Join the Long Defeat

I wonder some times that if my life was a movie, what would the audience be cheering me to do right now?

Because I know what I want to do a lot.  It mainly involves throwing in towels and yelling a lot in the woods, which I coincidentally have done recently.  I also scared some hikers.

We all have good and bad days and then we get those days when you just feel stuck.

If you have enough days like that, it just hurts. It begins to form these patterns in our heads that surrender hope before the day begins.  We start from behind in our minds.  There is no out because each day will be more of the same.  It will be another bummer and we will go home exhausted and broken.

Those days come and go a lot, but they don’t last forever-even when it seems they will never stop.

I can say this, even though it sounds a lot cliche and little idealistic, because I have learned something lately, namely that Autism is…

…relentless.

It never sleeps, takes a day off, pulls out its talons from my son’s little frame for a weekend or says, “enough, you guys win.”

This morning I was 10 minutes late for work.  Not because I had something to do, but because my son is two and a half and decided to take a bath in the toilet this morning.  Literally.

I don’t know why he chose the moment right before the moment we had to be out the door, but he did.  I caught him halfway in the toilet bowl, splashing around without a care in the world.  It would have been funny, except for one thing that it meant for us…we would get to school ten minutes late.

It is not a huge thing to almost everyone, but Jack is not almost everyone.  It meant that at school, instead of sitting with the kids at the tables with milk, he needed to go play outside.  It sounds insignificant, but to Jack it is a completely different schedule.  This means that his day is not normal, his routine is shattered and so he reacts.

I stood there in his classroom, trying to beat down urge to explode or cry as Jack’s Autism gained a head of steam and the inconsolable screaming and cries began out of his little frame, all the while knowing that there was nothing I could do but wait it out.  That no amount of talking could change his mind in that moment.

My head swirled up in Psalm 55…

I said, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest.
     I would flee far away…

…and the most heroic thing I could think of to do was simply to stay.  Not because I am so good, but because I am so fettered and dependent on a Grace.

When we first found out about Jack and his Autism, it was a strange time, like trying to hear someone narrate your life while underwater, which may not make sense but it is the closest i can get to what it was like.

However, in the slow chaos, one thing rose to the surface over and over.

It was not that we could overcome.

It was not that we would be rescued.

It was not that it was just “a phase that kids his age go through” or that “boys develop differently than girls.”  Those people kinda suck and need to stop.  I know they don’t mean harm, but I don’t think they mean any good either.

No, what we heard all the time, what God pulled my face to His and whispered was this beautiful, tragic phrase:

This

will

make

you

grieve….

                …hard.

Our home would be besieged.

Our tidy walls would be smashed to bits.

It was going to hurt.

A lot.

But in the grief, we would find God, if we would just hold on.  He would never leave, it would not get better for a while, but we would be better if we held on.  Which is all utterly unnatural I have discovered.  Pain makes you shrink back.  If I were to come near something hot, my instinct would be to pull back, not leave my hand in the fire.  And yet I feel God asks us to trust Him and do just that.  Sometimes God leads us into the desert to remind us of where we come from.

I hate it.

This idea always reminds me of a time at the cabin of a family friend.  It was an enormous cabin and on a late November day, it began to snow…a lot.  I stood out watching the snow for a long time, and although I was under an overhang, as the wind picked up, the snow was washing all over me.  I looked around, but there were no places on the small patio not covered in snow.  Everything was quickly freezing under an icy blanket, except right next to a L-shaped pillar in the very front of the patio, the one place on the patio that was the closest to the storm.  I went over to it and as I backed into the pillar as best I could, I escaped the storm, by being actually more in it that ever before.  The wind and snow whipped around the pillar, but as I stayed pressed into it, the flakes swirled around, but never touched me.  I don’t know the physics of this, but I do know that in that moment I heard God say: “Pay Attention.”

…Because that is exactly what God is like.

The moments I give up, those tragically infrequent times when I realize I cannot keep going and I cry out from the depths, He tucks me into cleft of His Love I am safe.  In the shelter of his immovable Presence, I find the storm can’t touch me.  That He holds me close and says, “Pay Attention.  Watch the victory of your Healer.”

C.S. Lewis once wrote a letter to a young child where he told the little girl, “…it is the difference between a picture and a map.  Maps tell you how to get to a place, but pictures explain the scene when you did.”

We can talk all we want about Grace, but until we are led by the hand out into the desert and God leaves us there, it is just an idea.

We learn Grace with our hearts in fires.  In the pain, in the moment when God and I go to the desert and it seems like He leaves me, I realize that we can only justly sing out that “all I need is you God” when He is all we have left.  When I give up my ideas of Him and admit that my heart is tarred and scared, but if I can just get near you, You don’t have to let me come all the way back, but I can just get close to You again, that will be enough.  Just please let me be near you…  Those are the scenes were I begin to, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, choose to “fight the long defeat.”  To give our lives back to things that matter.  To become fools and hold on to the idea that we can’t actually hold on to anything, but God anymore.

To in dying find Resurrection and Life.

 

When you feel His hand, I hope you hold on and join the long defeat.