Blowing Bubbles

 

 

 

ahhhhh....my third son and last child of four....love doesn't begin to describe my feelings for him.  Pure joy and delight are the things he brings to my life.  My other three children were young together, and I was too busy sometimes to savor their childhood, not just mothering them but also as a full-time public school teacher and then as children's director in a quickly growing church.   My own mother died of cancer when my oldest child was three and upon the birth of my second child, so I was also dealing with heavy grief for a lot of years which seemed to create a cloud-like sadness that hovered over anything involving my children, because I couldn't help but ponder how much Mom would have savored every moment of their growing up.

The distance that the passage of time has put between me and her loss has created a sort of buffer to those deep feelings of grief, allowing me to be more present to the milestones in Coleman's life.  More often than not, it's not the milestones like birthdays or the start of school that I enjoy most, but just the fun that he manages to eeek out of every day.  Last night when there was just an inkling of light left in the vast stretch of sky that spreads out over the open fields around our home, Coleman disappeared.  I asked if anyone knew where he was, to which one of his older brothers replied, "He went out on the porch, but I don't know what he's doing. " (Normally afraid of the dark,  I couldn't imagine what he was doing out there by himself at that time of night.)  I stepped outside to find him in nothing but his underwear, knees folded up in front of him in one of our porch rockers, blowing bubbles using the dishsoap concoction with the small plastic wand that has delighted children for years.  He casually said, "Hey, mom.  I figured it out."  "Figured what out?," I asked.   "How to blow the big bubbles," he replied.  "You just have to go really slow when you puff your air out."    I told him he had five more minutes to make his bubble discoveries and then he had to come inside and go to bed.

Before falling asleep myself last night, I read a periodic mailing that we receive from Make Way Partners Corporation, a Christian mission agency committed to preventing and combatting human trafficking.  In it, there was the story of another 5 year old child halfway around the world in Hope of Sudan orphanage.   She has sufferred the loss of both her parents and siblings, and knows war, famine, drought, and disease intimately.

I cried as I thought about the fact that Umaa has never gotten to blow bubbles.  Solely due to  where she was born, Umaa's short life has been full of  hunger, torture, death, uncertainty, fear, and resulting rage.  I pondered, as a mother, what it would be like to look into the eyes of your crying, hungry child and have to say yet again that you have no food to give them.  I thought about what I would want to do to anyone who brought any form of harm to my son Cole, and then how gut-wrenching it would be to stand defenseless as the slave raiders of the Islamic regime in Sudan continue to daily bomb and raid villages, ripping children out of their mothers' arms, separating them forever.

We are not talking about horrors of the past, that blacken the pages of our history books, about which we can do nothing in the present.  We are speaking of atrocities that are occurriing while I sit here on my comfortable couch typing.  Women in these areas of Sudan don't spend time as I did this weekend, figuring out where to hang a new picture, because many of them,after fleeing their bombed villages , are seeking a safe place to hide from the slave raiders, and don't have walls surrounding them on which to hang anything.  These women aren't buying different varieties of lettuce to plant in their fall gardens, as I also did yesterday, but instead aren't sure if they will eat anything at all for days on end.

Oh, it is so much easier to quit trying, quit caring, quit hoping....as Kimberly Smith , co-President of Make Way Partners says, "just quit, and clamor about with some stuffy activity to fill up the chasmic void like work, food, wine, or churchy activities (otherwise known as addictions)." Don't we all want to live sorrow free? Since we can't control the sorrows we face in our own personal lives, most of us prefer not to add to that pile by ignoring the sorrows we can halfway around the world, since they aren't right under our noses where we can see, hear, and smell them.

Eventually, brokenness will be made whole.  My brokenness, your brokenness, Umaa's brokenness.  God has good things in store on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death and we will ultimately share the victory with the One who wages war against all evil....but in the meantime, what?  Although it might seem self-preserving to bury our heads in the sand, we are called to "bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners."  Whose brokenness are you called to help heal?  In God's ecomony, we do have a role to play.

Kimberly Smith's role was to begin an organization with 2 criteria for selecting where they minister:
1-This organization only goes where women and children are at hightest risk of human trafficking, forced prostitution and other forms of modern-day slavery and 2- This organization only goes where there is little or no other help available because it is considered too dangerous, too expensive, or too remote for others to go. Please go to www.makewaypartners and learn 5 ways you can join this amazing organization to rescue and restore hope.

Just as Umaa must now learn to cope with her rage that is actually righteous anger against the injustices inflicted upon her, we too must learn  not to ignore our anger and sorrow upon being informed of such injustices, but to act in our own little corner of the world in  a manner befitting a child of God and in the way in which He calls each of us to respond.  Ask Him what he wants you to do....he will show you.  I pray you and I will both choose to respond in the ways He reveals.