Holding the phone close to my ear I sat down and bent over, trying to sound normal while the room spun.
Two babies in one week. Two babies buried deep. Two babies sitting in the belly of the earth. Then there was this one black haired beautiful baby whimpered on the other end of the baby monitor.
And I told the one on the other end of the phone I had to go. And I stood and buried my arms in soapy water at the sink. And I wondered why the Mommas who had beautiful nurseries ready and hearts full of wanting and waiting and the willingness to parent now had no baby and this beautiful raven eyed baby girl lay in a bed away from parents who didn't want her. Parents who had abused and neglected her.
Sitting on the back deck, I drug my toe across a crack in one of the boards. It had been weeks since I had held that beautiful foster baby but sitting across from real-life girl it reminded me of that suffocating feeling.
This Jesus loving, real-life girl talked about a brother who lost his only oldest sister and ran from the sovereignty of God that allowed death and how in only one year at one camp he met Jesus and two years later he put a hole the size of his fist in the bathroom wall because his man friend drove off the road at 17 and never woke up. And he had decided to follow this Death-allower so what was he going to do but put a hole in the wall.
And I felt like someone had stolen my air and my heart cried for loss that has taken years to process. And listening to her monotone voice tell about loss that is deep and close and scary.
I'm reminded that there's a girl in the house behind me fighting for life and the ability to live after death has come to her family.
And I'm terrified of the evil that comes without warning and is too strong to be detoured. And I ask Jesus what should I say?! I ask him if he's hearing this story, hearing the stories of loss.
And he takes me back to the night that I bent over a sink of soap and white dishes and colorful plastic cups. Reminds me the stories that connected that night.
That there was this time where Moses walked up on a mountain, the terrifying mountain consumed in God's presence. And Moses he asked bold and brave to see God's glory. So God hid Moses in the rock and passed by. When Moses came out he saw the backside of God's chara- his goodness. He saw the back of God.
Moses had come into the terrifying and all he wanted was to see God and what he got was a left over view of the back of God.
Then the omnipresent became personally present when he came here.
There was this woman who heard he was here and she went to find him.
Life blood coming out of her.
She went to find him and came up behind him, like Moses had been forced to do.
She wanted to see his goodness, experience his goodness. She reaches out and touched the back of the edge of his robe.
Then this thing happened; Jesus. turned. around.
And I'd never seen it, never put it together.
God had to hide Moses, but Jesus turned around.
And I am reminded of Tullian's quote
"In our suffering we do not need an answer we need his presence."
And I agree with Ann
"We do not need an explanation we need an experience." And I would add an experience from an experienced one."
Our wounding reminds us we need his wounds.
He reminds me he doesn't hold out on giving us anything good because he never holds himself back from us repenters, us followers, us cross-take-upers, us grace-covered.
So what do us use-to-be-enemies do when the expanse of an entire universe feels like it's closing in.
What do we do when the atmosphere of a planet isn't enough room to breath.
When 435,000 miles of sun is not enough light to make the dark places illuminate.
When only daughters watch their single mom die from cancer, when real-life girl sits across and talks about death taking her sister and sickness now wrecking her own body, when brothers carry heavy weights and we realize we are the ones who loaded them up with law and not grace and now they struggle to see God, when the girl behind you whispers low that she knows what hopeless is and how life can seem too much and death can seem so sweet.
We remember this Jesus, he was tried so that our trying could end and in our trials his trial reminds us that there is something weightier than this present moment waiting for us.
His suffering was cause by our sinning But the cross he carried that Good Friday it was his choosing, his entering and it is this entering that gives hope to our living.
Lives under crosses of abandon and adultery and broken promises and broken marriages and debt and divorce and cancer and miscarriages and missed chances.
It is his suffering that comforts the inconsolable and breeds hope where hurt has reigned.
It is his bearing of the wrath that makes it possible to choose the yoke that he has offered to share. A light yoke, a teaching yoke.
It is because he swallowed death that now we can taste and digest all of life, not just the tasty, palatable morsels. But the bitter, tasteless moments too.
Our brokenness is healed by his holiness and the holes that pierced his body to pierce the sin that put holes in us.
And our aloneness it needs to meet with his presence.
And our evil his atonement.
It is because of him that we do not have to exhaust explications but can exist in his presence confidently and comforted because of and by his suffering in our suffering.
And he reminds me; no good thing does he withhold because he never withholds himself.
So laying in bed after that deck talk, I asked him that question I have been asking for at least a month now
"Dad, where were you?"
and he reminds me face. to. face.
