She had just gotten her hair cut to right above her shoulders, which somehow made her big eyes behind her pink-rimmed glasses seem particularly earnest. She turned her head and said, “Sure, Mom. Why?”

I showed her the picture of Timofei from an article in the LA Times. “Penny, do you know what adoption is?” She shook her head. “It’s like in Annie, where the kids don’t have parents so they all live together until someone comes and gives them a home.” She nodded. “Well, this little boy doesn’t have parents, and there are some parents who are my friends and they want to adopt him. But he lives far away in Russia…”

“Where’s Russia?”

“It’s kind of near China. We can look at it on the map when we get inside. Anyway, he lives far away in Russia and the people in charge of his country won’t let him come to America to be with his new family. And, Pen, Timofei has Down syndrome like you.”

I didn’t tell her that if Timofei moves to a new institution, as he was supposed to do on his fourth birthday, he will almost certainly die from neglect (as I posted about in January: When Turning Four Means a Death Sentence). I didn’t tell her that Timofei has met his American parents, Bethany and Andy Nagel, and that he had a scrapbook with their pictures and he called them Mama and Dada until the adoption was halted and his caregivers took the scrapbook away. I didn’t tell her that God had begun this adoption process years ago and that they have been waiting and waiting and waiting to bring their son home. I didn’t tell her that it is hard for me to pray and not give up because it has been so long and the bureaucratic channels seem so knotted and unyielding.

This morning, I read in 1Peter 3 about suffering for doing what is good. It’s not something I understand in a personal way very often, and even today I could only understand it as I thought about Bethany and Andy and the ache, the longing, for their son to be given back to them, as they suffer for their good response to God’s call on their lives to adopt a baby who is now a boy with Down syndrome.

Even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed… But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…

The writer patterns our suffering on Christ’s suffering. He demonstrates the ways in which God’s blessing has come upon us due to Christ’s death, the ultimate example of suffering for doing good. And then he exhorts us to have a visible hope, patterned upon Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the reason for the hope that we have.

And so, as the orphans and their adoptive parents suffer, we hope. We pray. And we long for their reunion.

When Penny and I were sitting on the bench yesterday, she said, “You go ahead and pray, Mom.” And so I did, a simple petition, asking God to change the stance of the Russian government, particularly toward the adoptions that are already in process. I prayed, with Penny bowing her head next to me, with dappled sunlight on our arms and the dogwood in bloom and Marilee’s shrieks as she sped down the slide and the scent of lilac in the air.

(We also petition our earthly rulers to help: Call your Senator or Representative. Tell them that you know a family whose adoption was halted by the Russian adoption ban after they had met and bonded with their child, and ask them to sign on to a letter that is coming from the office of Senator Mary Landrieu.  The letter is a formal request from Congress to President Obama, asking him to raise the issue of pipeline families like us with President Putin when he meets with him in June at the G8 Summit.  To add their Senator/Reps name to the letter they should contact Whitney Reitz in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu at 202-224-5824 or whitney_reitz@landrieu.senate.gov)

(For more information, read The LA Times Article: Orphans, Families, in Agonizing Limbo, which features Timofei.)

With that said, here’s the passage I want to consider today, as Wiman explains his turn/return to Christianity:

It took a radical disruption of my life to allow me to see the sanity and vitality of this strange, ancient thing. There was no bolt-from-the-blue revelation or conversation or any of that. My old ideas simply were not adequate for the extremes of joy and grief that I experienced, but when I looked at my life through the lens of Christianity–or, more specifically, through the lens of Christ, as much of Christainity seemed (and still seems) uselessly absurd to me–it made sense. The world made sense. This ditance between culture and Christ seems like a modern phenomenon, but I think it’s probably always been the case. Even when Christainity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not. There is always some leap into what looks like absurdity, and there is always, for the one who makes that leap, some cost.

Yes to all of it, but especially to the world only making sense to me when I look at it through the lens of Christ. The simple joys of love and beauty and friendship and family make the most sense as I think about the world Christ came to restore. It is absurd to think that God would take the form of a servant, the physical form of a human being, and yet it is also the only way to understand God’s affirmation of this physical world, this created space with these beautiful odd creatures called people roaming around it.

The horrors of rape and war, the grief of illness and divorce and addiction, these also make sense to me only as I think about God coming in the flesh and as a savior. Again, absurd in this time and place to talk about sinfulness and atonement and salvation, and yet necessary too. Necessary, at least, in order for me to understand how far away we are as a human race from God’s desire for us. Necessary for me to understand God’s willingness not only to forgive us when we increase the distance, but to actually bridge the gap, to come towards us as we run away. The cross is a brutal instrument of torture. It not only symbolizes but again, physically realizes, the worst that broken, rebellious, wretched humanity has to offer. And Jesus hung there. Forsaken. Screaming. In agony. Until he died. If there is a God, only Christ’s death can begin to make sense of the pain in this world.

And then the resurrection. Yet another absurd physical reality, this claim that a dead man-God rose from the dead and walked around and talked and cooked breakfast. And yet again, necessary to try to bring these disparate daily realities together–to connect the beauty to the brokenness, the friendship to the fallenness, the love to the longing and loss.

I make sense of my life through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, absurd as it might seem. I make sense of the love I feel for my husband and our children, of the joy I experience in writing a good sentence, of the punch in the gut when I read headlines about children abused or hear of a couple getting divorced or realize that I have hurt one of my children because of my own selfishness. And I make sense of the hope I continue to hold out for all the wrong things to be made right, for even the impossible, the shattered pieces of this world to be made whole, for the dead to return to life, for all that is true and good and just and lovely to be all in all.

Recently, there was the night when we were reading The Berenstein Bears and Too Much Junk Food. After we finished, I asked Penny and William if they wanted me to pray about anything in particular. At this point, Penny usually offers a number of requests. William usually turns away and shakes his head. But that night, I asked if they needed help with anything. William pointed to the book with a shy look on his face. “I need God’s help with this.” And so we prayed that God would help him to want healthy food and only eat junk food a little bit.

Then I asked Penny a few nights ago, “Do you ever pray at school?”

She gave me one of those looks that implies I should know better than to ask a question with such an obvious answer. “Yeah, Mom.”

“When?”

“In art and in gym.”

“Why do you pray then?”

“So God will be with me. I need help controlling my hands. And God helps me.”

In both cases, what struck me was the simplicity of it. William likes junk food. He shouldn’t eat a lot of it. But he wants to anyway. And so he needs God’s help. Penny knows she shouldn’t poke and push in gym class or pick up all the little beads and interesting objects in the art room, but controlling those impulses is hard. So she prays about it. I wish I could remember, and trust, that prayer really is that simple.

And then there’s Marilee, who is just starting to join my little crew of theologians.

I asked her at dinnertime a few nights back, “Marilee, do you know what we are doing when we pray?”

Her face lit up. She clasped her hands together and said, “Thank you for our beautiful day!”

I know she was just offering back to me what she has heard, and yet it also came as a precious little gem of insight. Not just that when we pray we are saying thank you, but a reminder that prayer offers us a way to connect to the one who deserves our thanksgiving. No–it’s more than that. It’s that the feeling of gratitude for things we know we have not given ourselves–the dogwood tree in bloom, the giggles of my little girl, the wonder of finding the right words to put on paper, the moment of connection and hope in friendships–it’s that the feeling of gratitude doesn’t go out into a void but actually lands somewhere, with someone. There is one to whom we ought to give thanks, but perhaps even more so, there is one who will receive our thanks.

I sometimes wish I had an orderly prayer life, as I did before I had children. But I’m also grateful for the disruptions my children have offered. Because it is in those disruptions that they continue to teach me how to pray.

This blog is about discovering and remembering thin places, places where heaven and earth touch, where God seems more readily present, more easily accessed. It is meant to uncover ideas, relationships, points of connection, and moments of deep beauty that draw us towards one another and towards the Holy One.

I’ve been reading My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Christian Wiman’s spiritual memoir. I love it. I’ve underlined and starred dozens of passages so far, but last night as I was reading of Wiman’s return to church after his diagnosis with cancer. He writes about sneaking out of the church at the end of the service in order to avoid the pastor, and then exchanging some emails with the same pastor and then learning from a doctor that his cancer was terminal. Wiman writes:

That was the cloud I was walking under early one bright winter morning, maybe a week after the exchange of e-mails with the preacher, when I heard my name. I turned around to see im half running down the street toward me as he tried to pull a flannel shirt on over his T-shirt, careful not to trip over his untied shoes. I was in no mood to chat, especially not to an enthusiastic preacher, and all my thoughts were hostile. But I stopped, and we had a kind of introduction as he tied his shoes, and then he asked if he could walk me to the train station. Those days are a blur to me, but I remember two things from that morning very clearly. I remember Matt straining to find some language that would be true to his own faith and calling and at the same time adequate to the tragedy and faithlessness–the tragedy of faithlessness–that he perceived in me. And i remember when we parted there was an awkward moment when the severity of my situation and our unfamiliarity with each other left us with no words, and in a gesture that I’m sure was completely unconscious, he placed his hand over his heart for just a second as a flicker of empathetic anguish crossed his face. It sliced right through me. It cut through the cloud I was living in and let the plain day pour its balm upon me. It was, I am sure, one of those moments when we enact and reflect a mercy and a mystery that are greater than we are, when the void of God and the love of God, incomprehensible pain and the peace that passeth understanding, come together in a simple human act. We stood for a minute in the aftermath, not talking, and then went our suddenly less separate ways.

Wiman doesn’t use the words thin place, but he describes a thin place, a moment of connection in which God showed up, in which two human beings became suddenly less separate.

I highly recommend My Bright Abyss, and may we all have eyes to experience thin places today.

The reason I feel uneasy is because it’s pretty easy for us to have a child with special needs. It took some adjusting, and I still have the practical challenges of IEP’s and ENT visits and the like. But Penny is healthy, she’s happy, she reads books, she helps with her little sister, she gives me lots of hugs. William and Marilee, young as they are, love their big sister and get plenty of attention from me and other loved ones.

I feel guilty because we have a good life, and Penny’s needs don’t feel any more significant than those of our other children.

Continue reading Building Bridges at Not Alone Parents, where I contribute a monthly guest post.

A few weeks back, I got into a fight with my four-year-old son William. I can’t remember the details, though I’m sure it had something to do with getting dressed for school.

I know it had been a rough night of sleep the night before. I know my husband had left the house early. I know I yelled at all three children when they danced and bickered and lounged around instead of putting on their clothes. And I know that eventually I grabbed William and pulled him up from the floor, inadvertently creating a rug burn on the top of his foot. He sobbed. And then, after trying to comfort him, I put my face in my hands and started to cry.

My youngest daughter Marilee, who is almost two, couldn’t understand it. “Why Mommy cwyin’ ?” she was still asking 30 minutes later. William giggled uncertainly, as if he hoped I was putting on a show. But Penny, my eldest, knew immediately that this was for real. She came over to offer a hug, and then she said, gently, “Mom, should we pray?”

Penny was born seven years ago. Her delivery seemed unremarkable. My epidural had worked wonders on the pain, and since the baby weighed a mere five pounds five ounces, I pushed for only 20 minutes before she shot into the world. Her vital signs were good at birth, and she cried a hearty cry upon exiting the womb. For two hours, we experienced the euphoria of many a new parent—the relief that labor and delivery were over, the giddy excitement about what would come, the childlike wonder that we had been entrusted with caring for another human being.

But then a nurse called my husband out of the room, and when he returned, his eyes were brimming. “The doctors think Penny has Down syndrome,” he said. And euphoria turned to dread.

Penny’s birth and the doctor’s recognition that she had Down syndrome, a third copy of chromosome 21 in every cell of her body, rendered me silent before God. I was a seminary student at the time, so I had all sorts of theological resources on hand, but I was afraid to pray. It felt too risky, as if another unanswered or misdirected prayer might silence my faith altogether.

Continue reading Praying with Penny…

If there is anything I have learned as a mother, and particularly as a mother of a child with special needs, it’s that every limitation has a corresponding possibility. Even the fingernail cutting involves those little bodies snuggling their way into my lap and smelling their hair and feeling so grateful that I get to hold onto them for at least a few more years. I am limited–or perhaps I should say that I have chosen to be limited–in what I can accomplish professionally in this season of my children’s lives. But the limitations on my time writing and speaking opens up time for them. Yes, for fingernails and toenails, but also for reading stories and putting bandaids on boo boos and playing games in the car. And these limitations open up possibilities for learning from them too. Lately, I’ve had a strange sense of admiration for our children, and so as Mother’s Day approaches, I want to offer my gratitude for these three gifts I have been given:

I often hear that kids with Down syndrome are stubborn, and maybe that’s true, but with Penny I see it as perseverance. She has been working on tying her shoes for over a year. Every morning, she sat down and tried, for as long as we would let her. She got the initial tie pretty easily, but getting those two loops to come together took practice. And practice. And practice. She worked at it for days, weeks, months. One day in the fall, she did it. We jumped up and down. But it took another four months before she did it again. And then another week before she did it again. And now, almost all the time, she ties her shoes. I’m not sure I have ever worked so hard, so diligently, with so little immediate gratification. But she wanted to do it, and so she tried and tried and tried and she never gave up. She is doing the same thing in her math class and on the tennis court. Trying, trying, trying. Not worrying about what other people can do or whether they learn it faster. Just continuing to work hard. When I grow up, I want to be just like her.

With William, it’s curiosity. He wants to know about everything. He corrected me the other day when I referred to pine cones. “Those are hemlock cones, Mom.” I routinely drop him off at school with a question for him to work on–what was the first living creature? Do miracles really happen? How does that truck cut up the trees and make them into wood chips? I want to be like William too, observing the world around me and trying to figure it all out.

And then there’s Marilee. These past few months especially, I’ve noticed her unusual care for others. Some of it involves creature comfort. She will gladly bring ice water to her siblings when they ask, and she often totters back and forth from the family room to the kitchen to report what one of them needs. But she also worries when people are upset. Yesterday, William hurt himself. She ran upstairs to his room, unprompted, to find his giraffe and blanket and brought them downstairs. It was a simple response to a simple problem. I want to be on the lookout for people in need, and I want to be willing to respond as quickly and sincerely as she does.

I often pay attention to (and bemoan) the countless hours I have given to my children. But I am trying to be open to the three of them, and to the gifts they have to offer. So this Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about what each of our kids has given me lately. And I’m grateful.

photo by Nikki Kahn

I have Alzheimer’s disease. I’m sixty-eight, have had symptoms for a little over two years, and was diagnosed last September. These last eight months have been almost the happiest in my life.

Before my diagnosis, when I considered how I might die, Alzheimer’s was the only one that terrified me. I wasn’t afraid of death, I could deal with pain, but please don’t take my mind away! Don’t let my grandchildren remember me as a doddering old man who doesn’t recognize them!

But within an hour of my diagnosis, my fear was gone and I’d become curious, “Well, this is going to be interesting. What this going to be like?” I can’t explain that transformation; it feels like pure grace.

I’m not in denial about what’s coming; I’m a physician and I know it well: doing very embarrassing things in public, not recognizing my family, gradually dying in a nursing home bed. But there are gifts from this disease, too.

The greatest gift so far is greater emotional openness. To most other people, I was a pleasant, helpful guy but approximately as emotional as a stone—“intimidating” was the word one friend later used. From the inside I was mildly depressed much of the time. That’s changed. No, I’m not a happy-go-lucky extrovert, but others have noticed my openness and feel closer to me. I’m certainly happier; I even weep sometimes … mostly for joy.

But perhaps the greater gift is much deeper relationships with my family and small faith community. Several weeks ago, our community was on a silent retreat. One evening, I watched my wife Marja walk down the path through the woods. I was suddenly aware of a deep longing. She radiated an inner light. Lean and strong, she walked gracefully as if she belonged to those woods and that path. She smiled easily at several of our friends. In those few moments, the fullness of her inner beauty was revealed to me in a way I’d never felt in over fifty years of our relationship. In that moment I felt extraordinarily grateful that we belonged to one another.

But then the future broke in. As I watched her exchange glances with some others, I felt strangely excluded from those relationships. Suddenly, it was five or ten years down the road, and Marja had relationships with others that I was incapable of sharing or even understanding. I felt immediately jealous: I wasn’t able offer her what she needed and she had to look elsewhere. It was as if she were having an affair. In that moment, I felt jealous of any other relationship.

Afterwards, I went outside into the dusk, feeling very alone. As Marja came out the door, I caught her eye and she sat next to me. We clasped all four hands together. Feeling our bodies touch, holding one another, I was comforted and felt safe again … felt holy, actually.

My faith community has gathered around me in the most wonderful way. Without being paternalistic, people are patient when I can’t find a word or make an inconvenient mistake. We take turns preaching in our community. Since I came out to them several months ago, at least four preaches have mentioned me and my disease, not so much in sorrow but rather as an opportunity for us to move deeper into weakness, to faith, to more profound community. I’ve been part of this community for many years but never like this!

It’s early yet. I may know the medical details, but I have no idea, really, what’s coming. I am curious. And I face this uncertain future planted more deeply in family and community.

I’m not afraid.

David Hilfiker is a father, grandfather, ex-physician, writer and founder of Joseph’s House, a home and hospice for homeless people with AIDS and cancer. He blogs at  www.davidhilfiker.blogspot.com.

But I have broken a rule that I actually care about in the past two months because I have featured three guest posts by WONDERFUL writers of EXCELLENT books, and I have failed to actually follow through on giving away their books based upon your comments. So. First of all, I’m sorry. Second of all, let me remind you, even if you aren’t the winner of Rachel Marie Stone’s Eat with Joy, Margot Starbuck’s Permission Granted, and Sarah Dunning Park’s What it is is Beautiful. You could actually support these new authors by buying their books, for yourself, for someone else… And if you missed their words the first time around, here are the three posts again: What Are You Teaching Your Children About Food? by Rachel Marie Stone,  Two Headed Baby Born in Brazil by Margot Starbuck, and Let There Be Yes, by Sarah Dunning Park.

And three, the winners are: Rebecca, Tim, and Elizabeth, respectively. Sorry I took so long everybody.

I hope that this blog has been a safe place to “talk taboo” in the past, whether discussing abortion or adoption or prenatal testing. For this book, I wrote an essay about how to understand the classic Christian text on marriage in Ephesians 5. I’ve found that the idea that wives should “submit” to their husbands gets little attention in either “liberal” or “conservative” circles. The liberals dismiss the idea as outdated and repressive. The conservatives either ignore it in practice or accept it without question or just don’t talk about it. I wrote about why I’m hesitant to talk about this passage and also offered my own thoughts on the subject.

I’m eager to get my own copy of the book so I can read essays from women I respect, like Micha Boyett and Enuma Okoro and Marlena Proper-Graves (among dozens of other contributors). I’m glad this project has already been endorsed by the likes of Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaran, Parker Palmer and Rosemary Radford Ruther.

If you are interested, please take a moment to take a look at the Talking Taboo blog, and consider supporting the campaign. $20 will get you a copy of the book, and giving at higher levels brings other perks with it too.

What are the topics/questions you’re afraid to address when it comes to Christianity?