Ways you can help foster families

Do you have friends who are foster parents? Are you looking for easy ways to make a big difference in their lives as they shoulder the burden of caring for someone else's abused or neglected child?

The graphic on the right has a few suggestions. Here are a couple more, born of my personal experience as a foster father. Do these, and I guarantee your friends will never forget, no matter how many years pass.

 * Tell them you’re too busy to watch the kids so they can keep a doctor’s appointment. 

* Leave them to deal with case termination on their own after promising to stick with them the whole way through. 

* Drop out of their lives because you’re leaving the church they also attend. 

* When they’re grieving the loss of a child you can tell them to get over it. 

* Be sure to reprove them for a lack of faith. 

 And after all that, motherfucker, you can just go to hell. By that point it’s the most helpful thing left to do. 

The wounds we get from those we consider friends often still hurt years later. Some never heal.


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet

Forgiveness is a Struggle

I've been having a hard time with forgiveness lately. I'm sorry, did I say lately? It's been a problem for years. More than a decade, even.

Fourteen-and-a-half years ago, my wife and I opened our home to a foster child. At the age when our own daughter could climb stairs, feed herself, draw pictures with crayons or pencils, and communicate her thoughts with laughter, tears and words; Isaac could barely stand, much less walk. His vocabulary consisted of wordless but excited moaning, and he had no idea how to play. (He could sit still for TV, though. His parents taught him to do that extremely well.)

We didn't do this alone, though. I was from Pittsburgh and my wife was from Tuscon, Ariz., but we did have the support of our church, a community of believers we had been a part of since we came to the area. As one they stood before God and swore an oath to support us as we took this child into our hearts, and to support not just us, but also another couple who were offering their home his sister.

Isaac's problems were worse than we initially realized, but for those first few months things went gloriously. One of the women in our church was a licensed social worker, and at the beginning she and her husband handled arrangements for supervised visits. They gave us support in other ways too, as she gave us perspective, explained state regulations and even offered advice on how to engage a 2-year-old who was used to being ignored.

Isaac's mother had started coming to our church several weeks before the state removed the children from her custody, and Carla had difficulty understanding boundaries; so other friends ran interference for us. And everyone expressed great enthusiasm for what we were doing. If shouldering the burden of caring for someone else's abused child is Paradise, then that winter was Eden.

The serpent had arrived in Eden by springtime. The pastor our church had hired a year previously was showing his colors, as he used his pulpit to manipulate, to bully and to control. As quickly as he had drawn new congregants in his first several months, he was now driving people away, and as they went, our support network unraveled.

The social worker and her husband disappeared from the scene first. Then other people began to realize that they were overextended, and they began to pull back as well. We couldn't. There was a child depending on us.

My wife bore the worst of it. In addition to the extra attention Isaac needed, we had to care for our own daughter and there was a second child on the way. Harder still, I had started a job that spring that demanded more than 50 hours a week, including almost all day Monday and Tuesday. I could get relief by going off and working in the garden, but for my wife, Eden became a cage with iron bars.

She tried to get help. She called people from the church and asked them to watch our daughter for an hour or two just so she could attend a medical appointment. They told her no.

Time went on, and soon it became evident that Isaac was returning to his birth parents. We watched as the progress he had made in our home was torn up by the roots and thrown out. If our church was grieving with us, we couldn't tell. By midsummer, the church had all but fallen apart, and the people who had sworn to be with us were nowhere to be seen.

Isaac had come into our lives with a great deal of fanfare, but when it came time for him to depart we were almost completely alone. When I came home from work at two in the morning and found my daughter sitting at the stop of the stairs crying because her brother wasn't around, I was there to comfort her.

When the quiet and the grief overwhelmed with a depth too profound for words, the community I had believed would be with me, was gone.

So I say this to my old church: You screwed up, big time.

These people had sworn before God that they would be there for us throughout the entire time we fostered. They sang our praises, and told us how our faith inspired theirs. When we lost Isaac, they were nowhere to be found. We didn't even get a lousy sympathy card. One person when I saw her barely a month later actually told me to get over it.

Those last two really hurt. Fifteen years later, and forgiveness is still a struggle.


Copyright 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


1 | 2 | 3



Tweet

Adoptive children and reactive attachment disorder

The Daily Mail has an article about a British family who adopted a beautiful 5-year-old only to discover, too late, that the girl was suffering from reactive attachment disorder.

RAD is a condition where children are unable to form close emotional bonds with anyone. They become experts at emotional manipulation, manufacturing outrage, warmth, and whatever other emotional behavior they need to get the desired response from people around them. It's a pretty difficult thing to cope with, especially when you don't get the support you need as the parents of the child -- which it looks like this family didn't get.

Honestly, that's where the trouble was. She should have been warned going in what to expect, given the support she needed right from the start, and when she encountered difficulties, there should have been a support team in place to give her the assistance she needed.

It's good to know that Child Protective Services has caseworkers on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure a uniform standard of care for both parents and children.

Kids with RAD are difficult to reach, but it can be done, if they're reached in time. (Usually by the time they're 10.) There was an article in this past month's Reader's Digest about a Jewish family who adopted a boy from Eastern Europe with similar problems to those described here. The solution that they found worked was for the mother to spend a few months literally and continually no more than three feet away from her son, to forge the bond that he never had experienced before.

My nephew Ethan was a poster child for RAD. My brother and sister-in-law adopted him when he was 8 years old, not realizing at first what sort of problems he had. (He had spent his first eight years in foster care, in at least four different families, one of which had planned to adopt him until they had their own, biological child.)

Ethan did a lot of the stuff described in this article: acting incredibly clumsy for attention, but ultimately getting to the point that he would destroy walls, hardwood floors, windows and anything else he could to get a reaction; never expressing any warmth or positive emotion to his mother particularly; playing with matches in his bedroom; and finally really going nuts when his parents despite all odds ended up becoming pregnant.

I have no idea how they did it, but my brother and sister-in-law actually got through to him. He's got problems still, but their willingness to ignore his destructive rampages while he was on them (and then to make him help repair the damage), their steady and unending love, and probably even the birth of Hannah, really did change him.

His dad and I no longer darkly joke "I'll see you at Ethan's trial," because at long last Ethan does have a conscience. He lacks a lot of motivation, but he's good with his hands, and he's discovered a real love of reading that probably will be his salvation.

The proximity of this news story with the feature in Reader's Digest, timewise if not geographywise, does ring a bell in the back of my head. I suspect some organization is trying to raise the general awareness of RAD in an effort to boost funding for research or to shame state agencies into providing more support for adoptive families in this situation, instead of hanging them out to dry or to punish them.

crying over the chapel

I’m not getting much out of church lately. I find myself dreading the thought of going there from one week to the next.

It’s odd, and it’s puzzling to feel this way, especially given how much there is to like about this church and how I’ve felt at home here in the past, but the last month or more, I’ve felt virtually no interest in it and had virtually no desire to attend.

Partly it’s the worship, I suppose. The worship team is more than passionate for leading worship ― they also are skilled musicians ― but the worship does absolutely nothing for me.

Around me I see people who feel as though they have been transported into the presence of God; for myself, I feel like an idiot, standing around with my hands in my pockets. There was a time when all I could do was to go through the motions of worship, and since that was all I had to offer, that was what I gave. Nowadays I don’t have even that much to offer.

The worship is loud, and I don’t mean it’s because everyone in the church is singing enthusiastically. I feel much like I expect I would if I were watching The Who: The music pounds its electric rhythms from the speakers, assaulting my body in one relentless wave after another, darkening my mood, bruising my head, and driving me out and away from the church, instead of closer to God.

Some people find that exciting, and equate that excitement with an up-close encounter with God. I don’t. Having realized that even secular music with that same pounding beat produces the same effect, I can’t convince myself that God is in the music. Perhaps he uses the music to draw some people to him, but he does not draw me in that way. I can’t even stand to be in the auditorium most times the worship team is playing; it’s that loud.

“I thought once that God was in the music, but when I looked, I found the same void that I had known all my life, and the notes that came from it were sweet but empty, and so I walked on.”

The preaching is good. Each of the pastors usually brings some good insight about the culture the Bible was written in, one that makes the Bible make more sense, and one that brings relevance from the text to our lives.

Part of it may be the growth. Beloved Wife and I have been at this church for about two years, and have seen some tremendous growth take place. As the church has grown, we’ve seen the relationships we have with other members of the church change in some substantial ways.

I don’t mean that we’ve become closer to other couples and other families. Quite the opposite. I used to talk with Caoimhín and with Tom on a regular basis, almost weekly. I used to be involved in planning the Sunday services, and knew many of the people in the church at least on a first-name basis.

That’s no longer the case. The church divided last fall, spinning off a Norde Bastille congregation, and merging the Nova Bastille congregation with the college congregation. In that time, the Nova Bastille membership has shriveled to myself and possibly one or two other people, leaving me at the Nova Bastille church with a dozen or more people I barely know and have virtually nothing in common with.

The Norde Bastille congregation meantime has swelled from a handful of people to about a hundred, through a few well-timed and well-considered promotional efforts. In the process, with all the sudden new arrivals, the relationships I’d had with other people suddenly are diluted and pulled apart as my friends and associates, who are better at striking up relationships with people, suddenly are spending their time with the new arrivals, making them feel welcome and so on.

There’s also the issue of who has been drawn. At first I thought it was nice to see the people we used to worship with at Community Gospel Church, and maybe for a time it was. Not so much now. Now I have to admit that I find myself resenting things that happened at the end of CGC and the way people failed us so dramatically.

It’s not easy for me to trust people completely. I maintain a healthy sheath of skepticism and cynicism to keep people from cutting me too deeply when they fail to deliver what they promised they would. I learned early on that people like to think the best of themselves, rationalize their failings, and dance their way out of promises and commitments. I thought CGC was different, I really did. I thought, “This is a church of people who know what it is like to be burned by the world and by other believers,” and as we were involved in CGC under Mark McGrath and then later, as Crosspointe Community Church under Abner Bosheth, I felt comfortable with the other people there. We went on double dates with them, invited them to our wedding, to our housewarming, and other special events in our family.

The collapse of the church under Abner put the lie to that illusion. People who had been a major part of our lives stopped being a part. They didn’t return our phone calls, they didn’t come by any more, and as time went on, we realized we were left alone.

The worst part of this was what happened around Isaac. When we opened up our home to him, we were given assurances that we were not doing this on our own. The entire church, we were told, was with us in the entire experience, and would pitch in to help us when we needed it.

In the end, we were alone.

Alone. Can you understand how that felt? We had a child who had moved into our homes with extreme special needs because of the abuse he had endured. The state did almost nothing to give us the support we could have used; we had to find out about that through other sources and pursue it on our own, and some of it we never even heard about until after he had gone.

Our church had promised to be with us, but when push came to shove, no one was there. We tried to get babysitters from time to time, so Natasha and I could get out of the house and spend some time together, but no one would babysit for us.

There were times we wanted just to get together with other families in the church, because the group setting relieved the pressure on us, and in the case of the family with Isaac's biological sister, it encouraged a relationship between the two, and the answer almost all the time was no. Toward the end, because she was pregnant with Rachel, Natasha called family after family, one person after another, and begged people to babysit the kids ― just to babysit Evangeline, while Isaac was with his parents ― so she could get a gynecological exam, and family after family, person after person, they all said no.

Everyone praised us for our willingness to give a home to a child who needed us, but in the end, they were more interested in praising us than in helping us out or making it easier for us to save our marriage.

And now some of these are the same people who are coming to church with us and worshiping at our side. They act toward me as though nothing has changed, and all the while I see an unbridgeable gulf separating us. I wonder if they realize the distance their distance has created, and I wonder if they care.

Maybe I’m feeling sorry for myself, and that’s the problem. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I doubt it would be the last. I think it’s a common failing of humanity that we are all pulled toward narcissism by a personal gravity that we have no wish to fight.

Maybe I’m just unwilling to forgive; maybe my heart is hard and I’m harboring resentment over the indifferent wrongs people have committed against my family without ever knowing it. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve dealt with unforgiveness either.

But I know I’m weary. I want something different, and I want something better from this. I’m tired of going to church, and I’d much rather sleep in.

the old woman in the shoe

A woman is in jail and her nearly 20 children are in state custody in what Nurseryland officials are calling one of the most horrific and systematic cases of child abuse in record.

Authorities entered the home of Geraldine Hubbard, 38, known throughout Nurseryland as The Shoe because of its distinctive architecture following a report by neighbor Peter P. Pumpkineater that Hubbard was subjecting the children to a regimen of starvation and physical abuse.

Inside The Shoe, authorities discovered that the cupboard was bare.

"There wasn't even a bone for Hubbard's old dog," said Anthony Williams, a spokesman for Child Protective Services — and found signs that the children, desperate for sustenance, had chewed on the drywall, eaten the potted plants in the house, and in the case of the youngest child, even taken bites from the pots themselves.

Officials have said only that they removed 18 children from The Shoe this morning. They declined to release the names and ages of the children, except to say that they are all minors.

"From the information we have been able to gather, last night Hubbard gave them some broth and gave them some bread," said Williams. "This is the only meal we have been able to verify that she gave the children in the past three days."

Hubbard's children are undergoing thorough medical exams. In addition to the long-term risks to development caused by malnutrition, authorities also are investigating allegations of physical abuse, including that Hubbard spanked her children as part of a bedtime routine.

Jack Horner, an attorney for Hubbard, claims that Hubbard is the victim of a bureaucratic failure on the part of the Nurseryland government, and predicted that she ultimately would be exonerated of all charges.

"It's like the time CPS accused the king of harboring dangerous animals because a blackbird pecked off the nose of his laundrywoman," Horner said. "They're coming in, trying to grab headlines and painting my client as outrageously negligent and even cruel. The record will show that Geraldine had the best interests of her children at heart the whole time."

During the last six months, Hubbard petitioned Nurseryland officials several times for financial assistance in managing that her household, but never received any help at all. Records at the Department of Human Services verify that Hubbard did request help, with the notation that her case was "pending consideration."

"She had 18 children, including two sets of twins, with five children under 6 years old," said Horner. "The record will show in the end that she is not an evil woman; she just had so many children she didn't know what to do."



Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet

His birthday was yesterday

My only question is, when will it stop hurting?

My absent child: news, updates and gained perspective

Got an update on Isaac and his situation Monday night, courtesy of our friends who adopted his younger sister.

Although he legally remains in the custody of his father — his mother having moved to Florida with a boyfriend and having brought at least one other child into the world — Isaac has been living with his paternal grandmother, his aunt and her two children for the past two years. His father, I am told, does not live there and has virtually nothing to do with him.

Isaac also officially has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder, and was removed from his kindergarten last year because of his behavior problems. He is now attending a special school in Old Bridge, where he can get specialized care for learning and behavioral difficulties.

From what I'm told, he talks fairly well — when he came to stay with us, he was at least a year behind developmentally — and is more or less happy.

So that's good, I suppose.

The ADHD diagnosis doesn't come as a surprise to me. Whether because he lacked any sort of active parenting or mental stimulation his first two years, Isaac was prone to wandering from one activity to another if someone wasn't there to anchor him to it. It was especially bad in rooms where there were lots of toys on the floor, as is often the case when young children have lots of toys to choose from.

I thought he was making progress while he was with us — though I confess I don't have the professional credentials to say that authoritatively — but there was no denying the thing he sat for the most willingly and eagerly was the TV set.

Still, I remember the discipline and focus that we did see as time went on, and I can't help but wonder if he would have made more progress if he hadn't returned to his parents so soon. The visits became especially disruptive to his behavior, particularly toward the end. Still, what's done is done and the water passed under that bridge years ago and long since has wandered out to sea.

I have to admit that I feel a little empty when I consider the situation our friends have with Isaac's sister. They got to adopt her. Every morning they get to wake her up and spend the day with her, and every night they get to put her to bed. She has a little sister and a baby brother who are growing up with her as a natural part of their family.

Meanwhile, I have pictures hanging on the wall and lying in shoeboxes, I have a heartache that remains as raw today as it was three years and seven months ago, and I have a 6½-year-old who misses him just as much as I do.

Part of me keeps whispering "It could have worked out differently," and damn it, that voice is nearly right. It almost could have worked out so that we'd be in the same situation with Isaac as our friends are with his sister.

The courts returned Isaac to his parents in October 2002. Within three months, his mother had left him and moved in with her new boyfriend. After a lot of deliberation and talking with Natasha, I called Isaac's father in January 2003 and said that if he needed any help with things, we'd be available.

And we did help out. I don't remember many weekends we did it, but we watched Isaac for his father, in our own homes, because of his father's work schedule. We didn't ask him to pay us for the food Isaac ate, we didn't ask him to pay for the diapers he used, and we didn't ask him to pay us for our trouble. We had two children of own at that point, and we could have used the money, but we never even asked him to pay Isaac's way when we went some place during the weekend.

At one point Isaac's dad was going to tell his daycare center that we were authorized to pick him up and drop him off. If we had kept taking him on weekends, in time we probably would have reached the same point that our friends did, with Isaac living virtually all the time with us, calling us mommy and daddy, being in our legal custody, and finally being our legally adopted son.

I'd be whole right now instead of crying fresh tears while I write this.

So what happened?

It's like this. We were trying to help Isaac's dad in a tough situation, and ended up enabling him. The last weekend Isaac stayed with us, it was going to be for Friday night only. His father had adjusted his work schedule so he could pick Isaac up Saturday afternoon and spend the rest of the weekend with him. At the last minute, he decided he'd rather have Isaac stay with us until Sunday afternoon so he could celebrate his birthday with friends. It looked to us like Isaac's father was trying to pass his responsibilities as a father off onto us, and we couldn't be party to that.

It's like this. We wanted to help Isaac, but we had different expectations for his behavior from what his father had. We expected him to stay at the table during meals, to sleep when it was bedtime, to listen to directions and to do things for himself when he could. Whatever he was expected to do at home didn't match what we expected, and it was making him frustrated and us.

It's like this. I already had had my heart ripped out of me that October morning when he left, and so did Evangeline. At first it seemed like the weekend visits were a godsend; instead, they were becoming increasingly stressful, difficult and painful for us as we said goodbye each time, and as the challenges of his behavior were compounded with the needs of Rachel, who was only a few months old.

And it's like this. As bad as it was for me, it was far worse for my wife. God gave me a tremendous measure of grace for dealing with Isaac and his problems, but for whatever reason, it was too stressful for her to deal with, especially added to the stress of dealing with difficult child welfare workers, Isaac's parents, and the pain of seeing what all this was doing to me and to Evangeline. The last few months that Isaac was with us were an iron cage around her spirit. She was trapped in the dark and the cold, and felt utterly alone.

What kind of a husband would I be if I asked her to put herself through that again, with no idea of when or if it would end? She already had done more than anyone had the right to ask or expect of her. So our relationship with Isaac's father ended quietly and unceremoniously, and for the past three years I've had to comfort myself and Evangeline with tears, memories and the hope of a happy reunion some day, years from now.

I don't know what I should say at this point. I could say that life is unfair, and it is. If life were just, either Isaac would be with us and we would be happy; or better yet, his parents would have been the parents he needed from the start so that he never would have needed to live with us in the first place.

I suppose I should say that God is good, because he is. The pain I have had these past few years is real and it runs deep. Nothing else has ever cut me as deeply. Through it all I see the hand of a Father whose tears are deeper and more bitter than mine, and I see the wounds of a Lord who knows this grief and has borne it more fully than I could ever bear, not just for my sake but for Isaac's as well.

But let me also say this: In our hearts, Isaac is my son, and he is Evangeline's brother. There was never a chance that he would live with us, but we will never forget him. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

'Jacob have I loved'

Back in college, I noticed that God's judgments in the Bible always came mixed with mercy of equal measure. I wonder sometimes if the reverse isn't also true.

About four years ago, my wife, older daughter and I opened our home to a 2-year-old foster child whose parents had neglected him in some pretty substantial ways. During the nine months he was with us, Isaac made a lot of progress and became apart of our family. The day he left, my heart was torn from my chest. I've never stopped thinking of him, and in my heart he will always be my son.

I would have adopted him in a heartbeat, but for reasons that continue to escape me, the state decided he belonged with his parents, even though they had made no progress or improvement in the areas that had led to the removal of their children.

Isaac had a sister, about 18 months younger than he. While he stayed with us, his sister stayed with another young couple from our church. Although she also returned to her parents after nine months, his sister remained a part of her foster parents' lives, and somewhere in the past two years, she moved in with them.

They are now in the process of adopting her. Her biological mother is signing the adoption papers today. All that remains is for a judge to make it official.

I'm happy for them, but I haven't seen Isaac in years, and right now all I want to do is cry.

happy birthday

Dear Isaac,

As I'm writing this, it's almost the end of your fifth birthday. I wish I could have been there to celebrate it with you, but that isn't possible. By the time you're able to read this, you'll be closer to celebrating your seventh birthday than your fifth, and by the time you actually do read it — assuming you ever do — your fifth birthday will be long past and long forgotten.

If you do read this one day, it will be because you decided to seek me out. Hope is that thing with feathers, but I still hope you will come looking for me one day, however far off that may be. As I stand before God, I hope one day to see you again in the flesh with my own eyes. Foster son or not, I loved you as much as my own flesh and blood, and I still do.

You stayed with us from January to mid-October 2002, after Iowa Child Protective Services placed you into foster care. When you arrived you were a wreck -- unable to speak, barely able to stand or walk, incapable of showing any emotion except anger, and unable to concentrate on anything except watching TV.

That changed while you were in our care. I watched as you began to bloom for the first time in two years, and mastered skills that we had always taken for granted with our own daughter. I watched as you learned to stand and to walk without falling down, and as you learned to pick up things with your fingers and to eat with a fork. I cheered the first time you used an actual word to ask for something. Most of all, I lost myself in those smiles of yours, that silly laugh you had, and that insane humming you made whenever you wanted to sing butdidn't know the words.

The day you left is one that is seared indelibly into my very soul. The sky was clear blue, the leaves were beginning to turn color, and the air had the crisp quality of an early autumn morning. You'd been taking trips to your birth parents twice a week for the last nine months, so when the DYFS driver buckled you into the car seat and drove off, you were smiling happily, and all the while my heart was clenching tighter and tighter in my chest. The tears started when you disappeared from sight, and to be honest, they've never really stopped.

I don’t think I can ever begin to tell you how much I've missed you the last two years. Not a day has gone by since you left that I haven't thought about you, and sometimes the grief has been so great that all I've wanted to do is to crawl into a hole and cover myself up, or to drown it.

The day you left, a heavy blackness fell over my soul. It was as though I had been following Christ willingly and in faith, trusting him as the road got ever darker, until finally I came to the darkest place I had ever been. There was no way forward, and no way back, and on all sides there were beasts that would gladly rend me limb from limb if only they had the chance. I could hear them whispering, just out of eyesight. One wrong step would mean my destruction, and my guide was nowhere to be seen.

For the life of me, I don't know how I survived that time, except to say that God's love and grace are greater and more bewildering than I ever could have imagined. Trusting to him is like riding the rapids of a waterfall, without even the benefit of a barrel, and yet I wouldn't have it any other way. By his grace, I survived.

Having you and losing you has had a more profound effect on my life than just about everything else I've ever known — more than college, more than being an exchange student, and more than being a missionary. The loss of you is a pain that suffuses my writing, my relationship with God, and the relationship I have with my children. Every day when I think of you, I give thanks that I still have them, and I hold them close.

Evangeline, who was your older sister for those nine months, had a horrible time when you left. For weeks after, when we went to the movies or to a friend's house, she looked around for you. Once I came home from work late at night to find her, wide awake at the top of the stairs, wondering when you would come back. And when her sister was born, and we had to leave her with friends for the night, it made her ill. She knew — she just knew — that we had got rid of her, too.

Two years later, she still remembers you. She asks me why you left, she wants to know when you're coming home, and she prays for the chance to see you just one more time. She no longer lays awake at night waiting for you, nor does she still want to send her younger sister away so that you can come back, but losing you has affected her also. She loves you, and she misses you too.

I don't know what the future holds for you, but I hope it is full of good things. I hear that you've made remarkable progress the last two years: that you speak well; that you are relatively happy living with your father, your grandmother, aunt and cousins; and that you may even start school with the other children your age. That's fantastic.

I pray for you every day. If I could make a wish for your future, it would be this: Finish high school and either attend college or learn an honest trade. Stay clear of the wrong crowd, and keep away from those who would lead you into gangs, drugs or violence. Search for love, not one of the cheap substitutes we so often settle for in this world, and when you find someone special, make it work so the relationship can last a lifetime. Most of all, find Christ.

And if it's selfish, it's selfish, but I'm going to wish for it anyway: Come home to me. The day you left I promised that I would always carry a piece of you in my heart, and that you would always have a piece of me in yours, even if you didn't remember it in your waking hours. It's still the truth two years later, and it will be the truth in another twenty and another sixty. Neither one of us will be complete until we connect again.

I love you, Isaac, more than anything. Have a happy birthday.

Love,
Abba

pigs' ears and silk purses

It may sound odd, but early last year after we lost our son, I found renewed comfort in the book of Ecclesiastes.

The book of Ecclesiastes, known as Qohelet in Hebrew, is part of the Bible's wisdom literature, written by an author known only as "the preacher." In contrary to much religious writing, Ecclesiastes paints a fairly morose view of life, one where there is no advantage in being young, being wise, being strong or being wealthy. No matter how wonderful things are, hanging over all of it is the certainty of death to come, an ending that renders everything meaningless.

It's always been one of my favorite books in the Bible, but the preacher's brutal honesty helped me get through the darkest time of my life to date.

What did I take away from it? That popular platitudes notwithstanding, everything does not happen for a reason. Sometimes life is just so horrible, all you can do is crawl under the covers and ask why you didn't die the day you were born, and when you're done crying, get up and go through the motions of living, since that's all you have left to do.

And after a while, you start to see that even though to live is still to suffer, God has placed eternity in our hearts so that we can glimpse heaven and God's mercy in the world around us. We have friends who lie down with us to keep us warm (it's still cold, but someone is helping us make it through); we can still eat and drink, and enjoy what modest pleasures those bring us; and at the end of the day, we can escape our misery in a few blessed hours of sleep.

In the annoyingly oft-quoted Romans 8:28, Paul writes that God is working in all things for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purposes.

The way I came to understand that verse is that it's true that God can sew a silk purse out of a pig's ear. It may not change the fact that it's a pig's ear, but that doesn't change the fact that God made a silk purse out of it.

And lastly, of course, the preacher wrapped up his ruminations by saying, "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." A friend of mine once commented that he doesn't understand why the preacher says to fear God instead of saying to love him.

After what I went through, I think I understand: It's because it's not always possible to love God in the way that we usually understand it. Sometimes, all you can do is to live in fear and trembling of that dreadful joy, and follow the commands he has laid down.


Copyright © 2005 by David Learn. Used with permission.


Tweet

When prayer comes like a kick in the gut

Last night, Evangeline and I were reading a bedtime Bible story about Bartimaeus receiving his sight. The question at the end of the story was about what the child most wanted, with an encouragement to ask Jesus for it because he delights in giving us the desire of our hearts.

What does Evangeline say? "All I want is to see Isaac just one more time." Ouch!

If anyone's free and wants a beer, come on over. I'm buying.

The last I heard, he was living with his father, grandmother, aunt and two cousins, so he has some sort of family structure and something approximating siblings, which will give him sorely needed social interaction.

He's talking -- thank God -- and attending a special preschool paid for by the state. He's behind in many areas, but he's making progress, which is what I wanted. He's also settled down quite a lot, owing in part to the discipline we instilled and to his ability to communicate and interact with the world around him.

That's all I know. I've no way of getting in contact with them even if my reason wanted to, so as I told Beloved, if Evangeline's prayer is to be answered, it will be by God and not by her father.

creative discipline

From the Washington Post:

Hot sauce adds a kick to salsa, barbeque, falafel and hundreds of other foods. But some parents use it in a different recipe, one they think will yield better-behaved children: They put a drop of the fiery liquid on a child's tongue as punishment for lying, biting, hitting or other offenses.

"Hot saucing," or "hot tongue," has roots in Southern culture, according to some advocates of the controversial disciplinary method, but it has spread throughout the country. Nobody keeps track of how many parents do it, but most experts contacted for this story, including pediatricians, psychologists and child welfare professionals, were familiar with it.

When Isaac was living with us, we had to discipline him for a number of things, mostly because he had never learned any sort of self-control or self-restraint. Trouble was, our preferred method of discipline — time out — is completely useless for a child who is accustomed to being ignored. If the child is unfazed by discipline, it isn’t working. Sometimes you have to be creative when you discipline a child.

I discovered after a few weeks that his main means of sensory stimulation were tactile, taste and visual. No one had ever talked to him, so speech meant nothing to him, and corporal punishment obviously is out of line for abused kids who aren’t your own, no matter what you may think of it for your own.

But he loved to watch things. When I took him to walk the dog with me, he tripped every 10 feet and would lie there watching cars go by because he found it interesting. I finally got him to stand up by pulling his hat down over his eyes until he did stand.

I found that worked for time outs as well. Isaac absolutely hated being unable to see. So for him, time out became time in a chair with arm rests, with a bag over his head. (When his sense of balance improved, we started having him stand in the corner.) His behavior improved immensely.

We used the food thing primarily as a means of controlling his behavior at the table. He was accustomed to leaving the table, running around and eating at his leisure. Since he needed structure and discipline, the rule became, “Leave the table, leave your food.” He stopped leaving the table.

He also would feed the dog or throw bits of food on the floor. When he did that, he lost the rest of his meal.
If he didn’t eat the meal we gave him — he wasn’t used to fresh produce or healthy food, and preferred chicken nuggets and other processed junk food — that was too bad. At snacktime he got a normal-size snack, and had to wait until the next meal.

His eating habits and table manners improved tremendously as well.

So you have to be creative when it comes to discipline, since not every child is going to respond in the same way. E would think having a hat on her head is funny, although she otherwise hates being in time out.

On those grounds, I understand the hot sauce technique although I don’t think I would use it. For starters, I’m concerned about the associations it could cause with hot foods — I don’t want the girls to think they’re in trouble every time we eat something spicy.

Additionally, when time out is over, I can let the child out of her chair, or I could pull the hat off Isaac’s head. If you spank, it stings for a little, and then the punishment is over.

Hot spices can burn for quite a while. I once picked my nose after chopping jalapeños — a bad idea — and was miserable for about half an hour.

more on the sucking chest wound

We got a third-party update on Christian the other day. The good news: He's still attending the day care where the state Division of Youth and Family Services set him up after he returned to his parents. He's getting daily interaction with other children his age and the last I knew had a personal teacher to work with him on his psychocognitive development, where he was majorly delayed.

And he's talking! He's still behind a bit, as is to be expected, and apparently is not the most verbal person -- but he's talking in complete sentences and is able to communicate fairly effortlessly.

Thank God.

Chris is also living with his father, grandmother, aunt and two cousins. So he has something approximating family relationships. E definitely did a lot to prepare him for that.

Now the bad news: His mother is back in the state. She returned from Florida, where she had been working as a stripper, and apparently already has made a bid to get full custody of her children. That was denied, and she also gave up after her daughter had a fit during a visit and Judy had no idea how to handle it. But she still has access to the kids for visits, which can be a bad thing, given that she's the cause of the bulk of their problems.

And the really bad news is that Judy and her latest boyfriend have a child. This is her fourth that I know of. The first was put up for adoption, and Chris and Dominique were the next two.

The more things change ...

'where's god when it hurts?'

Today I finally finished Philip Yancey's book, "Where's God When it Hurts?" It's a fantastic treatise on pain and suffering that remains refreshingly orthodox without settling for any of the pat answers we so often like to give people when they're hurting.

Yancey starts out by talking about the nature and benefit of pain, by looking at some leper colonies and what happens to people when their nervous system fails to convey pain messages. (I always had understood leprosy to be a condition that causes the flesh to rot and decay, but that's inaccurate. Leprosy deadens sensation so that the pain receptors no longer work. The damage to flesh comes from not noticing injuries and having them treated.)

He drew a compelling parallel between biological pain and the more exquisite forms of suffering we know. Pain is the body's way of saying that something is wrong; the suffering of the soul is the world's way of screaming that something is wrong and not working as it was designed to.

From there Yancey explores the traditional answers we have for pain; that God is using it to punish us for sin, to teach us something; that God is incapable of or unwilling to stop our pain, or that he just doesn't care; and so on.

It's interesting. Yancey never really attempts to justify the horrorific suffering we sometimes experience -- the death of a child, genocide, grief, paralysis, prolonged or terminal illness -- but he does steadily march toward the Incarnation and the point at which Christ identified with our pain so thoroughly that he cried out in despair that God had abandoned him.

He also makes the interesting statement I hadn't considered before, or at least not in that light, that suffering brings out what is already in us. A marriage where husband and wife lean on each other for support will be made even stronger by suffering, but one where that is not the case is more likely to strain under the load. Paul writes that suffering produces character; character, perseverance; and perseverance, hope. And hope will not be disappointed.

His conclusion is not that we're wrong to be upset, or even to scream and shout and demand an explanation why we're suffering, just that we're wrong to think that God is oblivious to what we're going through, because every suffering we endure, he's already endured with us and for us throughout the Incarnation and especially on the Cross.

For me, that's comforting, because it's nice to remember that God is a foster father who has lost his children at times, and so he understands that grief that overwhelms me sometimes from out of the blue. He was a man who lost his father, as I one day will lose mine, and I don't doubt Jesus groaned beneath the weight of the responsibility that dropped upon him before he was ready to carry it.

The penultimate chapter was about the CHristian response to pain -- not just our own pain, but the pain of others. Paul wrote about he wept over the losses of other believers, and how he burned inwardly when he knew of fellow Christians who were led into sin. The challenge for us as the Body of Christ is to feel the pain in the body's toes and fingers even though they're thousands of miles away, being tortured in the Sudan, Saudi Arabia or China. It's to feel the grief Indigo goes through with her situation at home, or to share the anguish of Respectfully Brian P., Victoria, Greg and Don, and all the rest of us losers who set sail upon the H.M.S. Naked Glittery Squirrel.

And of course, not just to feel their pain (to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton), but to share it and carry it for them. I pray every day that I can carry the pain inflicted on my son and on Evangeline by what DYFS did, and although I don't doubt that's what keeps the wounds fresh for me, I also don't doubt that it helps them, just as I'm sure it's helped Indigo, Cats, Greg and the others here whom I've prayed for.

The last chapter was about the Resurrection, because that's where it all suffering ends. If there is pain in heaven, at least it will be pain without grief and without tears, and it will be pain more wonderful than any joy we've known on earth.

It was a great book. I hope I've whetted your appetite to read it.

Chronicling the five stages of faith

1. Awakening
The person awakens to spiritual things and to the presence and love of God. This can happen suddenly, in an instant conversion, or it can take place over months or years: The person becomes aware of God's love as never before, and the experience comes with feelings of joy and even exaltation.

2. Purgation.
Having experienced the love and holiness of God, the believer recognizes that she is out of sync with God. Thus begins a period of mortification, the killing off of desires, habits, and states of mind that get in the way of God. Often serious disciplines are taken up -- longer prayer, fasting, self-examination retreats, sexual chastity, relinquishing possessions -- to conquer spiritual sloth and pride. The period is characterized by moral effort and spiritual pain.

3. Illumination.
Now more morally and spiritually honed, the believer becomes joyfully aware of God at a new level. The knowing in the awakening phase is like enjoying the light of a full moon on a cloudless night; like basking in the noontime sun on a summer day. Many, if not most, people do not proceed beyond stage 3.

4. Dark night of the soul.
The most terrible experience is sometimes experienced at various points in each stage, and sometimes as an extended period of its own. Sometimes called "mystic death," it entails the final and complete purification of the self. It takes its name from a book by John of the Cross, who described the experience.

The chief characteristic is absolute loss of God, a sense that the sun has been completely obliterated. Desolation and despair are the usual emotions the seeker experiences. It isn't that God literally withdraws, but he does withdraw every emotional benefit the seeker has so far derived from faith. The seeker continues through the spiritual loneliness knowing that this "spiritual crucifixion" is necessary: One must learn to seek God for God's sake, not for the sake of the happiness God brings.

5. Union.
In this stage, the seeker enjoys God not as an illumination, in which God shines down upon her; here she becomes one with God. Again, this is not one in the sense that the seeker is destroyed, but one in the sense that husband and wife become one. This stage is often called "Mystical Marriage."

In my experience, this goes in cycles. In the sense of salvation, the Old Man dies once, but in the long haul, his death is a prolonged and painful thing. He appears to die, but he is only asleep, and when God appears to withdraw, the Old Man stirs and wakens again, and the flesh cries out in rebellion over the unfairness of God and his wanton cruelty.

Eventually we submit those areas to God again and find that completion comes in the Giver and not in the gifts, and we find that we can experience the Giver by walking in his ways and being like him to others around us. That's what the list refers to as unity, but it never lasts. God is very jealous; he does not share us with anyone, not even with ourselves, and he will not be content until we are wholly is. Each drink from Christ's cup is a deeper and more bitter draught, but it also fills us with more of his character and life.

I also have to say in all honesty that I think I've only been through that stage once, when my son returned to his birth parents. There have been bad times before, but none of them ever came close to the agony that I went through in the months leading up to and following Chris' departure.

I say that this period is something I would not exchange because, now that I feel I'm finally starting to see the sunlight and feel the breeze again, I've also getting a sense of what I've learned. It's hard to explain in a nutshell, and I don't feel like trying to reduce it to words again at this moment, but essentially it's been a time for depending upon Christ in greater amounts, for embracing the Cross to the bitter end, learning to love others endlessly and experiencing Christ's presence amid meaningless suffering. If I have suffered for doing what is right, and if my son has suffered for no reason at all, then so has Christ. He not only understands, but he shares in our suffering and we have shared in his. And though the experience still makes me cry, that's something I wouldn't trade for anything.

Rather than seeing the stages -- especially the last two -- as exclusive options, I'm thinking of them more of something that we reach by degrees. After the terrors of the dark night come new depths of understanding and closeness to God that bring us closer to what I would call "wholeness" but is labeled here as "unity." One never experiences the entire thing in this lifetime, but by degrees and by the grace of God we start to find our fulfillment in him and not in what he gives us. That's beyond the euphoria of Stage 3 -- what I call "infatuation with God" -- which is why I didn't check that option.

Grief and pain have a way of wakening us to a new understanding of Christ's love and mercy, and I would say anyone who has gone through the long dark night -- anyone who knows that spot where Despair sinks her hook into your heart; anyone who remembers being at that dark and lonely place where there was every sign that God had abandoned them but still said, "Not my will but yours be done"; anyone who has cried out into the void for an answer, for a reason, for hope and heard only the dispassionate response "Follow me," and done just that -- anyone who has survived God's violent love, at some level, through the grace of God, has found wholeness in him.

My own limited experience indicates that the roads to Calvary and Zion are one and the same, and that the more closely we follow Christ, the more it is going to hurt. In the end, the Cross will kill us, but by that time, we will be so full of the light of Christ that his grace will carry us through.

I've been through the Long Dark Night, and it ain't pretty. But I wouldn't trade that pain or grief for any other joy.

forget toys for tots, give a real gift

I've had about all I can take of Toys for Tots.

It's not that I think it's a bad organization, nor that I disagree with its mission of distributing toys to disadvantaged children at Christmastime. I'm just sick to death of hearing about it.

It seems like every time I turn around, someone else is collecting toys for Toys for Tots. My employer is collecting them. A real-estate office down the street is collecting them. Today I got a piece of mail from yet another organization that's collecting toys for them.

Is this the most pressing need before us as a society today? You would think from all the hype there is for Toys for Tots at Christmas, that everything is hunky-dory in America today except for some poor kids who aren't getting enough presents for Christmas.

Since this is ostensibly done as a forerunner of the Christmas spirit, let's forget about the fat guy in the red suit for a little bit. Let's look instead at the little boy whose birth Christmas originally was intended to celebrate.

It's easy to forget sometimes amid all the junk that has accumulated around Christmas that it's meant to be a religious holiday. And it's easy to forget amid all the junk that's accumulated around the religion what it is that Jesus Christ was really about.

Aside from a cryptic reference in the Roman historian Suetonis' "Twelve Caesars," and a few other remarks made by other ancient writers like Josephus, the four gospels in the New Testament are pretty much our only source of information about the life of Christ.

Those gospels record Christ as making a pretty radical call on his followers. Unlike the modern Jesus of the political and religious right, the Jesus shown in the gospels didn't push a particular moral philosophy, he didn't champion one economic system over another, and he didn't really back a political party or agenda.

One thing he did ask of his followers: Love one another.

The sort of love Jesus emulated and that his earliest followers strived to uphold wasn't some warm, fuzzy, goodwill-toward-men sort of thing. It was a no-holds-barred kind of love, one that called for putting others' needs ahead of your own. He told his followers to give everything they had for other people, to be involved in their lives, and to care for them in real and tangible ways.

He also called for giving generously to the poor. He actually told one rich young ruler "Go, sell everything you have, and then you can be my disciple," without even once cautioning him to make sure that the poor weren't welfare cheats playing the system.

His rule of love doesn't allow for discriminating between friends, enemies and strangers. Everyone deserves the same level of compassion if you want to be called a follower of Christ.

Worst of all, Jesus never promised people it would be easy. In fact, he said if you follow him closely enough, that it would kill you.

That's a powerful kind of love. It's the sort of love that reached out and took hold of me when I was a teenager on the brink of entering college. I didn't understand at the time what it was I was getting myself into when I committed myself to following Christ, but I've learned. It's been hard, but I've learned.

The lesson was burned deep into my soul last year when my wife and I, following Christ's lead, opened our home to a boy whose parents had failed him so badly that the state had put him into foster care.

I learned how bitter and painful that love can be when my foster son returned to his parents before they were ready, against his caseworker's judgement and against the judgment of social workers familiar with the case, simply because some bureaucrat at DYFS wanted to close the case.

If you ask me, that sort of agony is one hell of a better way to share the joys of the season than dropping off a bunch of toys at a business.

Where's the human connection with Toys for Tots? The most you've got is a tax-deductible purchase, a smile from some overworked employee who's been asked to handle Toys for Tots in addition to his regular duties and some vague, disembodied sense that you made some child somewhere happy for a few minutes on Christmas.

Humbug.

Presents are great, but you know what? They're candy. They may make children happy for a few minutes, but they're not going to do a thing to really help the child in the long run. What good is candy to a child who doesn’t have dinner? What good are toys to children who have no homes to play in? What use are presents to children with no parents to speak of?

I really don't want to hear another word about Toys for Tots, or some other toy drive to collect a bunch of gizmos and widgets that will be broken by New Year's Day.

If you want to really make Christmas a special day for somebody, become a foster parent or adopt a child. If that's too much for you, then at least go to a homeless or battered women’s shelter, and play with the kids.

No, the kids might not get the latest toys to play with, but they'll have something better.

They’ll have love.

The pros and cons of being a foster parent

Was it worth it to take care of someone else's child for nine months? Well let's see:

1) It took a heavy, bitter toll on our marriage. A friend had asked me to do a story for a web site he's the editor of, and even promised me payment for it. Things were so bad I couldn't find anything to say that was remotely insightful or witty.

2) Evangeline was unable to sleep for weeks, out of grief.

3) She also was convinced she was next to go, especially when we had to leave her with friends when her sister was born.

4) It's plagued me with bad nights like this one where I can't sleep because I keep thinking about him and feeling sorry for myself.

5) Other things I don't want to share.

6) Isaac learned how to talk, how to love, how to be loved, and started to develop properly.

7) This entire time has been a period of learning to lean ever more heavily on Christ and to reach a deeper understanding of his grace and what it means when he says, "Pick up your cross and follow me."

In light of 6 and 7, I would have to say it was worth it, and we've had our reward already. I also wouldn't mind doing it again, as long as Natasha is willing. In light of 1 to 5, I'd have to say someone would have to be nuts even to consider it.

'finding nemo'

So we got "Finding Nemo" on DVD when it first came out, I guess last week. Natasha's watching it with the girls in the living room, I come in and sit down next to them. It's a little odd, but pretty funny. I kept thinking of a fellow from Australia who I know, for some reason.

Then comes the clincher: The movie is about a clownfish named Marlin who is searching for his son, Nemo, who was taken by a tropical fish enthusiast to put into his tank. Marlin is swimming up and down the Great Barrier Reef, facing sharks and braving a water vortex -- risking everything, really -- just to get Nemo back.

Suddenly I start crying and can't stop. I have to leave the room.

And you know something? I don't think I'll ever be able to watch that movie with my girls, as much as I'd like to.

Thank God my wife understands.

Life is not beautiful at all; it's grotesque. I side with Flannery O'Connor: People who have never suffered have missed one of God's greatest blessings.

revolve

Remember discussion about the TNIV and whether it was worthwhile? As makeovers of the Bible go, that was mild. Check out Revolve!

I've been giving this way more thought than it deserves, and what it's boiling down to for me is the question of whether this is marketing or presentation.
I'm all for presenting timeless truths in a ways that can be understood by each generation. That's why I prefer churches that use contemporary services, with modern music, dramas, video clips and so on. They're using popular artistic expressions as a way to engage the people of their target generation with the gospel. In a good church that practices these things, the substance is rich, the meaning is real, and the timeless stories the Bible contains about jealousy, fratricide, love, sacrifice, resentment and betrayal, and most of all redemption gain new resonance with an audience that might never hear or understand these things otherwise.

Without a doubt we could do some things to present the Bible better.

The problem for me is when we come into marketing. Marketing is generally as phony as a three-dollar bill and, when done this way, has about as much currency with Gen X as that bill. (I'll let members of Gen Y and subsequent generations say for certain what works for them.)

We're past the point with our culture that celebrity endorsements and attractive faces will sell Bibles. That comes across as pure hokum because everybody knows the Bible isn't cool. About the only people who are going to buy these Bibles are Christian teens who want to be be cool within Christian circles. Maybe my imagination is too small, but I don't see this topping bestseller lists.

Marketing like this, while it is well intentioned, is not the way Christ models for us to draw people to God. He also met people where they were at, but in a decidedly personal, nonmarketing way. He never acted cool, and when you get down to it, the gospel is as fundamentally uncool as you can get. It tells us things like this: "Sell all you have and give it to the poor, and then follow me." Or: "If you have two cloaks, give to the one who has none." Or: "Don't resist an evil person; if he sues you for your tunic, give him your shirt also; and if he strikes you on one cheek, turn and offer him your other one also."

It's about not trying to control everything that comes your way, and accepting that some really unfair sh*t happens from time to time.

Last year around this time, you may recall I was in a pretty desparate situation. My son -- I still think of him that way, even though he wasn't born to me -- was about to be taken away from me and returned to the people who he had been born to.

A well-connected politician who knew the situation offered to intervene. Although he couldn't guarantee anything, he seemed to feel it was pretty certain that if he were to step in, Isaac would not return to his biological parents. Other colleagues of mine had ideas on how I could use media leverage or other connections to stop Isaac from heading back into an abusively neglectful situation.

Would Isaac have stayed if I had put up a legal fight and let the politicians who offered to do something to keep him here? Maybe. And you could even argue that I would have been saving him from the heartache of what's happened to him since, not to mention the grief it caused Evangeline when he moved out.

That's not the way of the Cross, though. The way Christ teaches and models for us lies not in fighting tooth and nail to protect our rights or to keep others from hurting us, but in going to the Father in prayer, and sometimes in just dying.

That's a religion for TOTAL LOSERS. Oddly enough, when we make that our practice, that does a lot more to draw people in than marketing the Bible and its inner beauty strategies probably ever will.

foster son update

We haven't seen Isaac in several months. His father, Craig, had been dropping him off here for weekendlong visits earlier this year for several weekends in a row. We put the kabosh on that because we felt we weren't helping Craig by enabling him to avoid his responsibilities as a father; we felt we weren't helping Isaac by letting him always be pulled back into a different family with radically different expectations for behavior; and we didn't feel it was helping Evangeline either since she was losing him again and again each week.

Actually, we didn't exactly "put the kabosh on it," but the blow-by-blow version takes too long to get into. We haven't seen him since early this spring or maybe sometime in February.

This morning, Evangeline looked up at Natasha and said, "Mommy, Isaac is my best friend, and I miss him very much."

This afternoon, she said, "Isaac, we need to send Rachel away so I can have my Lumpy back."

Sometimes, I think I've just had enough. Today is only the second time in my life I've wanted to get drunk and escape for a while.