My Love Cannot Save You

Last night I had a dream that you were missing.

For three days, we searched and I clawed at the side of an FBI agent who told me you were gone forever. I fell to my knees on the porch and screamed and I woke your Pa up with my cries.

“Babe?” He rubbed my arm as I whimpered my way back into the real world, out of the terror of night. Sleep evaded me then and I stared at the ceiling thinking of every mother who cannot find her child. Every mother who has lost a part of her heart and soul. I prayed for mothers who claw at the side of government agents who cannot find their children. I prayed for mothers whose children were taken during the night in Nigeria, for the mothers whose children never returned home from school, for the mothers at the border who were separated, never to see their son or daughter’s face again. Every mother who wakes from the terror of night to the gnawing ache of the day. 

--

We are on the cusp of the middle school years. This September, we launched our oldest into the waters teeming with social media, polarizing politics, confusing sexual ethics, peer pressure, a more demanding academic life, new friendships, all sorts of home lives converging in a public space where there is no normal, no baseline, no assumed morality. 

And she could not be more excited. 

The mothers who have gone before me give me mixed messages depending on their experience. I’m listening, of course. I want to hear how you handled those late-night conversations that erupted with emotion. How you responded when they decided you were too embarrassing to be seen with at school. (My answer: keeping singing loudly at drop off because she’ll survive that.) 

What you did with that one “friend’ who isn’t really a friend but your kid doesn’t seem to realize that yet. How you handled the questions that have no clear answer. How to prep your kid for all of those unseen things, temptations, moments that are racing toward you down the road and you just close your eyes, whisper desperate prayers, hoping against all hope that you’ve given them enough tools to respond with wisdom. 

—

I will screw this up. It’s inevitable. I’m human. I tell her this.

I’ll hold her tight and hug her until she’s squirming out of my arms. I rattle off the list of ways to live and how loved she is while we’re in the school drop-off line, fighting back my anxiety that what if this is the last time I talk to her?

The world feels so broken and unpredictable and no one can promise me that it isn’t.

I kiss her at bedtime and think of the 12-year-old kid who died in his sleep suddenly and no one knew why.

I love you I love you I love you

and my love cannot save you.

At the end of each day, I pull her into a long hug. I cup her face between my hands. “We love you, always, no matter what,” I say. She rolls her eyes.

“Mom, I know.”

“God loves you. He sees you. He knows more about you than you know about yourself.” She nods. We wrestle with doubts and fears, questions that won’t be wrapped up before a goodnight kiss. These years feel like a tightrope walk of faith, holding tightly to the promise that God knew her before I did. He crafted her edges, her weaker spots, her strengths, her need for Him.

I think of Mary the mother of Jesus as she watched him on the cross. How he suffered and died and she stood off to the side knowing full well her love could not save him.

But most assuredly, His love could save her.

“Parenting is the most frightening thing I’ve ever done,” I told my husband as we drifted off to sleep last night. Maybe that’s why my dreams were riddled with fear. Why I felt like I lost her despite all my attempts to do it right. Why I remembered that my love cannot save her, but His can.

—-

Today we listened to Weezer covers of 80’s hits. I pointed out the sunrise as we drove to school — lavender and lemon sky against the rusted and harvested earth. She squeaks out a low-key embarrassed “I love you too” in the parent drop-off line and I’ll take it because I don’t need her expressions to reciprocate mine. My Father taught me how to love this way.

I can’t give a downpayment on any of the promises but I know the Promise Holder. I can’t promise each sunrise but I know the one who holds the universe at its edges and shakes it new every day. I can’t prevent her pain or her tears, but I know the One who wraps his arms around her and catches every tear in a bottle, present and attentive to each one. My love cannot save her, but my love can teach her how to read a compass, how to lift her sails, how to find safe harbor and there on the open sea, my Love will meet her, catch her, hold her all the way home.

Broken When I Arrived, Broken When I Leave

I was broken as I came into this world. For nearly 56 seconds, I didn’t breathe. Any parent will tell you those first silent seconds are excruciating as you wait. My parents waited. For nearly an eternal minute.

Then my legs. There was the issue of my legs. The shorter one. The hip that didn’t form correctly. I came in silent and malformed. Deformed. Broken.

For months and years, I was in and out of operating rooms. My legs were pinned and stabilized, scarred and wrapped in plaster. I dragged myself around in an army crawl, affectionately earning the nickname “walrus” from an older sibling while my broken body healed in a cast that kept me immovable from the waist down.

Broken when I arrived. 

Scars are interesting things. They have the potential to scream in nerve pain or go completely numb. I can remember being a child, running my finger along all of my scars, tracing the ones on my knees, my hips, my thighs, my stomach, and realizing I felt nothing. A part of me that wasn’t a part of me. Broken. A part of me that told a story but a story from which I felt somewhat detached. 

My heart would go on to drag more raw wounds across my own memory. Searing marks of error. Scars that screamed with pain for years until the One with the balm drew near. Scars that went numb because sometimes healing means losing something that was once alive.

A few years ago, the news of the kidney disease that is slowly destroying my kidneys and liver came suddenly. Like a snap in my normal day to day living, the words fell disjointed into my lap. It’s taken years for what is happening inside of me, invisible and undercover, to start to show up in the way I move, live, and breathe. Except now I feel the discomfort and unease of a body that is broken. Now I have regular appointments on the calendar that remind me. Medication taken in a steady rhythm of routine, reminding me that there isn’t a cure. Just buying time. “Get blood work done” marked on my calendar with a star so I don’t forget that this is important, life or death, broken. 

Broken when I arrived. I’ll be broken when I leave. 

And lately when I feel the acute reminders that my body has betrayed its own flesh and blood, I think of Jesus. I think of the night he dined with the men who would betray him. The bread broken, the wine poured, the knowledge that betrayal and brokenness was the way of mankind and that was why he was here anyway. 

I think of this as I feel another pang of pain, another message from my doctor, another prescription in the mail.

His body, the incarnate Son, the unbroken passover lamb, who willingly laid down his life, allowed his flesh to be split, his blood to be spilled, who knew the feeling of when your body gives out. The man who gave his body for his body. He who knows what the betrayal of your own flesh feels like. The man who knew that we were irrevocably broken from the moment we screamed our first breath until the moment we raggedly breathe our last. Broken when we arrive, Broken when we leave. 

And so he came to make a way for us to be made whole in Him. So that when we leave these bodies of death, we will be whole. For once. For the first time. Completely, wholly unbroken. His hands which have the scars of redemption. The scars of atonement. The scars of undoing brokenness. Scarred so that someday the scars that I trace my fingers along will be erased, revived, restored. 

The promise was never that we’d be completely whole here. It was never a guarantee that this aging and cursed world was the pinnacle of being whole. The promise was that through the brokenness, through the raw edges of incurable bodies, scarred knees, wounded hearts, we’d see that he was making all things new.

Broken when I arrived. Broken when I leave.

And then, at last, whole.

Just Beneath the Surface

“Look underneath the leaves,” I tell my daughter this as we’re elbow deep in berry brambles. Thorns tear at our hands and forearms as we straddle the vines and a skunk hole just beneath our feet. We wouldn’t normally be here on this corner of the woods, but today I have a white bowl tucked under my arm and we’re hunting for black raspberries. This little cove of thorns and vines boasted a crown of berries catching the afternoon sun so here we are.

“I think I’ve got them all,” she says. Her fingertips are purple and a handful of berries piles into my bowl.

“Did you look underneath?” I ask again. “That’s where the best ones are hiding. Just underneath the surface.”

She lifts a leaf with her fingertips, trying to avoid the branches that are sure to draw blood. “Whoa,” she remarks. “Ok, yeah, there’s more.” There under the sharp edges and the now barren surface is a world of fruit. Shaded, healthier, less likely to be picked off by birds. A robust harvest of black raspberries spills into the bowl, piling it up to the surface. 

“I think we need another bowl,” she laughs.

---

I never intend for all of my interactions with the teeming nature just outside our back door to be moments of lessons. I can’t help but see Romans 1 in action everywhere I turn. While all of our culture seems to be living out Romans 1:21-23, I’m going to keep returning to Romans 1:19-20 —

“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

There is no error in creation. No analogy that isn’t there with intention. No picture of God that is there by coincidence or “Isn’t that interesting?” moments. It’s all intentional. And for those of us who see it, it becomes clear. God’s creation shouts of his character, his attributes, who he is. 

I see again it today as we fill a ceramic bowl with fresh wild raspberries and my daughter asks to learn how to find a berry patch. 

--

I’m thinking of every moment I’ve felt invisible. Every moment I’ve felt hidden while the ones who manage to make their way to the surface get picked and I feel stuck under a mammoth leaf. I think of every faithful pastor, mother, friend, worker, bible study leader, group leader, elderly woman, single dad, reserved child. I think of every time I’ve tried to get attention for the good in my life and it seems God is more interested at doing work at something below the surface where no one else can see.

I think about the fruit that grows healthy, sweeter, and vibrant just underneath the surface. The stuff that no one else can see. The stuff that seems non-existent until someone lifts the edge of a leaf and a world of fruitfulness is revealed. 

Fruitfulness in the homes that aren’t making it to influencer-level status on instagram. Fruitfulness in the marriages that are faithfully working it out every day. Fruitfulness in the mother who needs the grace of God to sustain her on another long summer day. Fruitfulness in the bible study leader who won’t ever make it to a main stage but who knows what it looks like to disciple someone. 

This is all I’m thinking of as our bowl fills.

Fruitfulness in the single parent who pours into their children at bedtime, with no one else to take note. Fruitfulness in the person who seems ordinary, not shiny, not that impressive. Maybe just someone you’d normally pass by assuming they don’t have much to offer.

Fruitfulness in all of the shaded corners, surrounded by skunk holes, fallen branches. There things root deep into the earth and find their growth.

Just underneath. Just hidden. Fully healthy. Content to grow without the fanfare of being seen. Content to grow to full health, protected, covered.

And it may seem obvious. It may seem like another analogy packed into nature, ready for anyone who wants to see it.

(Which it is. That’s the point.)

But today, if you feel hidden, invisible, unseen, trust that the One who makes you fruitful has not forgotten the place where He’s planted you to grow. Those massive leaves aren’t shadows. They’re protection. Grow healthy there. Be fruitful. Just underneath.