It is a very dangerous job
I do not know the clerk's name.
That makes me a bad journalist I suppose. His Asian Indian English runs together so quickly it sounds like a mumble to my Southern ears, but I pick out the words "prostitution" and "drugs" and finally "working at a gas station is the most dangerous job" before he steps out to move his car, leaving me alone with racks of porn mags in plastic bags, male part and pleasure enhancers behind the bulletproof glass enclosing the register, cigarettes and lottery tickets.
Why am I here? Well, I came here for this reason. To...buy a bag of trail mix and try to notice some things. But in trying to leave after five minutes of snooping I realized my keys were in my locked car.
This gave me plenty of time to peruse the Marietta Daily Journal and share several awkward moments of silence and difficult communication with the store clerk whose name I'll go back to get later on this week.
My job there isn't finished.
Last I remember about this store from many years ago was a large lady who worked the counter, swiveling in a backless chair between cigarettes and scratch offs. And when I was in fourth grade and used to walk here from a nearby park to buy a Fruitopia and wait on my dad to pick me up, the outside bathrooms worked.
Four or five months (could be longer) now, yellow caution tape has stretched across the bathrooms' openings, and I can only guess this is just as much a security measure as the surveillance cameras linked to a room full of men who will call at the first sign of trouble. (This is what the nameless clerk told me).
"They are broken," the clerk says. "You can go see. You can go try them. Go! Try them!"
He's smiling and saying all of this very quickly. I suspect he's had to explain this many times before.
I suspect the "broken" bathrooms are closely linked to "prostitution" and "drugs."
"It is a very dangerous job," he tells me, again.
We need all the pieces
We naturally value order and de-clutter, but love is not neat and clean so neither is family. "I love that our garage is full of kids toys," Megan said as we pulled in, our kids dead to the world asleep in their seats. She was serious about the big wheel stacked atop a scooter leaning against a Spiderman bike leaning against the back wall.
This is our merry life. Soccer balls buried and brown in old leaves, a swing hanging from a retired climbing rope hanging from a branch on the Maple in our front yard, a plastic swimming pool reassigned as a sled for sliding down the hillside pine island in our front yard. Tunnels made from couch cushions, blankets everywhere, piles of stuffed animals, rogue Legos. Dirty shirt sleeves from Benjamin's food, and other, wipings.
Love is not safe, clean, orderly, efficient, but all the pieces are important to make love real.
When Christ became flesh and dwelt among us, no one could hide their humanity from Him and still today He brings all the pieces—ugly, smelly, human—to light and says "now we know what we have to work with." And He goes to work.
And through me and in me, and in any of those who are His, He works in the rubble, in the dark corners of our homes where we think no light could reach.
Amen.
A grief observed
Rain and life continue in Atlanta, but Megan's crying in bed because friends of family lost their children last night. I can't process it and I have a sick feeling and the questions of "why" to God. I watch my kids, their little quirks, look into their eyes for longer than usual, give extra hugs and twirls around, linger a little longer after prayer.
Megan walks angrily into the kitchen. She is angry on their behalf, on the kids' behalf, angry at God perhaps. Is it okay to be angry at God? Was Job?
It's certainly okay to be angry, and perhaps wicked not to be stricken in some way, that two young lives were taken with a wake of two disoriented, grieving parents returning to empty cribs, the small folded clothes fit for two-year-old bodies, piles of toys, a house that until 8:30 this morning was filled with play, laughter, whining, and the hope of what life would be like when young mouths began to form full sentences.
What would I do with this nightmare?
A friend at work says he's still numb after a decade of grieving his son, who complained of headaches and died of an aneurism shortly after. Would I ever recover? Where is God?
At 8:30 this morning I was hit with what their reality would be at the same time. Did they stay at their home? Did they sit in silence? Now, as this day brightens, what are they doing with the dark? It's none of my business, and yet it is. It's my business to grieve with those who grieve but with this I don't know how.
I know C.S. Lewis was observing his own grief as he wrote "A Grief Observed," and I'm observing a long grief. A very long grief. Someone else's grief. One I can't imagine living. It would be unbearable. It is unbearable to think of.
Now there are no more neutral moments with my children, none taken for granted, none during which I don't think "this could be the last." The last goodnight. Last hug. Last "daddy, will you twirl me around?" "Daddy, will you pray to me and sing to me?" "Daddy, I want to hug you."
No more neutral moments. And if you've read this far I'll take this moment to say please pray if you pray. Pray for this couple who lost their twins in one night. Pray that God would release them from feelings of guilt, feelings of knee buckling grief, from questioning His goodness and sovereignty as I, even on the periphery, am tempted to do. Pray for people to enter this couple's life, speak words to them that heal, surround them with presence and be those in whose presence they are able to form the difficult questions.
