Prelude to Risk, pt. 2 (or Final Chapter)

“We have to make a decision today.”

I’ve been stalling for at least a month. 

January 2017. Earlier in the previous year, my wife and I took in two siblings and will, in a few weeks, adopt them as our own. It has been a long and laborious process up to this point. The adjustment to parenting is the only thing, for me, that has been more trying. From zero to two is an almost imperceptible change if you’re talking about the speed of a vehicle. If, however, you’re referring to the number of older children in your home versus only moments ago, no adjustment I’ve experienced in 40 years compares.

I’ve just begun to settle into the new routines, priority changes, loss of “me” time, etc., that parenting brings with it, not to mention the difficulties raising kids from trauma. If I’m honest with myself, I’m still not sold on the approaching adoption day and terrified that this is a mistake. There’s no turning back after that.  Now we’re being asked to take in a third — their sister. While my wife’s answer was a resounding, knee-jerk “Yes!”, she dialed-back her open-hearted enthusiasm when it was clear I hadn’t yet arrived there with her. We would, instead, think about it. She would pray and hope earnestly that I would change my mind.

A month later, and the new year has barely begun, as has my day. Waking up to get myself ready for work, I answer a call from my wife, who has already begun her workday. The time to make a decision had come, our caseworker informed her. She needed an answer today. 

I do not want to do this. 

It’s been hard enough becoming an instant parent of two. More than once, I’ve felt like quitting. I can’t imagine taking on yet another, who, we learn, will bring her own set of challenges. In short, we would be the fifth primary caregivers in her brief seven years of life — a fact to which I can’t relate to any of my own life experiences.

Overwhelmed at the thought, I tell my wife I need some time. I call work to tell them I won’t be coming.  Instead, I face the inevitable and prepare to wrestle with God.

I want an answer, and I’d like it to come unmistakably from Him. 

_________________

It’s long been easy for me to read the stories in Scripture, especially those in the early Old Testament books, as if God speaks to the key characters in direct, grandiose ways just as frequently as we might pick up the phone and text or call one another today. It takes only a few seamless moments to read many of these accounts as if one divine interaction follows the next, as routine or as common as walking from here to there. Such a belief can further lead to the self-critical idea that I don’t hear quite so often as that from God, and certainly not in such grand fashion, so I can hardly consider myself as intimate with Him as an Adam, a Noah, or a Moses.

Read-time is not real-time, however. Between punctuation, paragraphs, and chapters, especially in the Old Testament accounts, there is the undocumented drudgery of the day to day; there are actual days, months, years, sometimes decades or longer, between “burning bush” kinds of moments. Instead, there is the silence of God. I would argue, in fact, that we overlook the abundance of His silence in these characters’ stories. Granted, this doesn’t mean He wasn’t acting or speaking in these segues.  The writers, inspired of God, only tell us what we most need to know. Yes, he may speak to me in many simple, quiet ways on a daily basis, if I’m attentive, but many of the monumental divine intercessions or pronouncements writ large in Scripture are fewer and farther between if you stretch them out into actual time. 

This I find reassuring, and it adjusts my expectations of God. My faith in Him and confidence that He is ever-present to me shouldn’t depend on whether or not I experience frequent moments in which He parts the clouds for a special revelation. Many, many more times than we read, I am certain, Moses, for example, got up, went about his day, and eventually retired for the night, only to do the same the following day and the day after that. On almost all of those days, I am certain water acted like water does and neither parted across a sea nor sprang from a rock. It’s not exciting, but much of the time we spend in our lives isn’t. It’s simply life as it is.

Nevertheless, God is still present in the day-to-day routines, and it’s often in these periods that our faith is most tested. He will speak to us in the manner he chooses when he chooses to do so, or He may not. Sometimes, however, we hope and pray that He does so in such an intimate and direct way as we read in Scripture so that we are forever changed, our life altered. 

Sometimes, He may give us just that, even when what He has to say may not be what we want to hear.

______________

I decide to change my surroundings and venture to a local park. I turn off my phone. Maybe a little dose of nature and evasion of distractions will persuade God that I’m serious, that I’m holding my calls for Him, so to speak. 

I find a picnic table and sit down, read a few verses here and there, meditate, journal, say exactly what’s on my mind. I wait. I listen. I repeat.

Nothing.

After what feels like an eternity, I impatiently get up, move around, and take a walk. A few scattered times in my adulthood, I’ve imagined Christ by my side on one of my strolls, keeping pace with me, just being present, if for no other reason than to be a comfort, a reassurance in a world characteristically more chaotic than ordered. After a while, though, I sense it’s just me. 

Dejected and impatient, I change direction and walk to the van. God may have nothing to say to me about this. What’s more likely is that I’m simply not very good at listening to Him.  I shouldn’t expect Him to speak to me as He has in so many ways to my parents. I need to accept it, make a decision about this, and move on with life.

I get in, decide to clear my head, and just drive. I head south on the freeway. About 20 minutes in, I drift off the exit towards my childhood hometown. I’m soon coasting past old familiar places down the main thoroughfare. The car eventually makes a left turn, then another left. It stops along the curb behind a park where my siblings, neighborhood friends and I often played.  I don’t know why I’ve come here.

Across the field in the park, I see our old backyard at my childhood home. The architecture hasn’t changed after 24 years, but the paint and landscaping have. Someone else calls it home now. I wonder what memories they’ve made there.

I get out of the car and stroll to a bench. I take nothing with me.  Arms stretched across the back, I just sit and take it in. I stare at the back of the house across the short distance. I’m not sure I’m really listening for anything anymore. I relax, sit back, and remember what was, back when life was simpler and I was blissfully unaware. 

After an hour or two, a little bored and unenlightened, I get up and head back to the car. I don’t know what I’ll do or where I’ll go from here, but it seems God doesn’t want to show up. I’ve invited Him, but He has no interest in offering even a meager shred of advice on how to proceed. Forget it, then. I’ll figure this out on my own.  Maybe He did, after all, just wind this universe up at the beginning and casually amble away to pursue other interests, leaving us with the mess we’ve made. 

I sit down and shut the door. Reaching for the ignition, I press the button and start the car.

______________

“It’s time.”

I’m 15 again, sitting on the floor of my empty room. My mother’s words echo as the tears start to flow. She sits down beside me and wraps her arms around me. I’m saying goodbye to my home once more, the only home I’ve ever known.

Then I hear Him.

“You left your home once at 15. Your family left with you. I brought you to this place specifically to remember that. 

“This child is the fragile age of 7. By the time she makes her way to you, it will be her fourth departure in her brief life from places that only resemble a home. Her family is not with her. She doesn’t understand it all, can’t process it, and is otherwise alone. I’m giving you this opportunity to change her reality, to give her a home that’s truly a home, one that she will never have to leave again.

“It’s time — time for you to take a risk. Your parents had theirs, but this is uniquely yours. I’m not asking you to venture to the other side of the world; that was for them, not for you. 

“I will not promise you that taking this child — these children — as your own will be easy. In fact, you know it won’t be. I will not even tell you how it all will end, whether it will seem worth it. It is, however, what I want you to do.”

______________

Scripture tells us that God is sovereign. If I believe this, then I know His purposes will be accomplished. Moreover, I believe He chooses to use us as vessels to do His work. With or without us, He will do what He says. 

Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder — what if my parents had said “no”?  What if they had turned their backs to their call, though doubtless about what they had been told and who had spoken to them?  

What if they stayed?

Would God, as with Jonah, have bore down on them to any and every corner of the earth to which they fled, using whatever means at His disposal to exhaust them until they obeyed, albeit reluctantly? Or would He have simply changed His mind, searched, and found another to finish the job, leaving them to puzzle in their final remaining years, filled with regret about what might have been?

Maybe, just maybe, after all, they had a choice even then, notwithstanding God’s sovereignty. I can’t search it out, and it isn’t long before I find I don’t want to. Of all for which I have to be grateful in my life, I’m relieved I do not have to linger or obsess on what would have been had they remained where they were.  As with Frost’s less-traveled road, their choice to go has made all the difference. 

___________

I’m back in my car, tears streaming down my face, just like the 15 year old about to leave his home on a journey not of his choosing. I now know what I have to do, but it doesn’t feel inevitable. I have to choose. 

I’m afraid and uncertain. I feel inadequate, unprepared, and ill-equipped. My parents once felt this way as well, on the edge of a risk, but much greater than this. This time, however, I’m in the driver’s seat as I prepare to leave this place once again.

“Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”

I think it is no accident that the story of Abram has found itself placed near the beginning of Scripture. It is a simple yet relatable story to which many thereafter found and still find themselves directed by God as an encouragement to take the first step. As one author put it in his own famed, world-building story, “It’s a dangerous business . . . going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Abram’s faith journey begins anew each time we receive a call from Him and choose to obey. The call isn’t the same for each of us, but He calls us each to something. Reflecting on this, I make my decision.

I put the car in gear.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.”