I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve spoken these words to my son in response to his endless questions about the world he is still discovering at almost 9 years. While sometimes the questions are anxiety-driven (he has a deep need to know about what’s coming up), most often he is simply curious about the world. I appreciate his healthy curiosity, but it can be exhausting.
I’ve become comfortable, nonetheless, with not having all the answers to all the questions, perhaps because they are questions that, for me, are incidental or trivial and simply don’t keep me up at night. I don’t have an interest in knowing whether or not a Great Dane is a friendly dog (canines being his latest interest) or fudging an answer just to settle his wish for one. “I don’t know, buddy.”
Existentially, this drove a lot of searching in college, as it does for many, to find one’s own faith or meaning, no longer able to fall entirely back on your parents’ raison d’etre. The unsettled feeling prompted by the words “I don’t know” was enough to keep one intellectually searching for answers, even if it ultimately brought you back around to the same or a similar place. “I know enough.”
But parenting a kid from trauma, a kid who had other caregivers — maybe a number of them — before finally landing with you, can prompt such a crisis statement when left with the realization once in the deep end of the pool that “I don’t know” what to do, what will work, or how to move forward. As I remarked to someone recently, it’s not that the bar is set lower. The bar is in an entirely different location, somewhere over there beyond traditional parenting, where consequences, rewards, etc., may or may not matter in the least, precluding any leverage at all for correction. To say it’s exhausting is to use the word in its purest sense; it’s draining, both physically and emotionally, and hopelessness is right there waiting for you to join it in the depths.
There is nothing like this kind of parenting to inform you how we may take both too much credit and too much blame for the way they turn out. We do, of course, bear great responsibility, but much as well is out of our control with them, and some things are simply to be endured (or enjoyed) with prayer and hope.
My most basic but sincere prayer of late is nothing more than, “Please help. I don’t know what to do.” And I have to believe he answers, even if it’s just with an extra supply of patience or grace to handle a kid that neither knows nor cares any better. I want the problem to be solved, the difficulty to go away — we all do — but it occurred to me, with a little inner guidance, that there’s no growth without challenge, even if it comes in the form of a small person who didn’t begin with the same benefits as me. God help us all when we just don’t know.
At 15 years of age, the farthest west I had ever traveled was Colorado for a family trip to Estes Park, where I remember trail riding on horses (always a go-to activity on family vacations my mother planned) and taking in the beautiful elevated natural sights. The farthest east was Florida for one of three trips to Disneyworld, two with family and one as a high school sophomore for a band competition and performance at Epcot Center. Anything beyond these boundaries I was forced to explore in one of the sundry, yellow-spined issues of National Geographic filling out my father’s bookshelves in our living room. During my freshman year, I sat through World Geography, memorizing each and every country’s capital and discovering customs, cuisines, and landmarks around the globe, all detailed vividly in textbooks or in full, moving color on a television screen. These places existed where I had never been and might as well had been the stuff of fiction, since I was just as likely to visit the other side of the earth as I was to “explore strange, new worlds” in a starship.
On the cusp of my 16th birthday, however, that was all about to change. Here, at the edge of my 46th as I pound this out, I recently reminded my family that it had been 30 years this month since my parents took a leap of faith and brought us all across the ocean into what had been a formerly communist country only a few short months before. In the course of our text exchange, mom asked what we remembered about our exit, the first for any of us outside of the U.S., not for a mere visit but to change our residence. We each teased out snippets here and there, but a text conversation is rarely adequate for detailing personal events that deserve greater space. So, I felt compelled to take the time to stretch my own recollection of our initial departure further. What follows are my own sequenced but scattered memories of those first few days of travel.
For the sake of context, it might help to recall the world as it was in early 1992. The internet had not yet moved in to the majority of U.S. homes, and smartphones still might as well have been the stuff of science fiction. No one carried a mini-computer, much less a phone, in their pockets or purses. The average price of gas was in the neighborhood of $1.13/gallon. Johnny Carson hosted his last episode of The Tonight Show, and 60 Minutes was among the most popular programs on television. Police officers accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted, sparking riots thereafter in L.A., and Bush and Yeltsin declared a formal end to the Cold War, the Soviet Union having disbanded the year previous.
This was the general state of things as we rolled up for the first time to Houston’s Intercontinental Airport in June of 1992. It wouldn’t be renamed for the standing president for another 5 years. Dad was already making his way to Ukraine by land in Europe, having traveled with mom there the month before. She had returned after a brief visit to retrieve my brother, sister, and me. We had been staying with our maternal grandparents, who were experiencing one of the most difficult separations of their lives with our departure. We were their only grandchildren, and our mother was their only surviving child. Moving indefinitely to a country that until only recently was a Cold War enemy and taking the grandkids as well was breaking their hearts. Communication would be neither routine nor convenient; letters delayed by international postal services would have to suffice the majority of the time. We didn’t know when, or if, we would return.
As we waited to board, friends and family lingered with us at our gate in the terminal, taking for granted what post-9/11, still a blissful nine years distant, would strip away when airport and traveler security would become a priority, excluding all but passengers. Tears are what I remember as we stood by waiting for the announcement. Tears, hugs, and a deep sadness, some among us still wondering why my parents had picked this path, though they would say it was picked for them, and why they were taking us with them. The world was much bigger then, made so by the inability to connect instantly with one another in a variety of ways, as it is today due to the ubiquity and convenience of technology. When connection is scarce and limited, distances between those we love, especially physical distances, feel impossibly far away, as we would find.
The time had come, and we began the process of boarding, saying our final goodbyes and producing our tickets at the gate for the long flight to Germany, our first stop. I remember little of the flight itself, but a few details stick out. First, it was long. Up to that point in my young life, a puddle jumper to the Panhandle summed up the bulk of my flight experience as a passenger. The duration was just long enough to recognize that taking off and landing were the most exciting sections of the trip. Internationally, however, these maneuvers were a mere fraction of airtime, and, by the way, kids (and, come to think of it, adults), there were no iPads or screens to occupy us. So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Speaking of, and second, smoking, though recognized even then as an unhealthy habit, still had a foothold in most public places, including flights, though with some limitations. You’re all breathing the same encapsulated air, however, so you’re bound to take it in. My brother recalls receiving more than his unwanted share of it where he found himself seated. In any event, it’s a wonder there were not the irate passenger incidents we hear so frequently about today in the news. Easy to make a case of how spoiled and entitled we are; we put up with so much more then.
At long last, we landed in Frankfurt, still a hub for European air travel, and, to this day now as a more experienced traveler, one of my least favorite stops/layovers for its confusing sprawl. Exhausted but soldiering on, we waited with our group for the following flight that would take us in to Moscow for a day or two before our final destination — Lugansk, in far eastern Ukraine. We were traveling with a party of church-goers who were on mission not simply to escort us in but conduct a couple of weeks of mission work and evangelizing. I complained to my mother of my stomach — a tell-tale sign of anxiety I would become well-acquainted with at that age. My mother, with as much empathy as she could muster in her fatigue both emotional and physical, dismissed my pains to nerves, duly so, though it was little comfort.
In due time, we boarded the next flight bound for Moscow. Strangely, I remember absolutely nothing about this leg of the journey. Maybe I slept, maybe I didn’t. I assume my brain was too worn out to make a meager effort to file away what must have been an inconsequential experience. At any rate, we landed, we exited, and whatever was lacking in the previous few unremarkable hours of travel would be compensated for with impressions that planted their roots deep and have never escaped my memory.
It’s difficult to describe what it’s like stepping the very first time out of the familiarity of your own country and into another so unlike your own, one you have seen only on a screen or in pictures. Both fear and anticipation mingle together as you move along, sharing in common only your experience as a human being. All the rest has to be felt and experienced; you’re a kid once more, learning about the world, or at least a different part of it, and everything old is new again, so to speak.
Stepping out of the plane, I followed our group down the stretch until we each were expected to pause at a customs booth. My turn arrived, and I stepped before it, my eyes meeting those of a young uniformed Russian soldier, complete with the storied hammer and sickle pinned to the front of his military-issue hat atop his stern, no-nonsense head. His expression betrayed nothing except discipline and an expectation not to be trifled with. I produced my passport in silence as he took it, studied it, looked up, and studied me. Here, now, was my genuinely first experience of someone foreign in a foreign land. I felt a mixture of dread and excitement as his gaze lingered. This soldier, who resembled an authentic version of the enemy we had been educated to believe in, stood before me now in judgment. My fate was literally in his hands as I waited, alone, one solitary thought passing my mind: “This may be the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
I’m certain I detected a subtle smirk as he returned my passport and sent me on my way, satisfied he had produced the desired and intended psychological effect. As we moved on, after collecting our luggage, we waited inside the airport for transportation to the hotel. As other travelers passed us by, none of them American, I caught not only glimpses of my fellow foreign man but also his/her odors, I’m sorry to say. This sense impression is, of course, nontransferable in a picture, moving or still, and can only be experienced in person. Near us were, I recall, a couple, disheveled but clearly traveling. Accompanying them along with their luggage was a smell I had never encountered, but was unmistakably body odor on a level I can only describe euphemistically as “otherworldly.” It was there I’m sure I learned to hold my nose without actually holding it, closing off my nasal passages indiscreetly so as not to appear rude.
On the heels of this was my first encounter with an alcoholic, ranting and gesturing incoherently, I can only guess, though I could not understand the language as of yet. At some point in his tirade, he stumbled in our direction as one of our interpreters intervened and headed him off, redirecting him elsewhere. This disease, we would learn, was, and, for all I know, may still be an epidemic problem in Russia. More than once over the course of the following year we would encounter such persons, one of them I distinctly recall belly-up in the mid-day sun adjacent to railroad tracks as we were on our way on foot into town. We had to pause a moment to be sure we were not witnessing instead a fresh corpse. Fortunately, we observed his chest rising and falling ever so slightly as to indicate signs of life, and so we chose to move on, finding him absent from his improvised grassy bed as we passed by upon our return that way.
Our pastor had joined us for this trip, and I was paired with him in one of our two-person rooms at the hotel. Waking the next morning for a little sightseeing with the group, I discovered I needed only to roll over in bed to observe the first of many new sights that day. There he was, seated at the edge of his bed, Bible in hand, marveling and remarking to me about a passage in Scripture, clothed merely in an undershirt and “whitey-tighties.” Nothing inappropriate took place, mind you, but needless to say, I was not feeling as inspired by the lofty passage as he, and I never again saw him quite the same way when stepping into the pulpit.
Red Square was my first taste of a famed, truly foreign location, and it didn’t disappoint. I’m sure I was a sight to behold as well dressed as I was, sticking out like a sore-thumb in threads one would acquire solely in the U.S. Prior to leaving the States, I had earned my high school letter as a sophomore via band, so I was afforded a letterman’s jacket, which I wore proudly on the trip. I foolishly accessorized this with a Confederate Army soldier’s cap, which I purchased in Frontierland at Disneyworld before they, and I, “woke” to the inappropriateness of such a souvenir and what it represented to many, thereby discontinuing it.
The ornate, colorful domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral to our left, we stood in the center of the Square facing the tomb of Lenin, revered founder of the U.S.S.R. Upon his death in 1924, Soviet leaders built the mausoleum soon after and laid him permanently in state, where his body remains eerily preserved to this very day. While I can’t verify it, it is rumored that nails and hair are regularly trimmed when the body is not on display.
After a brief discussion, we determined who among us was brave enough to venture into the tomb. There was no question about it for me, having heard about this very monument and having learned a thing or two about Lenin and his role in Soviet history. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
So, we queued up and began the slow, deliberate shuffle toward the entrance. As we neared admittance, we understood that we were to remain silent, were to capture no photographs, and were to remove our hats. I dutifully complied as we began to make our way past the guards, one posted on each side of the threshold. As I began to cross, the guard to my right reached out his arm in front of me, I assumed to look me over first for photographic equipment. He then lowered his arm, allowing me to pass, and so I did. Placing my hands in my jacket pockets, I proceeded to move forward only to be jerked backwards by my right arm. I turned and found the same soldier angrily address me in his native tongue. I never determined what he said, but his incensed tone communicated everything — take your hands out of your pockets. I failed to receive these instructions beforehand, but I was nonetheless allowed to pass once I demonstrated I understood. Once again, I was left with the harsh impression that there are no comedians in the ranks of the Russian military.
Recovering from this shock and reprimand, I stepped inside and wound around the inner perimeter. There, in the center of the marbled, rectangular room, was the body of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. “Lenin,” lying protectively in a glass-encased container the size of a coffin. Guards stood stoically posted at all corners of the interior, ensuring respect was maintained by all who entered. The palpable silence, armed military presence, and dim atmosphere endeavored to communicate to all exiting that you have been in the presence of a god, albeit a dead god. While a day never transpired before or after in which Lenin crossed my mind, it nonetheless made an impression on me, not for the importance of this man but for the misplaced reverence of those following who paid sustained posthumous respect to him — a man whose Revolution that birthed a “united” country fell apart in less than a century.
The following day, we departed Moscow and boarded a dual-propeller Aeroflot passenger plane, bound for our final destination and new home — Lugansk, Ukraine. The noise and jarring revolutions of the engines, I discovered, ensured that conversations were maintained at a minimum of 90 decibels and that the fuselage alarmingly creak under the strain before, during, and after the flight. Somehow, we arrived intact and made our last few kilometers into town, uncertain of the stories we hoped to tell one day to those we left behind.
The news of late has shared no shortage of stories tragic and unsettling of this region over the course of the year. The stories, however, that we have been able to tell of that year in our lives there have remained with us and became an inseparable part of our identities. This first leg of the journey, lasting only a few days, left me with more than my share of impressions. I hope and expect to say more about all that followed in the future as time an inspiration permit. In the meantime, I simply pray that peace will once again find its way to Ukraine, a place we once gladly called home.
Seven-elevens. I and my brother frequented corner gas stations named as such in our youth on a mission to purchase sour-powers, as they were called, or pop a few quarters in whatever video game cabinet, nestled at the back of the store, happened to be available at the time. Many a Saturday were spent biking with friends to one or another of these stations around town in between outdoor play to purge our pockets of coins offered by our parents. So, we exited the house and occupied ourselves elsewhere to while away a warm spring or summer afternoon. Good times.
My paternal grandfather, however, employed this chosen term in a very unique and wholly different way. “Seven-elevens,” by contrast, were, for him, a disparaging reference to contemporary church praise choruses as opposed to the old, traditional four-stanza hymns, to which he was most accustomed for decades during Sunday morning worship service until a younger crowd began to lead the proceedings. “Seven words, repeat it eleven times,” he shared in his brief and to-the-point manner. While such songs certainly have their place, and I wouldn’t begrudge their power to move and inspire, I find I’m cut from similar cloth as my grandfather and often miss and prefer the old hymns, if for no reasons other than their familiarity, having grown up routinely singing them in church, and since I can’t help but observe and appreciate the very meticulous, thoughtful care the songwriters placed in their deliberate choice and arrangement of words. There is as much theology to be gleaned from the verses as one might in a seminary course if you’re paying careful attention. While there are many I could name, “It is Well” is one of my personal favorites. Since we’re on the subject, I wouldn’t object to a four-part acapella harmony of said title at my funeral, though I hope we’re years away from arranging such a somber performance.
I broke with custom at a recent church service, however, and found myself struck poignantly by the opening verse of a familiar tune I’d heard many times before in recent years but never gave a second thought. It opens:
“When all I see is the battle, you see the victory.”
The song continues, themed around the belief that God will tackle our most daunting problems on our behalf, problems that feel insurmountable, providing reassurance for the present moment that things will work out in the end due to his patient yet direct involvement, if only we trust. I was instantly moved by these words as soon as they were sung. As I continued listening, I felt as if my soul reached out desperately to the hope the verses attempted to offer both to encouraged listeners and faithful participants, even finding myself fighting back tears that spoke of the hopelessness I had been feeling regarding parenting, notably one of our trio.
For those who have not yet started a family, there are more than a few loose ideas out there about the most ideal number of children to have. What’s most important to remember however, is that there is indisputably a dynamic that governs the relationships, and it changes and is inseparably related to the number of children in your brood. That being said, while there are many theories, three is often without question, I hear, considered the oddest and most challenging dynamic to manage. “It’s always two against one,” as a sage acquaintance summed it up for us.
I can’t say whether or not this is true, but I personally grew up in a three-kid household, as did my wife, and we are well aware of the noteworthy dynamics of birth order, though both strictly from the vantage point of the oldest in the bunch. I have no doubt this phenomenon plays into the relationships in our own household, often one or another lodging protests regarding alleged favoritism. One of our three, in particular, is most vocal with this grievance, with the added challenge of acting out deep, personal issues stemming from early trauma.
Though we’re only 5-6 years into the adoption experience, the road has been long and hard with our child, and the struggle with this trauma to raise a well-adjusted kid in spite of it wears on you in a way nothing else does. You lose count the number of times you feel like giving up, or at least easing up. If you’re not careful, you can cease to care the way you should, the emotional drain feeling meaningless and far too great to bear.
These concerns tossed and turned in my head that morning the verse was sung, and they were words I longed to hear and believe. Parenting of any given flavor, I have learned, is so unlike anything else one undertakes. It is a long and difficult process with no guarantees, especially with kids who had a rough start, even if you’re doing the best you can with the tools, skills, and resources at your disposal, be they plenty or few. You can easily feel outmatched, as I often do and did that morning, wishing for more than a share of divine assistance. It is, regrettably, never so easy as flipping a switch, pressing a button, or checking a box.
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I’ve remarked before that my wife and I have more than a bit of the achiever bent in each of us, which plays well into our firstborn birth order placement. This is manifested best in the pleasure we take in checklists; rather, I should say the delight we take in crossing out a task on our various to-do lists. There’s nothing quite like it for its simplicity and satisfaction.
Recently, we embarked on one of my ambitious wife’s many life goals to invest in real estate, specifically in the short-term vacation rental game. We have stayed in quite a few “Airbnb” homes over the years with both family and just the two of us, and we find the experience both pleasant and preferable to a hotel stay. While the cost can be slightly steeper than standard lodging, you’re offered more of an experience, many homes tailored to the community in which they are found.
Staying, however, is hardly identical to staging. Seated on the opposite side of a property experience is a mortgage, repairs, renovation, furnishing, and amenities — less to be enjoyed by you than by guests hopefully charmed by the photographs you’ve provided online of your special getaway. After a long year or two of searching, we found ours in the comfy, historic, and amiable town of Brenham, famed home of Blue Bell ice cream. After minor wrangling with the sellers over a month or so via our respective agents, we signed the papers, and the newly-renovated, 60s-era 3-bedroom 2-bath was ours. Check.
Supplies, maintenance, upgrades, and furnishings all make the list, and the expenses begin to mount. “You have to spend money to make money,” they say, and it’s true, though as of this writing, we remain in anticipation of the “making” part, only days since our project was made available for rent. In any event, the “to-do” list is as long as a CVS receipt and is frequently updated and altered. If you’ve watched any home-improvement show, you should be aware of those unforeseen and unwelcome problems that crop-up (cue dramatic background music and carefully edited clips of pained facial expressions), be it rotted flooring, corroded pipes in the walls, outdated electrical, termites, etc. We were fortunate not to have too many heart-stopping surprises, the flippers previous to us handling the majority of the big stuff, though first on our list was the outdated AC condenser, replaced by a genial, salt-of-the-earth local professional very well-connected to this humble town and who was a friendly and helpful first-contact, providing me additionally with the opportunity to use with frequency thereafter the saying, “I’ve got a guy.” Check.
You wouldn’t think it, but installing blinds on windows can take the better part of a day, though one can become a quick study of such a repetitive task. This was first on the list of personal jobs I could handle on my own around the place and considered essential since it “blinded” any potential peeping-toms from all that thereafter took place inside. Next came bedframe and box spring assembly in the bedrooms, unpacking mattresses, putting together anything that arrived in a box, and then moving the big stuff in a Uhaul on a designated Saturday. My lovely wife did an outstanding job of acquiring innumerable furnishings and appliances via auctions stationed at every corner of the sprawling metropolis of Houston, allowing us to purchase at bargain prices otherwise new items, given one’s willingness to sustain the chance of a minor ding here or there. Our favorite story among these was a new Ashley Furniture sleeper sofa that we acquired for a ridiculously low price, only to discover after we brought it home that it was missing two cushions — our mistake for failing to read the fine-print. No matter, however, as we discovered. After identifying and contacting the furniture retailer’s repair line, they asked only for the serial number and our mailing address and shipped replacements free-of-charge, in spite of the fact that we admittedly did not purchase it new in-store. They arrived in time for moving day, as we hauled everything up and into the new home. Check, check, check, all the way to our eventual listing of the property a full month later.
How rewarding it is to finish a job, to mark off a task, to bring closure to something through honest hard-work and effort. Study for the test, submit your answers, and get the “A”; turn the screw, one after another, and assemble the bedframe; think your thoughts, type the words, and post your blog. Check, check, check. The task may take time, but it’s straightforward and unequivocal: your will to work is likely the only thing standing between you and the satisfaction of completion.
This works best against things in life that have no clear will of their own. I failed to observe this until children came along. In this, I was woefully unprepared, in spite of training. It was rapidly apparent and unmistakable to me that one of the chief aspects that was going to make parenting so challenging was the fact that I couldn’t address them like a task on a to-do list. They have little wills and emotions of their own, perhaps more potent than you might imagine, driven sometimes by issues that they cannot fully understand or explain. The dryer doesn’t skitter away from you when you step into the laundry room, refusing to do its one and only chore by accepting the wet clothes. A nail doesn’t scream in pain, shedding bitter tears, screaming “No!” at you when you strike it with a hammer. No, these objects are indifferent to the job and allow you to edge ever closer to that “check,” as long as you move your own will. You and maybe the static, dispassionate laws of the physical universe and/or mother nature are your only obstacle.
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Bathtime was a traumatic experience both for our youngest and my wife and me soon after he arrived with his oldest sister. The first time, when they were simply paying us a visit for the weekend, he was too shy and uncertain of us to choose to resist with any measurable effort. Thereafter, once they moved in permanently, you would think it was pure primal torture for all involved. You wouldn’t expect a 2-year-old to be the cause of so much fear and uncertainty in a couple of seemingly mature and responsible adults, but it was as if we were coaxing him to step into a puddle of acid. Wiry and unmanageable as he could choose to be with his chunky toddler frame, we gave up and tried a wet, soapy rag outside of the bathtub, which proved just as Sisyphean of a task. We nearly resigned ourselves to the possibility that failure to properly bathe this child might do us in and disqualify us as adoptive parents, until we were offered the down-home advice from seasoned child-wranglers, “You just gotta do it.” So, we dug deep and, with time and tough-love, powered-through until getting our toddler clean was no longer an unpleasant chore for either party.
First successful bath
I could say that we eventually checked this challenge off of a list, but it didn’t feel quite so simple as that, not in the least. Here we were, two adults running headlong into the will of another, diminutive as he may be, and we initially couldn’t get it done. Enveloped protectively around this will were emotions, experiences, and fears, and suddenly a “simple” task felt like the delicate and dangerous art of brain surgery. We didn’t want to further damage this child, but it felt as if we were. The visceral resistance genuinely baffled us and was a job unworthy of placement on a casual, dispensable checklist.
Raising children, certainly adopted children, doesn’t transpire with an easy checklist. It didn’t take long at all for me to figure this out and feel a claustrophobic unease of realizing the job would stretch out in duration much further and was more complex than I anticipated. On the flip side, the brand of satisfaction one experiences where kids and “completion” of parenting jobs is involved is less a “check,” I find, than seamless movement past an obstacle. It’s more often just progress as you continue traveling past the next mile marker, and the next, etc.
And sometimes, maybe more frequently than we’d like, it’s also, “Didn’t we just pass this way?” or, “Are we going in circles?” More often than I’d like to admit, this is where I feel like we are with our child, whose challenges rolled through my head that morning in church as we sang of such battles that belong to God, whose confident perspective I wish I was more prone to seeing.
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As we left the morning doctor appointment, something I was able to mark off the day’s to-do list, our youngest fretted in the back seat, concerned that I would not return him to school in time for P.E., his favorite “class” of the day. Multiple times he questioned me, in spite of my assurances that we would arrive ahead of schedule. It gave me pause, prompting me to consider how often I feel hopeless in spite of received promises and reassurances offered by God regarding circumstances, in our case, seemingly endless frustrations with our child. I just want to be done and finished with it, to mark it off the list.
Instead, I hear, and have heard more than once, “My grace is sufficient for you . . .” Unwelcome words, I confess. But there you have it. Parenting, especially parenting with the additional challenges of adoption, is rarely a simple, emotionless daily task to be completed. It’s a slog sometimes, a battle, as the song mentions. The victory promised feels long in coming. Will it ever arrive?
I certainly hope it will. And that often may, in fact, be the sole “task” I need to place on the list, after all, each morning as the day begins again. In that respect, all that is left “to do” may be more simple and straightforward than I imagine, but nonetheless motivating. Maybe I can’t change my kid right now, but I can certainly try and, if all else fails, today pencil-in only “hope” at the top of the list.
“The happiest place on earth” is one of the most brilliant marketing slogans ever created.
It’s also a lie, as most advertising is.
Before the devoted Mouseketeers among you take offense, let me explain.
If you’re willing to ask any parent who’s bought the slogan hook, line, and sinker, they would likely regale you with tales of bitter unhappiness in their ranks upon visiting one of the prohibitively expensive houses Walt built. My wife and I took a brief trip to the east coast version prior to parenthood and were witness to no shortage of tantrums and meltdowns. The kids in their charge were also challenging. In fact, they were the sole source of their parents’ grief. One indelible image burned into my memory took place at the Tomorrowland Speedway, where children have the opportunity to sit in the driver’s seat and practically demonstrate to mom and dad just how thoroughly unprepared they are to handle the family sedan. While my wife and I each waited in our designated spots for a repurposed riding mower with a paint job (I have no idea why we thought we wanted to do this in the first place), I was prevented from entering the vehicle due to a toddler with a death-grip on the steering wheel, mother’s arms wrapped tightly around his legs, awkwardly pulling him forcefully in the opposite direction, full-horizontal. Mom, of course, ultimately won this battle of wills, and I can only guess at what awaited him as they exited. My wife and I then hopped happily into our respective rides, pondering smugly how we would never tolerate such behavior in our own kids, if or when they arrived.
It had escaped my memory as I puttered along the guided track that my siblings and I had provided our own parents a decent share of frustration years before as children after they had saved scrupulously to bring us to this very magic, only to be met with timid reluctance to enjoy ourselves. The five of us were bunched together outside of the entrance to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, my mother wondering what the hold-up was. The noise and speed of the coaster as it roared past paralyzed the three of us. My mother would later tell us she grew up a fearful child, and, by God, she wasn’t about to allow that to transpire with her own. We were boarding the literal crazy train whether we liked it or not. My younger sister’s tear ducts began gushing with anxiety as our fate was decided, and so, we marched into the snaking line as if dead men walking. We sat down, we coasted, and my sister continued wailing (it never stopped) as we exited. Once she was able to quell her sobs sufficiently to form intelligible words, she shared our joint sentiments through tears now transformed: “I want [sniff] to [sniff] ride it again!” Mom’s dogged determination paid off, though it wouldn’t be the last time a carefully-planned family vacation was met with momentary misery.
The further along I move in parenting, the more I come to believe that kids will never meet all of our expectations, not even when it comes to the “fun” we plan for them. Likewise, we can be a source of disappointment as parents if we aren’t paying attention. I don’t know when exactly it occurs, but we forget at some point along the way what it’s like to be a kid in a world constructed and managed by adults. I tend to believe the best parents keep this truth at the forefront of interactions with their children, and, consequently, that such kids stand the best chance of adapting well to adulthood.
I often forget this truth as a parent, however, as I’m sure some of you would echo for yourselves. The stress of a given moment can bring out the worst in all of us, and sometimes our kids may be the closest target, though they may clearly have a part in the resulting strain on our nerves. Vacations are an excellent opportunity to test such scenarios, and ours are no exception.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, my wife is a planner and organizer to the nth degree. She’s assembled massive, complex spreadsheets and itineraries both for work and home that would make your head spin. Another talent I regrettably don’t share is her ability to summon an inexhaustible supply of ideas to serve as the content of said spreadsheets and itineraries.
This year’s idea for our annual spring break family vacation had us abandoning what was swiftly becoming a Disney tradition after three years. A couple of the kiddos wanted a change, so my wife went to work researching and preparing, settling on an experience they would never enjoy at the balmy sea-level climate of Gulf Coast Texas. And so, packing an additional large suitcase to carry winter apparel, we left the sunny, crowded beaches of Galveston behind for the white but equally crowded slopes of Beech Mountain, North Carolina.
For those unaware, as we were, Beech Mountain rises to an elevation of 5,506 feet above sea-level. The average high in March sounds more like the average low for what passes in Houston as winter: 47 degrees. Access to the resort involves weaving deliberately in and out of a seemingly endless series of hairpin turns that will challenge otherwise eager travelers prone to carsickness. My wife, a characteristically nervous passenger, chose to maneuver the airport rental herself due, no doubt, to the fact that I’ve carelessly rear-ended one too many strangers in the last six-years, and nobody needs that complication miles from home in a vehicle that doesn’t belong to you.
As we made the twisting ascent, the sun hid itself behind the accumulating clouds as the temperature plummeted in the space of less than an hour from a moderately comfortable 50 degrees down to a bone-chilling single-digit. Green gave way to white as snow collected in the passing surroundings. By the time we reached the summit resort village of Beech Mountain and stepped out of the van with the intention of paying in advance for the following day’s access to the slopes, the gusty, frigid wind hit our faces like a hammer. Seconds was all it took for the muscles to feel the icy pain of cheeks frozen in place. The trip up and then down the snow-covered stairs to the resort booth for tickets proved fruitless as we learned we would have to make our purchases the following day. My wife’s spirits gradually fell with the temperature, as did our youngest’s as they gingerly made their way back on the slick steps to the van in the frozen air. “I wish we had gone to Disney!” he lamented.
Once back in the van, the plan had been to make our way to the Walmart in the nearby town of Boone for a curbside order of basic provisions and to grab a bite for dinner before returning to the mountain and settling in to the Airbnb. The roads and weather precluded the likelihood of making it out of town, or back, for that matter, so we altered the plan and attempted what should have been a brief drive to the house to wait it out and simply get off the roads and into shelter. My wife relinquished the wheel and allowed me behind it this time as we set out.
The short distance to the house lasted twice as long on the steep, slick neighborhood inclines and declines. We unwittingly passed it by due to the absence of posted numbers and had to shift in reverse, precariously backing up until facing the driveway. Ascending it without snow/ice-treaded tires was out of the question, so the van would remain at the base of the driveway, just out of the way of passing vehicles.
My wife’s visible but unjustified regret over planning what was shaping up to be a miserable family vacation was about to get worse. As she and the kids attempted to gain footing up the driveway followed by two flights of stairs to the front door, I began grabbing seven pieces of luggage, one at a time, up the same ascent. I stepped inside to a warmer climate, thankful for an escape from the bitter cold outside. After a few passing minutes, one of us, I don’t recall who, observed that the lights didn’t seem to be working. In fact, nothing requiring electricity seemed to be functioning.
No power. Wonderful.
The weather outside is frightful . . .
Now, here I must pause a moment to observe the state of attitudes among our party, which I have glossed-over until now. Needless to say, my sweet wife was on the verge of tears at this point. I was intensely stressed on her behalf but was doing my utmost to remain upbeat, but the strain of the effort was wearing my nerves thin. Our children were, for the most part, faring better, save one, who will remain nameless. This one, I regret to say, often has an irritating tendency to offer needless, sarcastic commentary during almost any circumstance, be it positive, negative, or otherwise neutral, merely, it would seem, for its own sake, or for the delight of simply being a drag. We’re really not sure after six years. In any event, there is a time when it’s tolerable, and there is a time when mom and dad’s patience can no longer bear it. This was one of those times.
After returning with another piece of luggage, I stepped across the threshold, but to my consternation, my feet found only a slippery surface on the wet linoleum. It took only a second as my legs flung clumsily into the open air, and like a circus clown, I fell flat on my behind with a “thud.” No laughter was heard from our brood. Cue, instead, yet another dry, sarcastic comment from said child about how amazing a vacation this was shaping up to be. As I regained my footing and rose to my height, my anger broke like a dam, having heard one too many such unhelpful comments over the last hour of the journey. Before I knew it, the brief but cutting words shot out of my mouth like a cannon, aimed squarely and unequivocally in our child’s direction.
And just like that, I had uttered bitter, divisive words to one of my children, words I’ve admonished the kids never themselves to say to anyone.
I’d like to say I immediately regretted it, but, we all know, this kind of anger doesn’t step aside easily, at least not immediately. I wanted to be angry. I nevertheless moved on to the next task, which was comforting my wife and then trying to solve the power problem. I stepped outside searching for a breaker/junction box but found no identifiable issue there. Unthinkingly neglecting to inform my wife of plan B and having left my phone in the house, I began walking up the street to neighboring residences, hoping to either acquire assistance or information. Again, the air was a brisk and breezy 9 degrees. Not until climbing to house number four did I encounter another “survivor,” who told me power was likely to return before the evening, in his experience. This didn’t fix the food problem, since we had no inclination to die driving off the edge of an icy mountain, but I did acquire his cell number to update me, or, I thought, to plead for rescue.
I made it back to the house, where I found my wife beside herself with worry. I had not, as I mentioned, shared with her where I was going, leaving only her imagination to toy with her as to why I had not returned from the base of the stairs or why I was not answering her literal calls into the woods surrounding. Wrapping my arms around her as she sobbed, afraid she had been left alone to face this debacle, I apologized, doing my best to reassure her. I don’t remember when, but not long after, the neighbor-stranger became a God-sent friend, and he graciously invited us via text to share the warmth of his fireplace along with a hot meal cooked with care on his gas stove, if we were so inclined. We gladly accepted, but did not make the climb until dad, anger subsided, chose to make amends.
Though my words were directed carelessly at one of our children, I realized I needed to apologize to each of them. I did so in turn, and it appeared to improve matters. We made our way to the home of our new friend in much better spirits. As he cooked and conversed with us, after no more than half an hour, the familiar electric hum of appliances was heard suddenly as light bulbs above burst back into bright existence. The day was saved, our bellies were full, and our temporary home, upon returning after a couple of hours, was now warm and inviting. We would all get a good-night’s sleep, only to have another adventure or two the following day. It would, at the end of it all, be a vacation to remember, with several more ups and downs we wouldn’t soon forget.
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Parents, we know, are expected to exercise patience with their kids, but some kids, I’ve observed, appear to hold fast to the conviction that it is their sworn, conscious duty to test the limits of their overseers. We have just such a child, and the effort to remain calm but firm often feels impossibly Herculean, even for someone like myself who, prior to kids, was known for longsuffering with difficult people, notably in the professional realm. Library patrons, however, are not one’s children, though they clearly may act like them, to which I can attest.
There are many days I wake up nervous and uncertain of whether the Doctor Jekyll or Mister Hyde version of our child will rise to meet the day, ready either to challenge the world at large or to cooperate with it. More often than I care to admit, it’s often the former, at least with us at home. My wife and I have searched and prayed for an answer as to why one would actively work to antagonize those closest to you rather than seek peace and pursue it, but we have yet to find a reason, other than the lingering scars of an unstable, painful past, of which we, regrettably, had no part.
They say you have to love the child you have, as they are, and not the child you hope to have. This can be tough when it feels there is so, so much in them that needs to change. With adoption, there is no guarantee that you will make an impression, especially if you were absent from a child’s most formative early years, as we were with ours. It’s hard to know how to approach parenting under the circumstances when it often appears that nothing is effective in the way that it should be. Some kids are that eager for a fight. I’ve consequently lost count of the number of times I have felt like giving up, like we’re simply biding our time until graduation, when the house may return to us and a consistent peace will reign once again.
But we don’t give up, though I often am compelled to. And we’re not called to. I’m reminded of the words of Paul to the Romans, as he closes his letter: “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” Implied in these words is a truth about the life of faith, if not life in general. Behind the hope, patience, and faithfulness encouraged is an understanding that life will not be easy, no matter what’s before you. How much more so for those of us doing something we believe He’s called us to, even though we might feel we’re doing it all wrong or that there seems little evidence on a daily basis that He’s behind it?
Among those three, I struggle most with “joy.” It’s a chosen attitude, and I tend to allow the appearance of circumstances to drag me down, unlike my wife, who, to me, can find within her the capability to be endlessly positive — unless, that is, a spring break trip she has planned for the family is rapidly transforming into an episode of “Survivor.” We continue to plan them, nonetheless, which, I suppose, is good evidence that we aren’t giving up and continue to provide the kids with memories. Regardless of attitudes, struggles, or misfortune, or the appearance of little personal change among one’s charges, we press on, and we do best when joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
“Life is difficult.” That’s how M. Scott Peck opens his esteemed work The Road Less Traveled, and I love it, though I struggle, as we all do, to accept it. Truer words have never been spoken. We all want relief, ease, and convenience. You could make an argument that it’s the American way. But, no matter how many “just a touch of a button” solutions technology fashions for us, we’ll still have children to raise, as difficult as they may be, we’ll still lose our cool with them on occasion, and we’ll still have forgiveness to seek. God help each of us to choose joy, whether in the middle of family business at home or a spring break trip gone awry.
My mother whispered the words, shaking me awake a few minutes earlier than usual on a school day, doing her utmost not to disturb my brother in the adjacent bed. I never knew her to disappoint in her eagerness to share surprises with me and my siblings, so I stumbled out of bed willingly. She was notorious during our upbringing for her inability to await anything in which her children might find pleasure, even going so far as to allow us to open a gift, or two, or three, prior to Christmas, and this without any of our relatively patient, young trio begging to do so.
She led me from the bedroom through the fading darkness, past the kitchen, out the back door, and into the garage.
“Look!” she uttered softly with a wide-eyed grin.
Following her extended finger, my eyes landed on a deep, ample pot roast pan, serving in its retirement as our black cocker spaniel’s water bowl. Sissy, the family canine, did not figure prominently in this scene, at least not in my memory, which is surprising considering what I saw next. The truth was, her instinctive rage against other living things who dared to cross her territory seemed to belie a desperate need to compensate for her poorly-chosen moniker. More about that later.
In any event, swimming vigorous laps around the inner perimeter of the pot, as if training solo for the rodent summer Olympics, was a large, common, mangy rat. Clearly, his tiny arms were ill-equipped to extricate himself out of the pot and over the edge of this unlikely critter-sized pool to effect an escape. How he found himself trapped in this watery prison in the first place was anyone’s guess.
I knew not what to make of this scene, certainly not at this early hour or at such an impressionable age. My mother, on the other hand, found it uniquely amusing. There is, however, a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, including mirth and extermination, as I would soon discover. As disappointingly as this random rat’s day had begun, it was about to get much, much worse.
After a moment or two, my mother — my sweet, gentle, loving mother — resourcefully reached for one of my father’s thick-soled flip-flops and leaned over the pan. With one narrow end of the rubber foot-piece, she pressed down firmly upon its body, held it under as it struggled desperately for air, and didn’t release until the water stilled. And so, I began my day witness to the torturous execution of one of God’s precious living creatures.
Have a good day at school.
My siblings and I would be party to this scene at least once more when another rat found its way later into our backyard. My mother, now well-versed in the dark art of drowning small mammals, decided to make a memory of the moment and, in the spirit of doing things together as a family, had us dutifully empty a trash can, grab a hose, and, with the assistance of my brother, corner the unlucky animal and drop him into the waiting container. As the waters rose, the descent of a broomstick upon his tapered snout would be his last and final vision.
15 years later, having begun my first year of grad school and living on my own for several years, I decided, at long last, it was time for a pet. Perhaps guiltily remembering the misfortune of the two rodents’ watery graves at my childhood home, I settled on not a dog, not a cat, but — you guessed it — a rat. And not just one, but two. Rex and Ed, whom I acquired domesticated from a local schoolteacher, were treated to a 4-foot tall, multilevel cage and occasional forays around the apartment (I had a “thing” then about pets and space). I am certain management would not have looked favorably upon this arrangement, but I wouldn’t have them long enough to learn. In less than a year, I found them more trouble than they were worth and sold them off to another. My time living solo would see me also adopt a dog, Fred, whom I had to relinquish after a brief span due to a move, as well as a string of betta fish that managed to expire prematurely each in remarkably different and tragic ways.
We Americans love our pets. This is most evident when you spend time with citizens of other corners of the world, where such devotion is hardly lavished upon animals of any size or variety. The same year I acquired Rex and Ed, I supervised a computer lab in a medical school library while working on my library science degree. Most of the part time staff were students from India, doctors in their own country but living in the U.S. earning a simple public health degree in order to allow them simultaneously to study for the MCAT and qualify for residency here. Discussions once turned to pets, and they all shared how astounded they were not only at the time and attention focused on pets but also in the existence of superstores capitalizing on their care and maintenance.
We had no such superstores in my youth, but we had more than our share of pets. Lest I leave the impression all creatures great and small trembled at the sound of my mother’s name, to the contrary, she was the reason we learned to love them and enjoyed the privilege of caring for almost all but the farm animal variety, which was my father’s experience, though more of necessity than pleasure. In any event, there are a notable few of our diminutive companions I remember with fondness.
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Snuggles the rabbit wore a salt-and-pepper gray pelt. I remember nothing of how we acquired him or how long he shared residence in our home, but he had free-reign of the backyard and was as domesticated, friendly, and trusting as any common family pet — that is, until my mother thought better and attempted to realize a version of Eden in which lion lies down with the lamb, so to speak. So, we got a dog. We “adopted” Sissy the cocker spaniel from a family in town and brought her home expecting . . . well, I’m not sure what. Amiable and happy as dogs come, Sissy warmed-up to us immediately. Snuggles, however, was not afforded such courtesy. A single glance, and Sissy flew blindly at Snuggles with murder instinctively on her mind. Alas, there would be no Edenic animal paradise here. Never before or since have I heard a rabbit scream in abject terror as he fled as fast as his legs would carry him. Fortunately for Snuggles, we found ourselves nimble enough to come between them before Sissy captured her prey.
I have no theories as to the relations between beasts prior to the Fall, but if they existed in relative harmony, such theology had never crossed our spaniel’s mind, nor was it likely to be pondered. Someone had to go, it was decided. One would think Snuggles’s seniority and status as the offended plaintiff would secure her a favorable verdict, but it was determined she would stand a better chance of survival in exile. So, in a cruel twist of fate, the defendant won the day. We carried him to the edge of an overgrown acreage of brush, set him down, and watched and waited as he cautiously wandered into the wild unknown. I long imagined that he found himself an untamed, feisty partner and raised a warren of bunnies. The more likely scenario pictures him, curiosity sated, hopping back to the recently vacated grassy entrance, wondering where we were and when lunch would be served.
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Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” was among my favorite comic strips growing up. A single-frame was all he required to convey his quirky perspective on the humor he found in the world. Among the most memorable for me was one in which a professor dons his latest invention designed to interpret what dogs are, in fact, communicating through their incessant barking. As he ambles patiently through a neighborhood much like mine or yours with clipboard in hand, dogs scattered about behind backyard fences or chasing cars yip and yap, as they are prone to do. The domed machine resting atop his head tuned meticulously to receive and return understandable thoughts from the various dogs in proximity, the professor anticlimactically hears nothing but a single, simple word escaping their muzzles: “Hey!”
Our canine friends throughout the world may speak the same primitive language purposed merely to gain another’s attention, but they uniquely understand our own and only our own, especially if we have trained them to do so. We found this to be true while living in Ukraine briefly in the early 90s. There, once our family was settled into our own place, my mother once again found a way to introduce a pet into our home. “Wookie,” she called her — a small, unattractive mutt with a wispy, stringy black and white coat that traveled in all directions of the compass. Her sweet, affectionate character made up for her lack of beauty, and we fell in love with her. Her favorite places were seated atop your lap or lying down with her head nestled contentedly on your shoulder with her body in the crook of your arm.
Though she was birthed in Eastern Europe, she soon departed her litter and was gifted to us, having little or no time to learn the local dialect. Living with us instructed her ears to comprehend basic English and English only. Once we did give her over to the care of other nationals the following year after returning to the U.S. for a two-month furlough, we learned later that her most common posture soon after resembled the confused, blank stare of a Western tourist anytime Ukrainians issued commands in her general direction. She hadn’t a clue what she was being told. When we returned after furlough, we visited the village at which we had left her to attend a service. Toward the hour’s end, an animal cautiously entered the auditorium nearest stage left. It was Wookie, investigating, no doubt, after hearing her first language spoken and sung. We were greeted with wild delight once she saw us, though she was to remain under the care of her second family.
Her penchant for demonstrative affection was matched only by her generosity as a gift-giver. I never before would have imagined that an animal could express such a human characteristic, but she did so on more than one occasion, though in her own misunderstood fashion. One otherwise typical morning comes to mind.
My brother and I slept on couches that doubled as beds in a space that quadrupled in function as bedroom, dining room, schoolroom, and living room. Soon after the sun rose, Wookie would routinely wander in, hop onto each of our beds, and excitedly soak our faces with puppy licks and awful breath — the latter potent enough to knock us out a bit longer. She would trot off back to the kitchen to rejoin my mother, satisfied with a job well-done.
Now, in places like eastern Ukraine at that time and earlier, one did not purchase groceries indoors at a store but often in an “open-air” market outdoors. You brought your own bags and loaded them up with produce. A cut of meat came not in a package but was placed in wrappings after indicating to the butcher the size of the cut, in much the same way one would extend one’s hands prevaricating about the size of the fish you caught over the weekend. Chicken was typically acquired whole, de-feathered and headless but organs intact. What you didn’t use could be discarded or fed to the dog.
You may see where I’m going with this.
Mom would sometimes get an early start on lunch or dinner in the morning, and Wookie was all too happy to serve as her audience in hopes of receiving scraps, which she often did. Having the kind and generous heart she possessed, there was no question as to whether or not to share. In this regard, she was notorious for regifting.
She arrived in the morning as was her custom, hopped onto our beds to say “good morning” in her own special way, and quietly departed. Stirring several minutes later, I sat up and observed something on the blanket that could only be described as small, round, purple, and, after a touch that inspired a reflexive, disgusted recoil of my hand . . . squishy. Baffled as to what this clearly organic substance might be and how it found its way to my bed, I soon received an answer from my brother’s end of the room.
Leaping out of his sheets as if struck by lightning, my brother yelped, startled, he said, by something cold and wet against his skin. Pulling aside the covers, there we discovered, likewise, formerly living matter, though quite dissimilar to the mysterious soft sphere atop my sheets. There beneath the covers, as if slumbering peacefully beside her partner, were the remnants of an entire, intact chicken carcass.
Mystery solved, Wookie revealed the answer to yet another we had no interest in solving. If size matters, our compassionate, foreign pet had a clear favorite, though it would seem she possessed a remarkable emotional intelligence. She concealed, after all, the larger of the two gifts, I can only assume in an effort to protect my feelings. In any case, all I got was a measly purple organ.
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Dad had little interest in pets. Cats, even less. So it was no surprise when my sister begged to take one in from a litter left at the stable where she took riding lessons that his first and unequivocal response was a curt “no.” That should have been the end of it, except that daughters often have their fathers wrapped around their little fingers, as we all know. That, and my mother is both persuasive and persistent. She quickly warmed to the idea of a feline — an animal we had not yet auditioned for the role of family pet — so dad never really had a chance, though he did have the final say.
“Smudge” arrived at our home in north country New York, squarely in the brief adolescent stage of his life. Solid white save the small, almost indiscernible “smudge” of gray/black hairs on his forehead, he was a beautiful cat with plenty of personality to spare.
I will admit I often treated him like a younger sibling one loves to harmlessly pester, just to get a reaction. I recall running him up and down the stairs endlessly chasing a ball made of aluminum foil simply for the pleasure of laughing at the sight of a cat panting like a dog. When I wasn’t wearing him out on the stairs for this purpose, the same ball was employed to launch him into the air like a rocket. Let me explain.
Smudge might be, say, in the kitchen, around the corner and out of sight. I would squat on the floor of the den, leaning forward with my elbows touching the floor, face forward and low to the ground, the ball held in my right hand and directly in front of my face. I would wait, still and quiet, for him to unsuspectingly enter the room. Once he did, as soon as his eyes met mine, he would quickly assume the same posture, eyes wide as saucers, eagerly waiting to pounce on his spherical prey. After a moment or two, I would throw the ball high into the air, and he would launch himself from the ground no less than five to six feet to intercept. We still have a photograph of this scene, and I swear it isn’t a doctored pic. If you didn’t know any better, you might be persuaded our cat hailed from Krypton, preferring to fly from room to room in the house.
I could tell many more stories of Smudge, such as the time he caught a mouse in the basement and, being an indoor denizen, didn’t know what to do with it except bring it upstairs and stare at it, terrified as it was to move a muscle; or when, at the suggestion of a veterinarian, my parents dosed him with Benadryl to make him a more compliant traveler as they prepared to move. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to get a cat drunk, well, use your imagination.
In the end, Smudge found himself with only my parents, long after all of us had left the house and moved on with our lives. Ironically, the one family member most resistant to form an attachment was the one he attached to most stubbornly, as if he loved a challenge. Each morning, for as long as Smudge remained the family pet, my father could barely maneuver from one place to another without tripping over him as he snaked affectionately around his legs.
The day eventually arrived — the unwelcome visit to the vet — and my parents carried him there. With no options left, the decision was made to help him pass. It remains the only pet for which my father shed tears.
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These days, our kids woefully regret that my wife and I have little or no interest in pets. She grew up with none, and I grew up with all of them, enough to know that, while I enjoy them, I no longer have interest in taking care of them. We have allowed a guinea pig that goes by the name of Charlie, maintained (with many reminders) by our middle. While it has persuaded me that it may be one of the easiest pets to manage, there remain minor annoyances. Its greatest talents, I’ve discovered, are depositing innumerable droppings wherever our daughter has placed her unwillingly, or, if she manages an escape, instinctively hiding in the closest, darkest corner of the house, most often in a location impossible from which to remove her without an hour’s worth of coaxing or heavy lifting, if it happens to be beneath a piece of furniture.
Chillin’ with the G-Pig
In any event, unless our kids bring home a stray (they’d make a zoo of the house if we would allow it), I’d say my days of pet care and maintenance are done. But I’m thankful for the stories I can tell and the experiences of caring for them. I think pets can help us, especially in our most tender years, learn the virtue of compassion, and, hopefully, apply the characteristic to all living things. “Pets are humanizing,” said James Cromwell. “They remind us we have an obligation and responsibility to preserve and nurture and care for all life.”
My unease rose steadily with each word read. The little old church ladies of my youth never once shared this information with us in any conservative Sunday School curriculum, or at least none that I could recall. This was a Christian university, was it not? Here I was, a freshman, barely a week or two immersed in the college experience, absorbing from the Old Testament survey textbook the erudite, and seemingly apostate, opinions of a Ph.D. from the rarefied world of Biblical scholarship. It was a new, foreign experience for me, and I uncomfortably felt my faith unmooring.
The space devoted to the argument, laced with meticulous logic, filled barely a page, as if to suggest it required little defense. The plagues of Egypt, he implied, could, in fact, be explained through the lens of naturalism when considering phenomena known to have existed in that region of the globe and at that period in history. With that, he sequenced one cataclysmic event after another, detailing the manner in which each created the natural, physical conditions for all those following that befell the unfortunate citizenry under Pharaoh’s rule. Not once were the terms “God” or “miracle” interspersed within the paragraphs, as I would have expected. It was, admittedly, convincing, and I was dumbstruck. I had run headlong into my first, genuine intellectual challenge to my faith, and I knew not how to respond.
It wouldn’t be the last time I encountered what felt like a rebuke of my beliefs, but I learned, over time, to appreciate such challenges. The value of being raised in a Christian home cannot be overstated, in my opinion, but there comes a time when we can no longer lean upon our parents’ faith. We each have to take a good, honest look at our foundation, which is often revealed, soon after we escape the nest to meet the world face-to-face, to consist not of our own experiences and personal convictions but of those who have lovingly expended the painstaking effort and time to influence us day after day.
As for the successive natural catastrophes that were the bane of the Egyptians’ existence, I began learning to trust a little more, though not exclusively, in the grey-matter God provided me and allowed him to help me begin reasoning my way from solely “either/or” kinds of thinking to “both/and.” Each type of philosophical framework has its place in the proper context, and in this case, I arrived at an acceptable paradox, of sorts. So, what if there were a natural cause and effect relationship between one plague and the next? Does this necessarily preclude God’s involvement or the interpretation provided therein, the author’s exclusion of him from his version notwithstanding? Do you believe God created the natural world and, as such, its natural laws? If so, how could he not be credited with involvement, and, hence, the meaning behind such events? As such, I found my way through, not around, this crisis of belief, able to accept the seeming paradox of both the natural and supernatural perspectives.
Merriam-Webster defines “paradox” as “something (such as a situation) that is made up of two opposite things and that seems impossible but is actually true or possible.” I have found myself recently returning to this word and concept, though I long ago left my cherished college years and the thoughtful debates there encouraged. A couple of eventful decades down the road, I find myself now in middle-age and neck-deep in the travails of parenting — adoptive parenting, to be more precise. And while it is in many ways no different from parenting biological children, there are ways in which it is not. Distinguishing the differences can be difficult if you have not had the experience of both.
Nevertheless, this word — paradox —came to mind of late. More about that later.
Adoptive parents tend to flinch at the question from well-meaning folks when asked, “Do you have any kids of your own?” The children we have taken in, we know, are our own kids, and they always will be. What they mean to say, we understand, is, “Do you have any biological children?” We will usually forgive the unintended offense and may offer a gentle correction. Regardless, I have grown to recognize that there exist differences between the two experiences of parenting, especially from those who have accepted the daunting task of attempting both. Without fail, they share that it is not the same, regardless of how young your children were when brought into their “forever home,” as it’s termed, or how similar their upbringing. The difficulties of either experience are hardly identical across the board. This is ever true for children adopted later than the newborn stage and who had their own, often troubling, history prior to inclusion into the family.
Our kids will always be our kids. There was a time, however, when they were not. Their experiences are something my wife and I will never be able to fully-comprehend; the best we can ever offer for those years we were absent from their lives is the sincerest empathy from hearts bent towards a God who spiritually adopted each of us, as we read, through the work of Christ. Those experiences will, nonetheless, always be a part of them, and remind us at certain times that, as much as they belong to us, there are pieces of them that we will never be able to share with them. As unfortunate as their past may be, it still may feel to them like an irretrievable loss. The adopted child, consequently, may often live with the paradox of wanting both you while at the same time longing for something they have left behind.
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I had, at this point, wished to share an extensive narrative of the known, documented details of their lives before they entered our home, specifically from the perspective of our oldest, but discretion counseled otherwise. This remains their personal history, and this outlet here is, for all intents and purposes, public. My own intent was to convey through this narrative the enormous challenge it is to begin parenting in a foster child’s later life, due in no small part to the many disruptions they tragically endure before they (hopefully) land with a home and with parents who will love them as they should have been from the start.
Maybe someday I will share it, when the kids feel more comfortable with it. There is much of their early history that we have only read about in redacted files and reports. What their lives were before is scarcely ever shared by them in acute detail. Innocent bits and pieces appear occasionally: reminders of pets from their past, a random trip in the car with birth mom and siblings, etc. The grittier memories, however, are almost never revealed. I have expressed to my wife that I hope one day, when they are able to perceive themselves from an adult point-of-view, that they will be able to discuss with us their early experiences, including adoption, openly and freely. Even though we have become a part of their lives, even though we were once children ourselves, we will never be able to fully appreciate or comprehend what they experienced during the same formative years. Although they found themselves ultimately placed with willing, loving parents, time lost will never allow them to know what it is like to be nurtured consistently from conception on and find soothing assurance in the safety of a single set of caregivers.
Instead, I would say, imagine every way in which you nurtured your child until the age of, say, 7 or 8. Your connection with them began, I would argue, from the moment of conception, not when they exited the womb. You spoke to them, and they learned, even then, to identify the gentle timbre of your voice. You were conscientious about your diet, careful not to ingest anything that could harm the development of your child. After birth, you held them frequently; your touch regulated their vitals and fostered their physical development. You were responsive to their fundamental needs of eating, sleeping, changing — simply connecting. They further identified with and were responsive to your face, your voice, your presence, as they grew. They were safe with you and in their home. The stress they dealt with was minimal.
They grew older and matured with you by their side. They learned to talk, to read, to tie their shoes, ride a bike. They developed relationships with grandma, grandpa, cousins, uncles and aunts. They learned to socialize, share, play with siblings. They started school, made friends, learned about the world. You completed homework together, encouraged their progress, celebrated their successes.
Through all of this, the one constant was you — their parents. You had been with them before they even had the capacity to remember. Your loving and calming presence alone settled them, helped them learn to manage their emotions. They develop trust. Home is less a place than persons, though they may perceive it as a place. You are there, and you always have been. This is enough.
Now, the adopted child’s experience.
First, remove the constant, loving caregiver, who would not enter your life until later, if at all. Prior to this, you may have remembered your parents, but instead there are others, maybe many others, during that span who have acted in that role. You are moved more frequently than you’d like. Some caregivers were kind, some were not. It became difficult to trust adults. You still learned to ride a bike, tie your shoes, etc. You still went to school. But the nurturing, consistent presence of a true parent through all of this was conspicuously absent. Home was neither a place nor a person, at least not for long, if at all. You bounced around from one place to the next, and the rules and expectations changed practically every time. If you had siblings — your only other hope of connection to home — they may or may not have remained with you wherever and with whomever you ended up. It’s as if you entered the world on your own a decade too early, unprepared and afraid. You’re in control of nothing.
If or when you finally did land in a “forever home,” as they referred to it, there may have been relief, maybe happiness, but it was difficult at times to believe it. You don’t know who these grown-ups are and never have known them, though they seem kind and loving. The social worker dropped you off, once again, except now there is the expectation to become a family. How you do that is anybody’s guess. The grown-ups that you’re now meant to call “mom” and “dad” seem just as unsure about their role, though they try not to show it. Though this feels different, better, in a way, it also feels just as unsettling as any other placement you’ve experienced so far. There are new rules, new relationships, new expectations. The stress of it, though this is supposed to be the best thing you could have hoped for, is too much sometimes. You may act out, not fully understanding why. You want love, and here it is offered, but you may also feel compelled to recoil from it. You’re in a good place, but this is hard. It’s a fresh start, but the pain of the past arrived along with you.
Now, to put this into perspective, imagine for a moment that this was the experience of your child. Knowing what you know about who they are, how your relationship has shaped them, how you have nurtured them — imagine how such an experience would have had an effect on them.
Take a moment.
In the HBO documentary “Foster,” social worker and foster parent Earcylene Beavers accurately expresses how such a change affects a child, regardless of the circumstances surrounding removal from their home: “Once a kid is taken from their parent, if they didn’t have an issue before, they got one now.”
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They arrived at our doorstep mid-April. Our oldest, 8 years, and one of her younger brothers, 2 years, entered our previously childless home as the social worker covered a few formalities and then made her exit. And that was it. There we were, just the four of us, nervously but expectantly eyeing one another, wondering what happens next, faced with the seemingly simple yet daunting task of becoming a family.
My wife decides we should make a meal together, and spaghetti is about as easy as it gets. While she and our oldest head to the store for the ingredients, I lie on the floor and push a toy school bus back and forth with our youngest. This would be our first bonding moment, and he appears, in spite of his subtle trepidation, to be happy for the interaction. I’m as much a nervous wreck as a parent bringing home a newborn from the hospital.
On their way to the store, my wife and our oldest make conversation. She risks the question and cuts straight to the chase:
“Can I call you ‘mom’?”
And just like that, we became parents. One of their sisters would join us several months later, unbeknownst to us at the time. If life hadn’t changed significantly enough for us with two, it would, most undoubtedly, with a third.
I have no idea what it is like to parent biological children, and it’s likely I never will. It’s just as well. My wife and I tend to believe that the manner in which we pursued a family was destined, perhaps a calling, though, for my part, I frequently sense I’m falling short of the mark as a father. Adoptive parenting is, first and foremost, we have learned, about establishing and nurturing a connection, something that is commonly taken for granted with one’s biological children.
The adoptive parent, by contrast, often must live with the disparity of children who both want your love at the same time they may feel and act upon the impulse to push you away. Their early history and your absence from it will never change. This reality and the way in which it manifests itself in the home can feel as if they are both with you and without you, no matter how much love you share. It is parenting with a kind of paradox, though in hope and prayerful expectation that there will come a day when there are no conflicting realities, that there is only you and the unbreakable connection with your children, forged through years of struggle and patient healing from their past.
Adoptive parenting is hard and heartbreaking. When we share our struggles with a fellow parent and hear the words, “I understand,” it can, admittedly, be difficult to believe, though spoken with the best of intentions. A recent post I read along these lines recommended instead the response, “How can I help?” Many of us would welcome such help, even if only a sincere prayer.
Of course, it is not all struggle. There are plenty of unique rewards and pleasures, as there are for parenting in general. One of our favorite pictures was taken on the very day I mentioned. Upon returning from the store, mom and our oldest got to work together on dinner. I took the opportunity to freeze the moment and have never regretted it. Written on her face is pure delight about where she is, what she is doing, and with whom.
She is, in the photo, at long last, home. These created, captured moments we cherish, where no paradox exists.
Thick enough to choke a horse by the time it was finally retired in 1993, it had been in print for a century until the internet began to emerge and supplant it. It contained within its innumerable full-color pages practically all of the wants or needs of any American consumer — aside from perishables, that is — and bore enough heft to register on a common bathroom scale. It was my childhood’s Amazon.com, and you didn’t need an electronic device to access its content. When neither stored away nor browsed, its “literal” physical depth allowed it to function as an effective booster seat for a toddler at the dinner table. That being said, my generation should be the last to retain any memory of handling the massive, unwieldy paperbound object known as the general Sears catalog.
Each fall, my siblings and I would haul this beast out of our grandparents’ hall closet in anticipation of Christmas and thumb eagerly through its exhaustive, static, two-dimensional display of wares to assemble our wish lists. For obvious reasons, the pages of the toy section near the back-half received the most copious attention from the three of us. The latest and greatest Star Wars or G.I. Joe playthings, for my part, made the top of my lists nearly every year during the unforgettable decade that was the 80s until I moved on to other, more mature interests. As my childhood faded from view, so did the Sears catalog from the marketplace.
Kids live for Christmas, regardless of the tools they employ to detail their desires as scrupulously as a corporate accountant. My siblings and I were no exception. Even when Santa was ultimately revealed as merely a jolly illusion, I found renewed meaning in my parents’ offer to assist in the secret Christmas morning facade of a visit from St. Nick for my younger sister’s and brother’s benefit. On these occasions, I was permitted to stay up later, given my help assembling gifts dubiously procured from Santa’s sleigh before placing them carefully next to the tree for discovery the following morning.
As a professional adult with a disposable income, I exchanged preferences and found greater delight in giving over receiving. For a spell, I had a knack for pinning down just the right item for certain family members or friends, often nothing that was pointedly requested, making the pleasure of the surprise all the more meaningful. Such gifts are unmatched in my opinion, for they have less to say about the thing itself and more about the poignant satisfaction of being understood by another so well that words stating wishes are wholly unnecessary — I know who you are, and here’s an object to prove it.
My wife did not long have an opportunity to make the acquaintance of this version of myself, however. I don’t know when the change occurred for me, but change it did. She is much more familiar with a husband who requires a detailed list of wants for her and for others each year the season returns and who, conversely, as she observed plainly early into our marriage, “doesn’t like things.” While I wouldn’t put it that way, it is true I have been known to struggle to compose a wish list. This past Christmas, for instance, I admit for the first time in memory I lacked the wherewithal to submit even a vacant sheet of paper with my name alone at the top. There simply wasn’t anything I wanted. Not to worry, though. My wife completed my homework in my stead. She can’t bear exclusion and would make certain the tree would shelter packages for me another year.
I’m not sure it’s possible for any of us to imagine Christmas without gifts; they seem one and the same, each inseparably linked to the other. I know this to be so for our own children, as I’ve observed the last five years with them. In spite of having begun the first few years of their lives in difficult places, mention of the season almost immediately inspires composition of their wish lists, which are hardly modest, as I might have expected, and are just as lengthy and comprehensive as any given kid’s. A glance back toward relatively recent history, however, as I’ve discovered, reveals portions of this tradition were grafted in, at least in America.
It bears no mention that gift giving is a longstanding, historical human practice across all cultures and timeframes. Its association with Christmas here in America, however, notably with children, has its own unique flavor. In a 2015 article in The Atlantic titled “Why Children Get Gifts on Christmas,” Paul Ringel attempts to answer the question, noting that “no broad historical precedent exists for the link” between the Christian faith and Christmas gifts, in spite of occasional references, as I grew up hearing, to the wise men’s offerings to Christ at his birth.
“The practice of buying Christmas gifts for children,” Ringel writes, “began during the first half of the 1800s, particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home- and child-centered holiday.” Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “The Night Before Christmas,” was one of several tools utilized at this time by wealthy movers and shakers to migrate the season into the home and out of the streets. This poem was also among the first to promote the idea of Santa visiting the homes of children to distribute gifts under cover of wintery darkness and dream-filled slumber.
I acknowledge I could slothfully allow Ringel to expand my word-count and permit him instead to fill this space, though properly attributed. I’ll leave it to you, however, to determine whether or not to allow him the time to explain fully the finer points; his piece is easy enough to locate. Suffice it to say that Santa’s busy Christmas Eve distribution and the fact of kids as focal recipients of gifts here in the U.S.A. is a tradition that had a beginning not necessarily linked to the “reason for the season,” if you will. It is simply a tradition, nothing more, nothing less — a national, not religious one, it would seem, with curiously few, if any, authentic roots in the Christian faith.
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“I don’t want us to exchange gifts this year.”
My mother voiced it as a request rather than a demand of my brother, sister, and me a few months prior to our plan to meet at my sister’s in San Antonio for Christmas.
“I want us all just to get together and enjoy each other’s time.”
Mom had never heard of Paul Ringel and was likely unfamiliar with his article in The Atlantic. Nonetheless, it would be a first for us. In our adulthood, the gifting portion of my family’s Christmases had always been modest by comparison, but this year, we agreed the kids would have received a wealth of presents from exchanges previous to our gathering post-Christmas Day. So, we went giftless.
In the spirit of glancing backward at “where it all began,” a look back at our own personal family history might suggest this day was destined to arrive. As I’ve mentioned before, nearly 30 years ago, our family left the shores of America for the newly-rebirthed, post-Soviet era land of Ukraine to engage in faith-based humanitarian efforts with the people of Lugansk. As with a newborn, the country found itself in many ways helpless and in need of assistance simply to survive, having recently dissolved its ties with the former U.S.S.R.
Our time there was as much about scarcity as anything. While we wanted for nothing, we lived in many ways like the people, and we learned to live as well without complaint. We stood patiently in the same lines for bread and milk, walked or rode uncomfortably in crammed public trams, and lived as a family of five in spaces smaller than many ample single-person dwellings here in the States. You learn contentment, largely due to the fact that the others around you live in much the same manner.
The following year, we were provided a ticket home to furlough for a couple of months. I remember it well since our stay was marked by both the beginning and ending of the fateful and tragic Branch Davidian standoff in Waco. While the round-the-clock coverage kept us riveted to the TV, we found time to reconnect with family and friends, share our experiences, and enjoy a few lost pleasures on home soil. One afternoon in particular still stands out to us all.
Prior to leaving the States, we would occasionally make the drive on a Saturday from our home in Texas City to the Baybrook Mall to shop and stroll. It felt like a trip to Houston proper to a kid like me, though it remains today, as then, on the southeastern outskirts of the big city. Arriving for the better part of the day, mom and dad, without fail, somehow managed each and every visit to select, by chance, the one entrance of a chosen department store designated to warmly welcome us as a family with embarrassingly sultry displays of lingerie and underwear. Making safe passage past the undergarment gauntlet, we ventured into the mall for the day. Requisite apparel purchases aside, my favorite memories revolve around B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks — neither of which exist any longer as shopping mall staples but nevertheless were all but assured that our parents would allow us to acquire from their modest shelves (by today’s standards) our latest literary interest, be it Garfield or Choose Your Own Adventure. Hours later, threads, books, and last-minute sweet treats in hand, we would pile into the van and head happily for home.
Fast forward to early spring, 1993, on furlough. Whether or not we entered through the same doors showcasing unmentionables, I couldn’t say. What we do recall is feeling unexpectedly and profoundly overwhelmed. Walking past one display window after another, we felt suddenly alienated, out of place, among the mass of fellow shoppers and surplus inventory. There were no lines in which to wait for essentials, no miles of walking in the cold, open air in hopes of purchasing fresh meat, bread, or milk. The meaning of “shopping” had been transformed for us. We felt neither better nor worse than those around us taking advantage of sale prices. We simply felt different, changed. Our values had imperceptibly shifted over the past year, and things no longer would mean what they once did.
Making a single revolution inside the mall, we spent no more than time, and this less than an hour. Pausing, we looked understandingly at one another, and left with nothing.
We would return to Ukraine not long after, feeling a little more at home there than the previous year, when we first arrived. Our stay would not last more than a couple months, however, due to a medical emergency, which is a story for another time. We all sensed, nonetheless, that something inside each of us had shifted due to the experience, many things, in fact, but notably our perception of needs and wants, what it was possible to live contentedly with or without. Re-immersing ourselves in the American way of life, we lost over time a little of the impression we felt that brief hour in the mall that day, but certainly not all of it. I have no doubt a residual shred of that impression prompted my mother to offer her request for our family’s Christmas gathering nearly 30 years later.
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We arrived in San Antonio dressed for summer in late December. The weather was uncharacteristically warm, but, then again, this is Texas. “If you don’t like the weather,” they say about a state bred for overexaggeration, “just wait a few minutes.” It should have felt odd carrying not a single wrapped package into my sister’s home, but, strangely, it didn’t. For a day-and-a-half, we ate together, played together, talked, shared, and reminisced. No gifts were opened or offered, and no one was the worse for it.
Like so many other siblings, adulthood has, regretfully, splintered my brother, sister, and I through physical distance and personal obligations for many years now. While I am by no means advocating for giftless family gatherings at Christmas, ours was exactly what we needed and wanted it to be, the “reason for the season” every bit as present with us as with other families of faith. We are rarely afforded the pleasure of each other’s company any longer and recognized that most precious and fleeting of gifts — time — is the best of anything we could offer one another. No need to spend money on an item destined to be forgotten on a dusty shelf or dark closet.
Prior to leaving, albeit reluctantly, my sister-in-law offered to capture a rare photo of the three of us together once more. The last time a camera caught us assembled was nearly two years previous, so we needed no persuading. Opening the photo forwarded to each of us, I glanced at it and realized — I had received this year many incredibly thoughtful gifts, all of which I appreciate. This simple, easy picture, however, I found myself valuing more than anything else I had received. It was, in essence, the final gift for an eventful year, our posture and posing signifying that at the end of it all, here we are, still standing, still smiling, and memorializing our connection, which is infinitely more important than circumstances or stuff.
While a picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, not all pictures are identical in worth. The heaviest of catalogs, filled merely with pictures of things, scarcely register on the scale against the ponderous value of a single photo reminding us who, not what, is most important. I hope that my own children will find reason to cherish a similar perspective 30 years from now, however technology allows them to preserve their moment. Only time, the most precious of commodities, will tell.
My jaw hit the floor. At best, I would have guessed a couple thousand, which would itself have been justifiable cause for celebration. But I had long forgotten about the copy of the will that had been sent to the library many months ago and had begun this particular day with no expectations whatsoever. A seemingly routine call would change everything.
“How much?!” My elevated tone must have implied insult on the other end of the call, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“Is that not enough?” the executor replied. After reassurances to the contrary, we shared a laugh and then commenced discussing the details of the late Mr. Lee’s bequest to the Clear Lake City-County Freeman Branch Library, which I had been managing for just over a year. I then would do my best to wait patiently for the check in the mail. In other professions, such as my wife’s chosen field of chemical engineering, cash like that is chump change, here and gone in the course of an afternoon. In a public library, it’s a windfall of serious capital. We had just won the lottery.
Nine years previously, I had trepidatiously begun my career as a public librarian at this branch, which was on the cusp of closing the doors to its third architectural iteration, circa 1970s, and reopening in a state-of-the-art facility almost four times larger directly across the parking lot. At the forefront of my mind was my uncertainty from the first day I was placed alone on the reference desk whether having earned the degree would prove time and money well-spent, or if I should have instead opted for choice number two — to be all I could be in the U.S. military. Had I selected the latter, which I nearly did, the following year would have further altered my fortunes in the service of my country after the tragic collapse of a pair of towers on home soil. It’s anyone’s guess where I might have found myself deployed and what fate would have awaited me in some remote corner of a world in conflict. As it would happen, I selected study over soldiering, and so I landed among books instead of a battlefield.
After a year as an entry-level librarian on the front line of public service at this branch in and around the Johnson Space Center community, I nearly threw in the towel and ventured to other less turbulent waters, so to speak, or so I thought. I knew not what to expect after taking a job working for the general populace, and I certainly didn’t expect to be treated so poorly and ungratefully by the everyday folks I was sincerely trying to help. More often than not, the interactions were admittedly positive, and I proved myself capable of pinning down the answers they sought. But it’s true that one bad apple can spoil the bunch, in this case the bunch being the collective patron interactions in a given day. A single, truly negative encounter is a pall over one’s work day if you allow it to be, as I did time and again. I’d had enough of this entitled crowd, and so I would roll the dice and see if I could find better patrons elsewhere.
I was still too green to understand that working directly with the public simply opens yourself to encounters with difficult people. It comes with the territory. Changing the scenery is no solution. They’ll find you. In almost 18 years in the profession, I’ve observed there are many long-time front-liners who remain nervous and perplexed about this reality and who continue searching in vain for a remedy that will never present itself outside of themselves.
In any event, I attempted an escape to another large municipal system and was offered a position. Upon arriving for a day of preliminaries and paperwork, I stepped unwittingly into a HR disaster. At least one of many new-hires was wise to the dysfunction and walked out within the first 15 minutes, expressing her disgust at having wasted a day of vacation for this. I, on the other hand, decided to stick it out. The situation did not improve. By the time the day was done, it was discovered that none of us were informed about documents we were required to bring with us, after repeated inquiries they still had not determined at which of the many branches each of us would be placed (an important detail when searching for a spot nearby to lay your head), and, oh, by the way (as we all were departing in the late afternoon on our long respective routes home), there is one more stop here in town we neglected to tell you about; you’ll have to use additional leave time from your present job in order to return and take care of it. As if this weren’t enough, I was provided one final disappointment — I was not being hired for the position for which I interviewed but a step and pay grade beneath it.
Now, I do believe in providence. The 8th chapter and 28th verse of Romans I often forget to apply duly to any and every circumstance. This was a rare moment when a prayer for direction earlier in the day when circumstances began to deteriorate returned an answer as clear as fine crystal. The inept crew at this particular HR department were hardly working for the good of those they called and, by all appearances, were under the impression they were paid instead to sabotage their employer by repelling new-hires. On the flip side, I left with the bittersweet certainty that I should stay put where I was, and I was fortunate to learn that I would be welcomed gratefully back to the branch in Clear Lake, two-week notice notwithstanding.
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How does one determine the will of God? Why, in that moment, did I interpret circumstances as an indication he wanted me to stay where I was? Why could it not, from an agnostic perspective, simply have been what it was on the face of it — an incompetent organization in desperate need of improved hiring practices?
I can’t imagine a scenario in which I could irrefutably prove to anyone that God was indeed guiding me that day. I am not a skilled apologist, I have learned, so I’ll make no attempt here. I do think, however, that if all of us were honest with ourselves, there is plenty that each of us accepts on faith, though the substance of that faith may differ. As for me, I have seen and experienced enough, especially while I was under my parents roof, that convinced me of a good God who is involved in the world, and it has informed and shaped my faith over the years. But I also don’t believe I had no choice in the matter; I wasn’t irresistibly compelled to believe, though it could be argued I would be foolish and stubborn not to. Choice, I find, is still left to us, though God may be sovereign. It is just a part of what it means, I think, to be created in his image.
Dostoyevsky may have said it best in his novel “The Brothers Karamazov,” suggesting that we may willfully apply our preconceptions when interpreting events, personal or not, particularly if one is a realist/unbeliever:
“The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also.”
I wouldn’t say I encountered miracles as much as intervention that day. Nevertheless, it is left to us to choose an interpretation based on the substance of our faith. I could have proceeded with the move, I suppose. The truth was, I was running from a difficult situation in an attempt to make my own life more comfortable, or so I thought. There is value in facing challenges, though many of us are conditioned to interpret them as a sign to seek an easier, more convenient way.
While I believe God was making use of circumstances to influence my decision, there was another hard truth I needed to understand — running from a challenge may involve nothing more than running towards another. Life isn’t always best lived seeking one simple, convenient, and pleasant path after another. If it’s not the frustration of dealing with contentious patrons, it will undoubtedly be something else. And sometimes, one difficult choice, one turn, if you will, is all that’s needed to make a world of difference in your life or mine.
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John Lee Hancock, like me, grew up in the blue-collar, chemical refinery town of Texas City. I would venture to guess that our similarities end there, but I have found it curious that there isn’t a movie director in present-day Hollywood whose films I am almost guaranteed to appreciate more consistently than his. In any event, his film “The Highwaymen,” released in 2019 on Netflix, tells the story of the manhunt for notorious killers Bonnie and Clyde from the perspective of the former Texas Rangers commissioned to track them down. Leading the pursuit is Frank Hamer, played convincingly by Kevin Costner, with Woody Harrelson in the role of his partner, Maney Gault.
Midway through the plot, Hamer pays a visit to Clyde’s father in Dallas. Perhaps seeing little to gain from either in the investigation, the pair use the encounter instead to wax philosophic on the nature of choice and fate. “One turn on the trail,” each utters familiarly, suggesting the notion of a course in one’s life set and determined irrevocably once a pivotal choice is made. While the elder Barrow’s imploring for his son takes issue with the idea that the choice reveals one’s inherent, inescapable nature, Hamer illustratively applies the phrase to himself, describing a single moment chosen in his youth that, he believed, dramatically altered and fated his life’s profession. The choice, the one turn, changed everything.
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My wife and I were once good friends without a hint of attraction between us. I still believe friendships can evolve into some of the best marriages, but that’s a topic for another time. Over a decade ago, I don’t remember precisely when, she was in the process of purchasing her first home, and I happened to be the friend available to whom she first decided to show it. We turned into the neighborhood, down the street, and then parked alongside the curb in front of the house. She excitedly shared the details with me for a few minutes seated there in her sedan.
Now, at that moment, I had no idea about what the years ahead held for me and how this casual afternoon stop was as much about what was in store for me as for her. Had my future self spontaneously appeared in the back seat to drop unwelcome spoilers, I wouldn’t have bought a thing he was selling; I wouldn’t have been prepared to hear any of it:
“Let me tell you what’s about to go down, Jim. First, this house. Take a good look, because a lot is going to happen right here for you. Your name will eventually be on the title. Yes, you heard that right. You don’t know it yet, but this is also your first home, which leads me to my second surprise. The girl seated next to you is the one you’ve been after for so long. She’ll figure it out before you do, but once you recognize it, you’ll have difficulty imagining anyone else better suited for you. Cue wedding bells. Third, you two will start a family right here. Maybe that’s not surprising, but here’s the kicker — you’re going to forgo the baby stage and acquire three older kiddos in one blow. Oh, also, they will bear absolutely no resemblance to you whatsoever. I’ll just leave it at that. Fourth, that great big library you unsuccessfully tried to escape several years ago? They’re going to put you in charge of it. Yes, you. Moreover, you and the staff will be afforded rare but rewarding opportunities to make significant impacts on the community, impacts that will be publicized even outside of the city and state. Much of it will begin with a phone call you aren’t expecting about the generosity of a man you’ll never meet.”
I never for a second would have believed any of that. But it did, in fact, happen. And it might not have had I ignored how I was being directed and had instead effected my flight a few years previous.
Time and hindsight reinforce anyone’s faith, I find. The downside is, of course, the waiting. I feel as if I daily face doubt about the goodness of God while dealing with one irritating, sometimes disheartening, challenge after another, especially in this stage of life raising kids in the home. Assurance can be long in coming while buried in the grind. But when I pause to look back on that day and see all of the remarkable things that have followed because, I believe, I obediently chose to stay, how could I not believe in a good God?
We’re taught in Scripture that not one of us is beyond the grace of God; not even a single choice can alter that. However, time isn’t returned to us, which makes each choice more valuable as the minutes slip away. It’s the earliest turn that stands the best chance of affecting the greater share of all those that follow. And that’s good news for those who believe in a good God.
Carving broad lines into the dirt, he circled the tractor at the edge of the field his father farmed as a hired hand, straightened it out, and started anew. Plowing one endless furrow after another, Joel stole a longing glance at the cars speeding past on the adjacent road, each headed anywhere but here. Family duty held him firmly in the driver’s seat of the tractor’s cabin, though he would gladly relinquish it for a ride in the backseat of even the slowest vehicle escaping this dry and dusty patch of land outside of Dalhart. While he would later appreciate the work ethic instilled in him by his father, who expected him and his brothers to do their part by participating in the family trade as long as they remained under his roof, he derived no pleasure in farming and anticipated after graduation a life outside of such a town that offered few, if any, other means of making a living, even to this day.
Granted, there was nothing to discredit the modest, deliberately-paced community of Dalhart, so named for its establishment between Dallam and Hartley counties in the Texas Panhandle. Then again, there was nothing much to its credit either, in Joel’s opinion. Living in a small agrarian town suited men like his father, who had spent his entire life there, was devoted to his trade, and knew as much about the world outside of it as he wanted to and nothing more. In a way, Dalhart was a refuge from the busy, chaotic world beyond beyond its borders. Even my grandfather’s television, a veritable window in one’s living room opened to the wider world, was, as I recall in his later years, rarely tuned to anything other than golf or the weather; there was little else that captured or required his attention, and this by choice. I once asked him if he had ever considered living anywhere else, myself having recently arrived for a visit from the sprawling, noisy metropolis of Houston. “What?!” he exclaimed. “You’d have to be crazy to want to leave this place!”
My father shared no such sentiment, a fact that did not evade the attention of his own father. It isn’t a stretch to say that the numerous years David Johnson had spent working the land as a matter of necessity had become stitched inseparably into his very identity. To have a son who did not find equal meaning in this respectable form of labor was to suffer a personal affront. He was not an emotionally demonstrative man, however, though his departure from his childhood home as a teenager was contentious, to say the least. He made a rebellious escape of his own from a father with whom he didn’t see eye to eye and never once looked back in regret. Exiting the dust-bowl era, he found a way to make life work for him in spite of an unfinished formal education, eloping with his teenage bride, Zola Faye McBrayer, and focusing his life’s labor on tending the land. Five kids were to follow, Joel the fourth in line, preceded by Peggy, Nancy, and Steve, and trailed by Don.
Zola Faye’s fourth was an unplanned pregnancy. To make matters worse, conception was discovered following a procedure his mother had undergone known obstetrically as a “D and C,” which involves clearing tissue from the uterine lining. No viable pregnancy is biologically equipped to withstand such a procedure under the best of circumstances. Upon learning of the mistake, the doctor counseled abortion, convinced the fetus either would not survive or would be born unhealthy or severely disabled. Zola Faye refused. Defying the odds, the baby would be born to term, alive and healthy. She would give him the prophetic Biblical name “Joel,” meaning declaratively “Yahweh (the Lord) is God.” The improbable birth would be documented in medical literature. I would first hear this story many years later in a sermon delivered by my father, who shared of his mother’s conviction that it presaged a life determined for a special purpose or moment.
Whatever that purpose might be, this story would lend Joel a profound sense of God having miraculously intervened in his life long before he possessed a formed mind to perceive it. The words of Psalm 139 might as well had been penned by him, who, incidentally, was given the middle name “David” by his mother and father.
“Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
Central to this sense of meaning and purpose was the church, and for the Johnson household, attendance was routine and expected for all in the family. His father, David, arrived early every Sunday to open the doors of the First Baptist Church of Dalhart, his deaconly duties extending only insofar as gatekeeper and collector, namely offertory contributions and attendance numbers in Sunday School classes. Aside from this, he characteristically could be relied upon to shutter his eyes during the service not in meditation or prayer but in slumber. Yes, the pastoral message was important; he diligently brought his family each week, after all. It seems, however, he was simply a man who was at his best and most alert when moving, and a sermon afforded little opportunity for that. Zola Faye, by contrast, kept conscious and active attention, teaching the young married’s class, singing in the choir, and occasionally serving as pianist and, for several years, church secretary. As for Joel and his brothers and sisters, they were present and accounted for given the doors were open — Girls in Action, Royal Ambassadors, childrens and youth choir, Sunday evening church training, vacation Bible school, etc. Religious or not, one’s best social opportunities in a small town at that time were often provided by an engaged church, and the Johnsons’ extracurricular activities would imply it was practically a second home for them.
Growing up, Joel’s interests inclined toward literature. His oldest sibling, Peggy, unwittingly practicing for her eventual career in education, taught him to read before he ever set foot in a classroom. Once children’s stories were covered, he moved on to the family encyclopedia, an educational staple of many mid-20th century American homes. Further along than most by the time first grade began, he and another student were permitted in their reading class to occupy a corner of the classroom and lose themselves in any available story that seized their interest. He acquired a library card at the earliest opportunity and pored over every book on the shelves detailing the history of World War II and the Civil War. The daring adventures penned by Alistair MacLean were his favorite. When these were exhausted or unavailable, Readers Digest bound and abridged novels that amply lined his mother’s shelves would do. To this day, my father’s preferred posture is seated comfortably in a recliner with an open book. Conscious of it or not, he was building habits and forming values that would extend to his own children years later. My own career choice of librarianship undoubtedly began its formation during those early reading lessons decades ago between my aunt and father. For those of us led to believe we are the masters of our own fate, I would argue that nurture and influence stretch much further back into our familial past than we might imagine.
At 15, a friend loaned him “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. “It’s a dangerous business,” Tolkien writes, “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.” Joel would spend hours discussing the volumes with his friend, enthralled not only at the exploits of the nine but, more importantly, moved by the spiritual themes undergirding the patient, expansive story, which, like many others he read, depicted places, real or imagined, dissimilar to the one he inhabited, fueling a desire to tread his own path into the unexplored world once given the opportunity. Something greater and deeper than the adventures he had read about continued to stir within, inspiring him soon to begin taking his first steps into a vocational life of faith.
Whether it was the stress of this call that weighed upon him or simple adolescent immaturity, Joel found himself during his senior year succumbing for a season, due to the influence of friends, to more than a passing interest in alcohol, a developing habit that he managed to conceal from his abstinent parents. Late in the academic year, he would pass evenings several times a week with friends overindulging. He didn’t relish the taste, but it did the job and did it well. Certain evenings passed out of memory entirely; the manner in which he made it home on these occasions were left a mystery.
There are few times in life that bear stronger potential to form both our best and worst habits than adolescence, and at his rate, alcoholism could thereafter have grasped and held him captive with relative ease if left unchecked. Had it succeeded, the story told here would read differently or, perhaps, not be read at all. To our great fortune, however, resourcefulness is one of God’s most enduring though often overlooked qualities. Every tool is at his disposal to shape our circumstances and character as he sees fit. He would recognize in due time what awaited him without an adjustment and would, thankfully, quit cold turkey. He would never touch another drop. The lessons learned would be put to good use, as they should for any seasoned minister. There is no shame in possessing a past, especially if it offers a personal education on the meaning of grace. And who better to comprehend and appreciate the lessons of one’s past in humility than those committed to professional ministry in the service of others, each with their own pasts? Christ saves us all from something.
Joel had spent abundant time pondering these and other spiritual matters for much of his brief life thus far, which led him eventually to consider whether it hinted at a call to a career focused wholly on God’s work. But to what, exactly? The works of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, do not always describe the “call” of God in precisely the way many of us understand it today. Then, the Levites fulfilled the “professional” function, but primarily due to bloodline; it was a “default calling,” if you will. Many of those “called” who we read about were tasked with a very specific job in mind that did not necessarily carry a socially- or culturally-defined title that limited their role and responsibilities: be fruitful, build an ark, father a nation, lead my people, conquer, save my people, be anointed as king, rebuild the city, etc. All were called of God, but to an ordained task, not a defined title. I have met those who pursued a call in seminary who did not belong there, and I have known instructors who shared that observation. While there is no clear fault in following a call in the best way we know with the information we have, it’s wise to consider that we may limit God to think he can work with us only within the confines of professional ministry, though it most certainly has its place.
As best as Joel could surmise, just as many others do, his call should be pursued as a leader and shepherd of a congregation much like the one of which he’d long been a part, so he duly set out to obey prayerfully in the best way he saw fit. Consulting with his church’s pastor as well as select deacons in the body, he was approved and officially licensed into ministry. The duration of his first sermon barely gave listeners time enough to warm their seats after only seven minutes in the pulpit, but the brevity was no discouragement to him. Joel would continue in that direction.
At long last, graduation arrived. He summarily struck out on the road leading from town, blazing past furrowed fields over which he’d once driven. From here, there would be no stolen glances toward the tractors carving the dirt hours on end, though perhaps the metaphorical but fitting words of Christ, to whom he had pledged himself, echoed in his mind as he fixed his gaze forward and forged ahead.
“No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
Just as the plow prepares the ground for the growth it will foster, Joel was unknowingly headed not yet into a life of career ministry but rather one of patient preparation for a task God had designed for him years later, a task which he would share with another. Her story began many miles southeast of the quiet farmlands spread across the Panhandle, nearer the noisy, steam-pluming refineries stretching along the lengthy coasts of the Gulf. Hers was a different hope for the future they would soon inhabit together.
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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
Time in a Bottle 