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.