Afraid. Terribly afraid. Not knowing who I was. Not realizing that love had finally found her. She cried because she’d borne so much pain before we’d ever met and she could only see me filtered through that filmy lens. She couldn’t see me as I was - the one who wanted to love her.
They said she was sick. They said she had failure to thrive. They said she wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t grow. And I saw the scars on her skin. The infections and discomfort. I saw the hollow look in her eyes. She was barely alive. She’d barely survived to the day that I first held her. Battled for her very existence. A miracle child.
And I carried her home. Across miles of mountainous landscape and ancient rivers. Over war torn countries and cavernous depths of ocean we flew. And she never left my arms. Even when she slept, I was there; my hand was over her. I never left her. Not once.

She arrived in this strange new land with strange new people. A frightening arrival, because she didn’t know that Home had finally found her. She feared she was lost, that she would never return to the cracked walls and the dusty floor she remembered. The doctors said she was severely malnourished. Developmentally delayed. Neglected. She had feeding issues, social issues, relational issues. Her swallowing reflexes weren’t strong enough. She couldn’t stand. She could hardly hold herself up to be seated. The list went on and on, and the road ahead seemed long. Perhaps it would be a life-long journey. So we set our eyes on the path and our hearts on the goal.
For months we tried to feed her. We labored for each bite. Each swallow. We fought the everyday battles for her heart. And inch by inch, she learned to trust. We taught her how to use a bottle. How to be held and rocked. She learned to eat. She learned to crawl and then to stand. She learned to smile. And then to laugh. I heard my child laughing and it was one of the sweetest sounds I’d ever heard. And then one day she took her first steps. She walked, even though the physicians in India had not been sure if she ever would take a step.
Six and a half months of laboring. Doctors appointments, specialists, nutritionists, hospitals and more. Poked, prodded, examined and x-rayed. Diagnoses and predictions. All coming up short. Because all she had needed…was love.
She needed to know Love.

Today she had her last follow up appointment. She’s gained a total of eight pounds (nearly twice the weight she’d been when we brought her home) and she was four inches longer! My heart swelled with joy. The doctor sat with me and asked me some questions about my little girl’s progress. I answered them all, each one with a positive reply. Then the doctor laid open the medical file and began to write. She made a list inside my child’s records, and as she wrote she said it aloud for my benefit: “Orphaned, malnourished, neglected, failure to thrive, swallowing difficulties, developmentally delayed…”
Her list was long, and I found them hard to hear with the chubby, radiant child smiling back at me in my lap. It was painful to remember my daughter like that. And I wondered what the list meant. Why would the doctor take the time to write all of these things in the record now, after everything?
The physician stopped; she looked up at my daughter for a moment, introspectively, and then looked back to the list. With one long, decisive strike she crossed the list out, a line drawn through it. I held my breath as I watched. She made an arrow at the bottom of that line and pointed it to the words she wrote beneath.
“All. Resolved.” She said in her thick Middle Eastern accent.
And those words of absolution made my throat catch. Made my eyes well up with tears. I had to say it again in my head to be sure it was true. All resolved…. All resolved. And the physician smiled with me.
I could not tell you the relief that flooded over me with that declaration. The freedom I felt from the fears that had plagued us for the previous year and a half. Lightness and joy now washed every one of those fears away. This was the greatest Christmas gift I could have received: Hope. This child will know life and know it fully. The weight of her past was being lifted away. And though I know there will be hard days ahead, as with any child, today I felt the full realization of peace. After the agonizing wait to bring her home, and the fear for her health and her future, she was home in my arms. She was safe. And now she was well. All of the unknowns and all of the fears had been resolved.

“You rescued this child,” the physician said in all seriousness. “You know that is the greatest thing any person can do? To save the life of another human being.” The milky gaze through her glasses was tearing up now. “And you will have a big castle in heaven.”
I shook my head. That was all wrong, though I knew her intentions were kind, and that in all her seriousness she probably believed it to be true. But the synopsis was reversed. I was the one who had been rescued, and my love for this child was just a small glimpse of that much bigger story. A microcosm of the greater One. The far greater work. My works were filthy rags. Even my attempts to love this child as Jesus loved are worthless. Nothing without Him.

Because you see, there was another child. Born many years ago. On the other side of the world. In an ancient town called Bethlehem, with cracked walls and dusty floors. Conditions far worse than the orphanage I found my daughter in. This was a baby born of a woman, who also came to a strange land with strange people. A baby who cried when he breathed his first breath, just like you and me. And He must have been afraid. Because unlike my child coming into a strange world, He knew where he was going. He knew the purpose for which he had come. A child ordained for a purpose much greater than any man had ever known. Born to become the Hero of mankind; born to die. The God man. Emmanuel - God with us. The most miraculous child of all. A mystery I can’t fathom.
But I can imagine that dirty stable a little bit better now, that filthy hole in the ground where the God of the universe condescended into flesh as the most vulnerable creature possible – a human baby. Defenseless. Reliant on the arms that held him. As fragile as my baby had been. And somehow in this divine mystery, the hands that had defined the universe and laid out the stars were now clinging to an earthly mother for warmth in the chill of night. Beneath the very moon He created.
The bright sun of Heaven, now the light of the world. Without any beauty or majesty that we should recognize Him. He put on flesh to dwell with us.

It’s so curious, isn’t it? Why the God of the universe chose this method to reach us. Maybe before that precious Baby came we couldn’t view God rightly. We could only see Him through the filmy lenses of sin and depravity. We couldn’t see Him as He was in Heaven: The One who wanted to love us. And so to view Him - as He revealed Himself - to view the manger as God intended, we must also view the cross. The inseparable ‘coming’ and ‘reason He came’. The whole reason that Heaven and earth collided and the veil was lifted for those thirty three years when God walked among us. And the reason was this:

Love found us. Love came to rescue us.

The humble beginning in a manger was only the foreshadowing of His work to come, His servanthood. It was only a foretaste of how He would enter human frailty completely to fight the battle for us in physical death. The yoke of our burdens would be upon Him. The Hero of mankind would have to become the Man of Sorrows first. Stricken by grief and afflicted. The pain of sin and death, the punishment for all of it, would be upon that Baby’s shoulders. And not just my burden, but yours, and his, and hers and theirs. All of them. All of us, who were and are and are yet to be born. Those sons and daughters He has called to Himself in His infinitely divine mercy. The mighty crushing weight of all of our human distress. Our utter clamoring desperation. Hollow eyed, sickly skinned, wretched creatures of our own demise. Enemies of God. Unable to know His love.
If all of that burden was lain upon one Man, how great must the burden have been? So much sorrow. So much sin. So much death and darkness. I cannot comprehend the burden of it. And how it grieves me to know that my own burden is in that awful heap! It was my terrible weight that helped to crush Him!

This one thought gives me comfort in the knowledge of Christ’s indescribable sufferings: How much greater must His love have been for us, to carry ALL of this to the cross willingly and slay it there upon Himself? His love for us had to have been greater than all of the sorrow and sin of this world combined. It had to have been immeasurably greater.
And my daughter’s physician was right. The greatest thing any one person could do is to save the life of another human being. To save just one life. So how much greater is Christ then, who saved many from every nation, from every people, through all of history. And more: The life He gives to those He saves is everlasting, never to be lost again.
A Savior. In the purest, truest, most beautiful and perfect understanding of the word.
God’s reconciliation for us. The greatest gift ever given.
And I will never forget the first time I met Him. How I saw myself for the first time in His eyes. The reflection of my complete forgiveness being understood. The reflection of my new-found hope and purest joy received. I will never forget how I saw Him, because I knew then that Love had found me.

I know that in my feeble nature I am still learning to trust Him. Inch by inch He battles for my fully-surrendered heart each day, even though the final battle is already won - I am already His child, and I cannot lose that inheritance. Still, He is teaching me how to be held by Him. I’m learning that His arms are safe. Over time I have learned to crawl. To eat. To stand. And still I teeter as I learn to walk these years later. Someday I hope to run this great race as other saints before me have run. But He has been there. He is carrying me homeward to His unveiled presence. Over the war torn lands and high mountains I never could have crossed on my own. Over the murky rivers and cavernously deep oceans that would have swallowed me for certain. Even when I’ve slept, His hand was over me. He has never left me. Not once.

And I imagine that maybe this list could have been made about me before Love came to rescue me that very first Christmas: Liar, cheater, gossiper, slothful, spiteful, prideful, broken, wanton, hurting, hopeless, motherless, godless …

But a strike has now been made through my list, a list far longer than I have given here. And far more shameful, I’m afraid. That list was struck from the record by my Savior.

No…

It was struck ON my Savior. And the strike that was needed was not one of ink, but one of blood. The most precious blood of all. Spilled for me. So that these words could finally be written of me: All. Resolved.

That is the story of Christmas. That is the ebenezer I place in the ground today. I will remember from where I came. And I will look on the manger with eyes that have also looked on the cross. I will see Him now, with the film of sin and depravity peeled back from my eyes. He is the God of Heaven, come down, the One who has loved me from before time began. The One who has ordained in His mercy to call me His own, before I ever had a formed mouth to call on Him. The One who made the moon and placed the stars. The One who remembers how He formed me and knows that I am only dust.
I am His. I rejoice in my adoption. I sit radiantly upon His lap. A lost child - found. A sinner – forgiven. A wretched and depraved heart – cleansed. My brokenness - made whole. My sin – resolved. And my separation from a Holy God – resolved.

All. Resolved.

The Greatness of Small

I long for respite. For peace.
To see breathtaking places and fly away from here.
I want to see the world. It calls to me.
There is so much to be tried, accomplished, felt. I yearn for it all, a big bite of the human experience – that thing which is only given once.
And yet it can be found here too. Couldn’t it?
The giggles. The playfulness. Yes, even the tears. The pain that makes us hold tighter to the intimate moments. Finding it all precious.
Growing and changing. Shedding the old skin, what I used to (want to) be.
For them.

I often wonder what treasures could be found in that far away place I saw once so long ago.
I didn’t know what I was seeing then. I know it now. I’ve contemplated it for years, pondered and mulled over deeper things than I knew back then. Time has nurtured that understanding and desire.
I would savor it now. If I could.
There is so much of life to explore outside of these four walls. So much that still needs discovering.
But little voices call, holding me back.
Little faces need wiping. Little hands need holding.
Little mouths need sweet kisses goodnight.

I imagine the stories I could write. They live inside of me, clawing. Writhing.
Could I create them if there were quiet here? If there were time?
I long for greatness. Not for myself, but in the things I accomplish. To see results. To know that my working hands did what they set out to do, and did it well.
Greatness in smallness, I suppose.

And yet it’s here, isn’t it?
The smallest of small.
It’s here.

The greatest of great.

Maybe one day I will go there, to that other place.
I’ll see that treasure. I’ll write that story.
I’ll do all the things I’ve longed to do for so long.
But anything else I accomplish, anything else I succeed at, will all be for naught if I fail at this one thing I've been given.

The Good Ol' Days

There’s a nudging in the heart for the good ol’ days. Those times we spent together as children, when the world was bright and innocent. The memories that remain from those early years have a softer glow about them, like film from an 8mm camera. Grainy at the edges. Yellowed with time. Sweetened with age.

I remember how I used to crawl into my sister’s bed when the night closed in too dark around me. When the dreams haunted me. When monsters threatened to bite. My little feet would creep across the hall and lift me up beside her; hide me beneath her coverlet. There I would fall asleep, dreamless. Safe beside her.
Those were the good ol’ days.

We used to play in that cabin at the edge of our yard. Daddy had built it with boards and shingles the summer I grew in my mother’s belly. We’d imagine ourselves as Mary and Laura Ingles, growing up on the vast prairie of our imaginations. On warm nights I’d have a sleepover in the loft with my closest friend from down the street. We’d prop open the cabin door and watch the stars, talking through the night. Innocence rang out in our bubbling laughter.
Those were the good ol’days.

Christmases around a sparkling tree.
Dinners around a small, laminate kitchen table.
School mornings waiting on the front steps for the bus.
Mommy in her fuzzy slippers with a steaming cup of coffee.
A ditch that imagined itself a grand creek, full of summer adventures for a small child.
A black and white dog playing fetch in the yard.

Those were the good ol’ days.

They were.

But it occurs to me whenever I am watching five little pairs of bare feet traipsing across the yard, on an adventure of their own, that these are the good ol’ days too.
Every time I’ve had the gift of looking down into a newborn baby’s wondering eyes. Or nestled a sleeping toddler into his bed. Or played a game of kickball in the backyard with a small tribe of laughing children. Or kissed the man I love at the end of a full day.

These are the good ol’ days.
The days rich with memory, golden with beauty.

I don’t want to miss a moment. I want to store it all away – precious treasures – for later. I want to look back when I am old in my bed and know that I did not waste a single minute; I did not wish any of it away or long for other days. Though many days the work is hard, and though grief may creep in from time to time, one day I want to look down at wrinkled hands and know that they worked hard, and loved well, and cherished every gift.

Time

Time is a mysterious thing.
It is the ebb and flow of the universe. The pulsing of life.
Elusive yet definable.
It is the shallow breath in my lungs and the fluttering rhythm in my chest.
It is the sun rising and setting in its course.
Tender shoots sprouting from the earth. Trees blooming then laying themselves bare again.
Stars rotating above this blue and green orb like streaks of fire in the black velvet sky.
Time.
It is a human constraint too, a frame of reference.
Clocks spinning. Numbers changing.
An attempt to explain what is slipping away from us - that which is brief and unable to be retained by human hands.

The one thing we can never get back again.

Time is history; the end of one era and the beginning of another.
It is the rising and falling of empires.
And it is also the sweet intimacy of a little girl’s arms wrapped tightly around my waist.

“Mommy, you have to come see! It’s a cardinal!”

“Really?” I smile down at her.

“Come see it! Hurry!” She races from the kitchen to the dining room.

But I get caught up. I truly intend to go and see that cardinal. I couldn’t even tell you what interrupts me from going and enjoying that moment of simple wonder with her. Someone needing something from me; a momentary emergency, perhaps. But a few minutes later I am passing down the hall and I see her frame in the front window. Her face is turned toward the yard.

“You missed it,” she says, looking back at me with a rueful smile. “It flew away.”

Enough

The kitchen looks like a bomb went off. Dishes are everywhere. The counters are nowhere to be seen. The little ones are clamoring for me.
Mommy…mommy...
There are five of them, but those younger three have been bickering since they opened their eyes this morning. And I feel like my head is going to explode.
One of them has had an accident in the bathroom. The family room floor is strewn with toys. There’s a heap of towels and sheets in the hall outside the laundry room and a mountain of clothes on our bedroom floor. A pile of backdrops sit waiting to be painted for a children’s play I’m supposed to be producing, and a list a mile long is demanding my attention… (somewhere).
Props that need finding and costumes that need making. Lesson plans that need writing and church classes that need preparing.

I was fortunate enough to remember it was dinner time and that I needed to put something on the table. But that is an unusual occurrence – the remembering part. Usually it’s 4:58 and I suddenly realize I have no plan.
Oh yes! Food! (Have I eaten anything today other than Jovan’s crust of sandwich bread?)
I am moving inside of a hurricane. At least it feels that way.

Most of the time this job feels overwhelming. And I often find myself thinking, I’m not cut out for this. I’m doing a horrible job. Those words follow me around, day in and day out, like a shadow of disgrace cast on my back and a heavy weight of guilt in my heart.
I am not enough.
I will never be enough for this.

Well, I found myself at a breaking point today. Actually, that’s wrong. I think I’ve always lived there and it’s just that sometimes I look around and realize where I’ve set up camp.
But this particular night, I felt myself on the verge of tears.

And then the phone rang.

A shaky, tired voice says my name on the other line. I hardly recognize it until she says her name, amidst the screams of a toddler hanging on my leg. I break free from the chaos and I find a quiet place behind a closed door. I want to hear this voice I haven’t heard in many years. I want to know if everything’s alright.

“I’m in the hospital. I’ve just had surgery. Oh, but that’s not why I called,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

She assures me she’s fine when I press her.

“I was thinking of you just the other day too,” my voice waivers. “I was thinking about that summer we spent together. How special it was to me.”

There was nowhere for me to go back then. I wasn’t old enough to stay home all day every day by myself. And school was out. My dad would leave at sunrise for his long commute to work. I would get myself up and dressed, and have a bowl of cereal at the kitchen table by myself. A key hung around my neck on a black chord because I often came and went from an empty house.
A latchkey kid.

Sometimes I’d be playing in the back yard when her car pulled into the driveway. She would call my name. I’d come running. And she would take me home with her.

We spent many long days together that summer, me and my mom’s old friend. We went on errands. She showed me how to cook, how to do things around the house. And we often went out for ice cream at her favorite place. Nearly every day, if I recall. Just the two of us.
She loved to be silly. She loved to laugh. At a time when I needed to remember how to laugh.
She talked with me.
She nurtured me.
And I have never forgotten it.

“I just wanted to tell you,” she says affectionately into the receiver. “That your mom would be so proud of you. And that I love you.”

My throat catches. Because I realize as she is speaking, that I know intimately the love of a Heavenly Father who does not leave his children alone.
I am enough.
I will always be enough, He reminds me.

Sometimes we need an audible voice from God. And sometimes He uses one to reach us.

Things Only Heaven Can Fix (Part Five)

…
He is gone now.

And if I could truly convey the depths of his account, I would impress upon you the burden with which he lived his life. The abuses, the tragedies and the damages done to his body and mind were immense. In turn, the brokenness and heartache he passed on to others cannot be undone in this temporal world. That is all that needs to be known in order to understand the end.

Or, perhaps… I should call it the beginning.

We visited him three times before he died. And during that last visit, my father had a few moments alone with him. I watched from the hallway, through a crack in the door, as they talked.

This is the image I want to keep of him, and bury all the rest:
He is propped up in his hospital bed. Tears fill his eyes. The cancer is ravaging him, but he still has the strength to speak. At his bedside sits my father, hunched over, holding his wrinkled hand. I cannot hear the words being spoken between them, but I know they impart repentance. And forgiveness. This man has spoken the name of Jesus for most of his life, but he has never quite understood the power therein. My eyes, peering intently into the splinter of light, behold redemption. I catch a small glimpse of the scandalous grace that is the gospel.
The grace that changes and washes all else away.

He took his last breath, alone in that room, just a couple days later. The bed sat empty for a time. The whiteboard on the door, blank. His name, erased.
Wiped clean.
The government claimed his body and buried him in a veteran’s cemetery. It was the last thing bestowed to him on this earth. A plot of dirt for his sacrifices in Vietnam.
Dirt.
That was the best this world had to offer him.

And though he left this place an empty, broken man, he also left clinging with all he had to something greater than himself. Someone greater. Greater than everything that had ever been done to him and greater than everything he had ever done: Jesus.

When he slipped out of that lonely room, he passed into another one that was echoing with multitudes, rejoicing and praising that Greater One who won the battle none of them could win.

I suppose, in a way, I am still standing in the hallway. Waiting. Only having seen a glimpse of redemption through a crack in the door. There is healing in the other room and I long to partake in it.
I will. One day.
But of this I am certain: He was something that only heaven could fix.
And perhaps I have come to realize with clearer understanding that I am too.

Things Only Heaven Can Fix (Part Four)

…
The sun beats down on the hood of the tan station wagon as she pulls into the parking lot. The car seats are sticky. Air conditioning is blasting through her short, dark hair. She reaches across the passenger seat to grab her purse.
And a box.

Someone in a uniform takes her money and weighs the carton. She sticks the postage onto the corner and writes down her own address. Above that, she writes my name. And when that package arrives at our door in a couple of days she will lie and tell me it’s from someone else.

I never knew her as a woman. I will never have an adult conversation with her about motherhood or marriage. I’ll never get to ask her my hard questions.
I only knew her as a child. Part of me wonders if, because of that, I never really knew her at all.
But now I am a mother too. And I understand the fierce love that abides in the deep recesses of a mother’s heart.
I know why she did what she did on that summer day. And if it were possible to love her more for it, I do.

It’s twenty-five years later. The gift that was packed inside that brown box is broken and gone. It is ashes and dust. But there was another gift inside. I am discovering it now. One that has traversed time to reach me. One that doesn’t waste away.

I sip from a steaming cup, looking through a window at brightly colored leaves. The house is quiet and I am lost in thought.
There are no accidents. And though his coming back into my life had felt like a haunting, I am strangely at peace.
I am glad I asked him that tentative question, and I am content with his honest answer that hurt for a moment but exposed the truth.

A breeze pushes through the spindly oak in our back yard. It surrenders its precious few leaves, red paper that will turn to brown and feed the earth with its sacrifice.
The time is coming for giving thanks.
And I find myself deeply thankful.
…

Things Only Heaven Can Fix (Part Three)

…
He speaks with unnatural ease, as though nothing is the matter. As though he is simply regarding the weather and not what has happened to our loved ones.
Ones I will never see again in this temporal world.
“I had her laid next to your grandfather in the veteran’s cemetery.”

On a scrap of paper an address is written. I watch shaky hands writing numbers and letters that may guide us back to her one day. Or at least to a stone with her name on it.
I was not there when she took her last breath. I was not there when they placed her body in the ground.
And I hate him for this.

Why did you do it? Why? I want to scream. I want to wring my hands around his neck, though outwardly I listen to his rambling explanations and details. How he dragged her across the country. From state to state, like one in hiding. How he tried to care for her himself, though she was elderly and he was not capable.
None of it makes sense. His mind is drenched in paranoia. His thoughts are like secrets whispered in shadows.

I am weary. I want to leave. And I never want to come back again. But he is the keeper of the story. He has locked in his mind a million images of my mother that I long to see, images he will take to the grave with him if he does not give them away. And so I ask him to tell me the things I don’t know. Tell me the stories she would have told me.

He slips into story and memory, like a song the heart knows. And I find myself softening as I listen. It soothes some aching part of me to know these things I’ve never heard. A puzzle piece found and put in place.

“Do you remember that gift?” I ask him tentatively, a chink in my armor showing. “The one you sent for my birthday? The one that was my favorite?”

I am a small girl tearing at the packaging tape on a big brown box. Pure joy rushes through my veins because it isn’t often that a box so big comes for a person so small. Mommy stands beside me, watching, with a smile on her face.

No. He doesn’t recall.
“I didn’t send that.” The corner of his mouth curls. “She must have sent that to you.”
…

Things Only Heaven Can Fix (Part Two)

…
A man is hunched there on his bed. His chest is sunken in. His cheeks hollowed. Hair, white.
The last time I saw him it was black. That’s how many years it has been. Time and cancer have whittled him away. But I know this man.
I still know him.

His bearded face turns toward us. And I look into familiar eyes, the same pools of black that peered so attentively at me in that other hospital. Twenty-one years ago. His lips were the ones that uttered those words I cannot forget. The words that changed my life. His face is my vivid memory of that moment. And I have wished many times since then that it was not.

I used to crane my neck to look up at him; he was so much bigger than me. Now I look down on him. Is it wrong that I find some kind of power in this?

So many thoughts, so many emotions, spinning around inside. It’s confusing. Disorienting. What was once adoration has been smothered by hurt.
I feel my teeth clench though I will myself to bend down and hug him. He manages to weakly acknowledge me. But even that feels like rejection all over again.

You were all I had left of her, the one my world revolved around. And you stole that from me. You killed her a second time. The fragile remnants that were left, you obliterated.

I am a small child again, running through a crowd. My hand has slipped from hers. I’d only looked away for a brief moment and she vanished. I am running. Pushing. Frantic to find her. Frightened, as only a child can be.
Lost.
Perhaps it is then that I realize how my identity and my personhood are so tightly intertwined with hers.
And suddenly it is as if there are two rooms. I stand in one. And he in another. I cannot see her but I know she is there. In the other room. Out of reach.
He stands at the door. He looks at me.
And he closes it.
I weep and wail. I bang on the door. But there is no answer. He will never open it. The other room is impenetrable.
And she is gone.

“What took you so long?” He asked, his dark eyes judging our intentions. “I thought you’d be here hours ago.”

I look at my lap, my legs bent rigidly over the seat of the visitor’s chair. I had thought you’d be here years ago.
Bitterness rises, but I swallow it down. And in its place comes a desperate question.
…

Things Only Heaven Can Fix

PART ONE

I stand inside a metal box, I and the one whose face resembles our mother’s. We say nothing. Because there is nothing to say. We look at our shoes. At buttons with numbers. And our blurry reflection on brushed steel.

The elevator doors open to the smell of sterilization and sickness. Instantly a flood of images rush back to me: A body laying eerily still on a bed of white linens. Snow falling through a window. A sharp, cold pane on my fingertips.

Florescent lights line the hallway with a brightness that strains the eyes. And yet it feels so dark.
Coughing. Beeping machines. Wheels grinding along. Blank faces looking back at me. The soles of my shoes squeak on the white tile floor. I am dragging my feet. We’ve driven six hours to do this – to find some kind of redemption in the ashes - but the entire length of that trip I’d wanted to turn the car around and forget this.

There is no turning back now.
Counting numbers upon doors, it comes closer. We find our way, and yet I feel more lost with each step.

He is written on the door. A small whiteboard with black marker spells out the letters of a name we have not spoken since he killed us with his words and walked away.
In a short time that name will be erased. Expunged.
The thought lingers in my mind, numbly, for a moment.

He loved me once. I thought. He showered me with affection and spoiled me with gifts. (His were always my favorite, if only because they were from him.) Somewhere, all the way back in that distant place, there was laughter. Games. Jokes.
But not anymore. I cannot even reach far enough back to hear its echo. It is long gone.
Bitterness has choked it out.
Words upon actions… upon silence… have dug a great chasm here. I fear I cannot cross it.

The heavy door is before me.
I am keenly aware of my humanity, standing here. Of the breath in my lungs. Of my pounding heart. My utter weakness. Every pore seems to hum with hyper awareness of my limitations. I am sure I cannot do this.

Still, somehow, I breathe a prayer. And I step over the threshold.
…

The Power of Words

Nothing is written. Yet. But the possibilities are infinite. I stare at a blank white page and wonder at the power of words. They unravel the folds of the human mind and lay open the chambers of the human heart. They hold the power to connect, to bind separate entities through the shaping of the mouth or the shaping of the pen.
Words.
Simple or complex.
Like colors on a palette, painting worlds and stories. With a single word a universe is born, bursting forth from nothingness. I am an image-bearer in this. It meets some strange need I have deep in my core. To create. With words.

But words are dangerous too. They easily entangle; they get stuck sometimes. Come out wrong. Say what I didn’t mean to say, and mean what I didn’t want to mean. They have a will of their own if I lack the brush to stroke them.

Words have the power to kill. To sever. To wound.
Destroy.

“Your mommy passed away,” he said, sitting in front of me, this intimate stranger. His eyes were pools of darkness and I felt myself sinking into them. “She’s gone.”

She's gone. Two simple words that sent a child’s world into dizzying chaos. Two words that severed my past from my future and at once divided who I would have been from who I have become. Two words that ripped everything away, in an instant, and left me irreparably broken. I have not been whole since they were spoken.

I know full well the power of words.

But in that scandalous power there is also beauty. The words form a story. My story. Yours. And a greater one than either of those - a story that began when the first Word breathed life into the cosmic formlessness.
I will read it after the last word is written and I will marvel at the Author.
I marvel now. I see the story everywhere. It’s inside of me. And I in it.
Words were spoken, and out of vast emptiness comes fullness.
What was dead comes to life.
Starting anew.

I stare at a blank white page and I wonder.