A Mending Shift

[Note: it may be helpful to read this out loud or in a whisper as it is more stream-of-thought]

So here it is God, Friday evening and my spirit seems deeply burdened. I’m not sure why. The blog name, A Carnival in My Head, comes to mind as a close descriptor of what I am feeling. Round and round the music of Your love and grace goes, spiraling around in my mind, rhythmically pounding: “This is too good to be true, this is too good to be true.” Yet my spirit senses deep within a voice that whispers, that resonates, that caresses Your love like a newborn infant, saying, “I knew You were this good, I knew my Daddy was like this.” And back and forth, round and round, tugging and pulling these voices dance, spar, engage. Fatherly thoughts simultaneously clash against and speak to Your love. My 2 ½ year-old daughter being abducted and tossed into the child-sex ring…her image, spirit, body being molested by deranged men. The anger. The rage. The pain. The disgust I feel as a father at the thought. How could You love such beasts? How could You, Papa, embrace such filth? How could You forgive such creatures? My daughter—with them!—in the foulest of ways. They must be punished, killed, torn apart! They must feel the pain my daughter felt, have their dignity ripped from them as they did my daughter’s, be scarred forever as my daughter is. And then I look at those men as if I were their father. Seeing my hurting boy, whose dignity is no more, whose ability for love is smoldering, whose image, spirit, and body has been self-molested for years. Whose pain and wounding run so deep that I hardly recognize him as the three-year-old I once held in my lap, the 8-year-old I once played baseball with, the teenager I once taught to drive. He is a shell of the creature You crafted, yet he still bears Your image—dim all be it, but it is there…the image of You. And oh how I long to embrace him, heal him, restore him and remind him he’s loved. And yet he’s distant, alone—he thinks—in his pain. Fatherly thoughts seem to simultaneously clash against and speak to Your love, God. And sometimes it just feels like a mess, and sometimes it just feels so beautiful, this love of Your’s. I look at my daughter being hurt and I look at my son causing the pain and I rush in to rescue my daughter from her pain all the while longing to rescue my son from his. I step between the two of them seeking to prevent my daughter from being wounded and look into my son’s eyes and see his wounds. I violently lash out, throwing my son off my daughter and embrace her while seeing the tears of my son disclosing his desire to be embraced as well. I pin my son down with my fist clenched above his face ready to strike a blow when my daughter grabs my arm, graciously holding me back and reminding me of . . . love. I see the wounds in both my children. And I love them. How can I not? They bear my image and I shared in their creation. Is it the same with You? Is this how You feel? Is it more of a father-child relational thing than a judicial-transactional thing for You? Is this love perhaps the kind that can heal and restore both the victim and the perpetrator, who happen to both bear Your image and whom You created? I don’t know…and yet I do…then again, I don’t. And so the music of Your love and grace goes, spiraling around in my mind, rhythmically pounding, “This is too good to be true, this is too good to be true.” Perhaps it is. If it is true, the oxymoron of a beautiful mess also rings true. A beautiful mess . . . a beautiful mess . . . a beautiful mess, love is.

Tags: Anger, Children, Disgust, Father, God, Hate, Healing, love, Pain, Parent, Rage, Restoration, Wounds

This entry was posted by Jeromy Johnson on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 11:02 pm and is filed under God, Kingdom of God, love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.