Oh Lord – he’s 10. He’s 10 with a broken brain. Can you mend a 10 year old broken brain? Of course you can. I know that. But will you? Would you?
Oh Lord he’s 10. Or 11. Maybe he was 10 when he did it and 11 now. But his brain got broken a long time ago.
This doesn’t just ‘happen’ Are you in the business of mending broken brains? Sometimes I don’t think so. But what if that’s because we only see the ones that didn’t get mended. – or haven’t yet.
What if you’ve mended more brains that we could ever know Because we haven’t seen the effects of the brokenness?
Oh Lord, he’s 10. Or 11. Does it even matter?
You Who dwells outside of our now – do you see the man he ‘is’ in a simple pivot of the line of time? Is he a monster? Is he fixable?
Oh Lord – a broken boy. Please God might you mend him?
Might you put your people around him to help him heal? Would you protect others in the now, and in the future, from the spread of this specific sadness?
Would you? Oh Lord he’s 10.
So many fearful others, so sure of the ‘should haves’. And would I be too in their position?
Oh Lord – the other broken boy. Heal, protect, love, tear down, build up, surround and restore. How long oh Lord. How long. He’s 8.
Oh Lord.
Written after one boy abused another at a local school.
I grew up in a generation that used “Der Fred” when something
seemed really dumb or obvious – but I don’t think it’s allowed to say “der
Fred” to Jesus.
When we first moved into our current house twenty-something years ago, we had these lovely neighbours to our right that became like an extra set of grandparents. Bob-Bob would walk their lovely lumbering dog Rufus past our house each afternoon…
Borders. We all have borders in our lives. Some are bad and need to be broken down. Some are good – God given even – and exactly as they need to be. For the season that they will be. It is *these of which I speak. The *God sent ones.
The left over garlic butter accidentally made its way into the Anzac biscuits we were sharing with our South African guests that day. They loved them anyway and wanted the recipe emailed – but that wasn’t the main reason I remember that picnic.
A bubble in my memory Sequestered in my mind Tonight was burst unbidden A jail break from time I didn’t know it held me So bound up in its grasp Until it burst unbidden This piece of jagged past And now a smile – old pain released A sadness buried long Finally not seventeen The broken record – gone!
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the longest day of our lives. Well, it actually began a few days before but extended for 22 more from this point on, while a little life hung in the balance and the rest of us held our breath.
I am not the centre of this story, but his life in many ways has been at the core of mine.
The time from when we knew he was on the way, till the time we said goodbye, has been like a BC – AD division of history in my life. There is Before Elijah and After Elijah. So significant it has been. And due to his coming and passing, so much in my heart and life changed. One night I wrote a list six pages long of areas of my heart and thoughts that had been impacted by this season. I only stopped writing because I was too tired to continue.
I think more about him in this month of February, but there isn’t a day that I don’t think of him at all.
That long long day was a succession of phone calls and drives to KEMH, tension, precious moments, the continuation of normal, exhaustion and tears.
And it was followed by a much much longer night. A night which is not mine to tell but in which I was deeply enmeshed and which was mostly invisible to almost all around. A night which lasted years…
Some of you are my Facebook friends because of contact made around this time six years ago… And others or you are still my friends because of the love and care expressed through that time. I feared judgement and we received grace. I expected rejection and we got loved. I still have all the emails in a folder… A great many of the stories shared were different situations but of people’s greatest pain and have lodged in my heart as the most significant kind of sharing – and like the little box of Elijah memories under our bed, I cannot open the email file – I know it is there and i treasure it all.
The story isn’t finished, I don’t know when it will be, or even if. But for me there has been a great healing by a Gentle Friend who has walked beside in every moment.
Before Elijah was born I had a sense of stepping off a precipice. This impression came to me as I was giving birth to Miss Taryn who was three months old when Elijah was born. The precipice impression was as gripping to me as the birth process happening at the time. Tarri was posterior, the doc had commented that it was as though my body had forgotten it had done this before (7 year gap) and the pain was more like a first than a seventh delivery. I was totally loony on the gas but felt Gods presence acutely. With this impression of the precipice came the correlation to birth… That I had no option but to trust in time passing, in the process and in those caring for me… and the God who sees, cares, comforts and walks beside. In going over the precipice I had no option but to trust in those same things.
So I did.
Some years later I had another impression. This time, of having been set gently down. I had indeed gone over that precipice, but like the eagle, He had swept in under me and set me so gently down that I didn’t even know when it had happened.
Just that He had.
And so we remember The presence and passing Of a little life Who mattered One through whom We grew and were changed One who Forever will be Part of the fabric Of our family
This is my wedding ring. It has lived on my hand for nearly 29 years.
I don’t know if you can see how bent out of shape it is – this happened on a day a little over 20 years ago when I did a heap of gardening… leaning heavily on a shovel, edging the lawn borders.
Today was such a conglomeration of sights and thoughts… one tangent I found myself on took place after I dropped my Dad and Mum at the hospital (Dad is having surgery) was on healing.
I went off thinking how awful it would be if our bodies NEVER healed. If we got sick and stayed sick and if we got cut or bruised and never repaired. We’d all truly look like zombies. A speckled zombie in my case since I had measles AND chicken pox as a kid.
Not in fact a morbid line of thought as I was thinking on the Psalm 103 where it is talking about the Lord “who heals all your diseases”. While it’s not quite the intent of the verse, it led me to be thoughtful and grateful for the fact that in so many cases our bodies are made to heal.
We recover from wounds, both cuts and bones knit back together and headaches go away. NO not in every case, and yes we age and the healing gets slower till we all don’t heal of SOMEthing… but at every moment of every day, every one of us are healing and repairing from a variety of things, all without our own effort or decision.
Amazing. Multiple miracles happening inside every person.
I’d had a miscarriage about 3 weeks before I stood at the edge of a gorge in Queensland marvelling at its beauty. Up to that stage, the miscarriage had been the hardest thing I’d ever known, and tears were never very far away. (This was 20 years ago almost exactly).
