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<\/a>He didn\u2019t know what to do after his wife took the kids and left him, so he joined a motorcycle gang, turned to drugs and drink to dull the pain.<\/p>\n\u201cI don\u2019t really blame him,\u201d his daughter said. Still the hurt of all that shadows her. \u201cI have a hard time crying. I can cry for others, for God even, but not for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her mama kept running long after she left her daddy. She married five times. One of those men claimed to be a Christian man. He took the kids to church and lead the family in prayer, before and after the beatings. That man believed he was the hand of God administering the discipline and wrath of God.<\/p>\n
Her brother didn\u2019t remember the beatings. He thought she made it all up until he got on the battlefield in Iraq and it all came to him in a rush, the way the terror of war does for those who\u2019ve survived it.<\/p>\n
Throughout her growing up years, she kept thinking: I don\u2019t belong in this family. This can\u2019t be my real life.\u00a0She wasn\u2019t like her brother, her sister, or her mother. \u201cI never felt like I belonged in my own family. It didn\u2019t make any sense until I went in search of my father.\u201d<\/p>\n
She did that in her mid-20s, after she got saved.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow does a girl in her 20s get saved when she hasn\u2019t grown up in a church?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m never surprised anymore how these conversations spill out off strangers. This time an isolated corner of Salt Lake City airport. I was working. She sat down near me, clutching a Karen Kingsbury book.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou like Karen Kingsbury?\u201d I said, choosing purposely to engage a stranger.<\/p>\n
A decade ago, she\u2019d received a call at her home in Arizona telling her that her granddaddy was dying, so she hopped a plane east. \u00a0Her father and his father had been at odds for over 35 years. That\u2019s no longer water under the bridge \u2014 that\u2019s a sizable flood to try and divert. Why are we always so willing to reconcile in death what we won\u2019t in life?<\/p>\n
They couldn\u2019t talk at first, her daddy and her.\u00a0What is there to say to a man you love but don\u2019t really know?<\/p>\n
But she\u2019d been a good study of her mama. She\u2019d learned how to keep a bad relationship going. She asked the hospice nurses to pray for her, pray that God would give her the strength to leave the man who was her lover, the man who beat her like that other daddy-wannabe.<\/p>\n
Thank God for good women. Those hospice ladies didn\u2019t lecture her, didn\u2019t boss her about her business. They simply said they would pray for her. And sure enough, it wasn\u2019t long after her granddaddy passed, after she went back to home to the broken relationship that continued to break her, that on a particularly good day, a day when everyone was happy and laughing, she announced to her boyfriend that she was leaving him.<\/p>\n
She moved East, to spend time getting to know her father, finally. She began to see the reason that her mama had pushed her away \u2014 she was more like her daddy than she\u2019d ever imagined.<\/p>\n
Her parents had met at a Bible College in Tennessee.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan you believe that? \u201d the girl asked. Her highlighted hair fell in gentle folds around a smile that flashes like a faint star twinkling. She can\u2019t see the prettiness I do.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it\u2019s like we are all walking through a House of Mirrors, trying to determine which reflection is really us, unaware that every single one of those images is distorted because we are staring at the wrong thing. To really see ourselves we have to step away from the mirrors of self, and get face-to-face with God.<\/p>\n
The mystery of us is revealed only when it\u2019s God\u2019s face we seek, not our own.<\/p>\n
This, people, is why God put the law there \u2014 for our own protection \u2014 not to be contrary or arbitrary. \u00a0It\u2019s there to help us stay the course. So we don\u2019t come to the end of our days and realize, far too late, the path we blazed scorched the earth, burned down homes and left many severely scarred. \u00a0Shame kept her mama running, not only from her past, but from the future and the hope God had intended.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan I pray with you before I go?\u201d I asked, after folding my laptop back in its bag. I wasn\u2019t sure how much time had lapsed or exactly when the flight for home departed. Everything had been hinky-kinky since I\u2019d called home early that morning and found out the husband was sick. I paid the extra $50 to change the flights so I could get home earlier, though still not early. It\u2019s a long way from Pensacola to Pasco.<\/p>\n
So I knelt there in that airport and prayed with this young girl. Prayed for God to redeem it all. God doesn\u2019t plan our hurts but he won\u2019t waste them either. He takes the refuse of life and creates beauty from brokeness.<\/p>\n
He is Creator God. An Artist and a Poet.<\/p>\n
An hour or so later, at the end of the D-Gates, I pulled out my ticket and checked my seat: 6A, when I looked over and saw her standing yonder, holding her own ticket.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere are you headed?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cPasco\u00a0to visit a friend,\u201d she said. \u00a0\u201cWhat about you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSame,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat seat are you in?\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at her ticket: 6B<\/p>\n
Right there at the D-Gates, among a standing-room only crowd, we laughed as God whispered his poetry over us.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
He didn\u2019t know what to do after his wife took the kids and left him, so he joined a motorcycle gang, turned to drugs and drink to dull the pain. \u201cI don\u2019t really blame him,\u201d his daughter said. Still the hurt of all that shadows her. \u201cI have a hard time crying. I can cry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":90,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[589,656,1295,1424,1512,1663,1807],"class_list":["post-1052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-florida","tag-god","tag-pensacola","tag-redeem","tag-salt-lake-city","tag-strangers","tag-utah"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>He didn\u2019t know what to do after his wife took the kids and left him, so he joined a motorcycle gang, turned to drugs and drink to dull the pain.<\/p>\n