The one with a promise

After Ephesians 6:1-9

A history of covenants,

promises, with Adam,

with Noah, with Abraham,

promises made and

promises kept. And

a commandment, one

of ten, the first with

a promise attached,

not only do this,

be this, but do this

and here’s what happens.

Honor your father,

honor your mother

—and here it is—

a twofold promise—

that it may go well

with you

and you may live

long in the land.

It starts with 

the most basic 

of human conditions

and relationships –

child and parent –

with this addition,

a word of advice

to parents: 

don’t provoke

your children to anger,

but raise them in – not

yours – but the discipline

and instruction of the lord,

and that assumes that

parents themselves have

been taught what that is,

by their parents. 

 

Photograph by Sorasak via Unsplash. Used with permission.

When Your Phone Dies: "A Hurricane in My Head" by Matt Abbott

What do you do when your phone dies? Poet Matt Abbott has a suggestion, at least for your young teen. And it’s radically counter-cultural. 

Abbott is a poet and educator who lives in Yorkshire in the U.K. He loves poetry; he began writing it when he was 17. He wants everyone, of all ages, to love poetry, “especially those who consider it a dull and irrelevant artform.” He’s published a collection for adults, Two Little Ducks (And Selected Poems 2015-2018), based on a highly successful one-man show. Now he’s published a poetry collection for children.

 

A Hurricane in My Head: Poems for When Your Phone Dies is aimed at children in the middle grades, but the fact is that it’s great fun for children of all ages, including grandfathers.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Loving children

After Ephesians 5:1-20

Children are loved,

and children imitate.

Being loved is walking

in love, with a holy love,

a fierce love,

the same love given

to us, the love

of faithfulness even

to death, a love

which amazes,

which terrifies,

and we ask how,

how are we loved,

how are we to love?

Photograph by Lebin Yuriy via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Two kingdoms

After Luke 18:15-17

Two kingdoms face each other

across a gulf, a valley, a canyon,

a divide, deep into the earth, one

the kingdom of children, the other

the kingdom of men, of man,

two kingdoms:

one relying on faith

one relying on acts

one a path to peace

one a journey to war

one a passage in faith

one an existence in fear

one kingdom yearned for

one kingdom occupied

Photograph by Michael Janek via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Kingdom of children

After Luke 18:15-17

It is the kingdom of children,

the kingdom of awe and wonder,

of innocence and trust,

the kingdom where the hearing

is the knowing, as words travel

from voice to ear to heart, and

the truth is heard and

recognized as soon as it’s spoken.

Such are the hearts, 

such are the souls,

who reside in the kingdom

of children, the kingdom

received by the children.

Photograph by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“A Thousand Small Sparrows” by Jeff Leeland

A warning: don’t read this book in public. I did, and everyone at the gym wondered why I was crying.

A Thousand Small Sparrows by Jeff Leeland is about children, and specifically sick children. It’s also about well children, and how an initiative to connect the two came to happen.

It started with Leeland’s own son, Michael, diagnosed with leukemia. Leeland had taken a new job with a school, and his medical insurance was in that limbo land of the new policy hasn’t started and pre-existing conditions won’t be covered (this was before the Affordable Care Act). Students and staff at Leeland’s school began making small contributions toward the family’s need for a $200,000 bone marrow transplant for Michael. The word spread, and eventually all of the needed funds were raised, and Michael received his transplant and went on to live a healthy life.

If Michael, why not others?

Thus began what became known as the Sparrow Clubs, a program to help connect families of sick children with schools. Schools “adopt” a sick child and provide the family with support, encouragement, and fundraising help. Companies and other organizations get involved. People outside the school can hear about the effort and support it.

In effect, it’s a way to bring kindness to a family desperately needing help and a focus on the needs of others for schoolkids. 

Jeff Leeland

Leeland includes story after story of how children in medical crises and their families have been helped. It makes for emotional reading. Not every child survives; in fact, many of the children involved are experiencing what are fatal diseases. The disease, however, is not the point. Helping children and their families is the point, regardless of the eventual outcome. The author tells the story of his own family in an earlier book, One Small Sparrow: The Remarkable, Real-Life Drama of One Community's Response to Save a Little Boy 's Life. He’s also the author of Disarming the Teenage Heart: Helping Teens Navigate Today’s Cultural Minefields. A Thousand Small Sparrows was first published in 2009.

The book presents stories about the sick children and their families, stories by the school students and classes who get involved in helping, teachers, parents, and others. The stories are encouraging, moving, and often heartbreaking. 

Just don’t read it in public unless you’re okay with people watching you cry.

Top photograph by Piron Guillame via Unsplash. Used with permission.

I was their normal adult

We were a young married couple living in Houston, both working – me full-time and my wife part-time as she finished her degree. On alternating Saturdays, I was doing volunteer work at a home for emotionally disturbed children. The home was called Cambio House, and it was operated by Harris County in what at one time had been a large residence right near downtown.

My volunteer work was supposed to be simple and fun – taking the kids who had earned enough points for good behavior on a two- or three-hour field trip. It might be a movie, a visit to the park or zoo, just something fun that allowed them to remember that they were kids.

The problem was that the field trips turned out to be few and far between. The kids rarely had enough points. Behavior problems were always an issue. And these were children who were classified as mildly disturbed. All of them had been separated from their parents and were legally wards of the county. All were under the age of 13; teens went to a different residence program.

One little boy liked to kill small animals, like cats and dogs.

One 8-year-old girl had been found by police digging food out of garbage cans. She had been taking care of her bipolar, drug-addicted mother since she was five.

A ten-year-old boy named Henry had been separated from his brother and parents. The family had been found living in a small, ramshackle garage. The parents were both deaf and mute, and had themselves been abandoned as children; they had no idea how to raise children. Henry and his brother had been adopted, but the family had returned Henry to the court because they said they couldn’t handle more than one child.

Henry looked and usually acted like a normal 10-year-old. But Henry was not normal. Like many of the other children at Cambio, he couldn’t control his anger, and when he became angry, he would physically explode.

Field trips were rare. My usual volunteer work involved playing games there at the home, and sometimes having to help the staff hold down children who had gone on a rampage. And you never knew when something would trigger an explosion.

It’s no surprise that the staff had a high burnout rate. I outlasted almost all of them, but then I only was there a few hours at a time.

All of these children had suffered trauma of some kind or another. In Heart Made Whole: Turning Your Unhealed Pain into Your Greatest Strength, Christa Black Gifford describes two kinds of trauma – Trauma A and Trauma B. Trauma A is suffering the absence of something you should have received. Trauma B is suffering the things that never should have happened, like abuse, or rape, or divorce.

These children at Cambio House, these children classified as mildly disturbed, had suffered both Trauma A and Trauma B. Some had never been loved. Some had been abused. Some had been sexually abused. Some had a visceral hatred for any adult. Some believed they could never be loved, so they did things that made sure they would never be loved.

How do you manage that pain in a child’s life? Trauma, Gifford says, is “any place in your heart where your pain stays greater than your joy.” How do help a suffering child find joy, when all they may show you is hate?

The staff director told me that the most important thing I could do – that I was doing – was being a normal adult. These children didn’t have much if any experience with normal adults. The only normal adults they knew were therapists, doctors, psychologists, and social workers – professionals who had to care for them and deal with them. They didn’t know normal adults.

I was their normal adult.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading Heart Made Whole. Consider reading along and join in the discussion. To see what others are saying about this chapter, “Managing Trauma,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Kai Stachowiak via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

An Easter Book for Children

I reviewed it here two years ago, but if you’re looking for a children’s book on Easter, one of the best I’ve found is Why Do We Celebrate Easter? by Mark Sutherland and illustrated by Julie Hammond. It’s aimed at children ages 3 to 7, and it’s a delightful story (with engaging pictures).

It’s available in both paperback and Kindle versions (as well as Nook).

When the Need is Overwhelming

This chapter of Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption, entitled “Just one More, evoked a sense of quiet and reflection, deep thought, and several large intakes of breath.

You help one child, and a dozen more need your help even more.

You care for a child, and then have to send him back into the bad home environment he came from.

You change a baby’s diaper, and find worms, and you know hundreds more have the same problem.

You come face-to-face with your own limitations. You cannot meet the need that exists. If you try with too many, you will fail with all. You know intellectually that God could provide if He so chose.

But He doesn’t. Or the help doesn’t materialize.

And the little boy goes back to the home where he’s unloved.

The baby’s health is restored, and you keep her.

In Uganda, Katie Davis is living in the extremes. She experiences extreme joy when a child is helped. And extreme desolation and anguish when all the other children aren’t.

She does two things. She prays. And she clings to God even more.

If her faith was shallow, if the seed fell among the rocky wayside, she would burn out and leave. But that’s not what happens. The seed has fallen on good soil.

It’s the eternal question – why does God allow such suffering? And why does God allow such suffering to fall so hard on children, always so hard on children?

Katie keeps the little baby, whom she names Patricia, and then proceeds to describe her personalities and unique attributes, which Katie does with every child she adopts into her family.

As a single woman, she can only adopt girls under Ugandan law, and little Michael, who weighs less at six years old than my grandson weighs at two, must return to the family where he was so terribly neglected. But a prayer is answered for Michael.

Katie realizes that God is no stranger to this awfulness that happens to children.

The suffering, and the awfulness, fell hardest on His own child.

We’ve been discussing Kisses from Katie, led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Katie Becomes a Mommy, Times 5

Katie becomes a mommy. Five times over. And this is just the start.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption by Katie Davis and Beth Clark. Katie is living in rural Uganda, serving as a missionary. One thing has led to another, like they always do, and Katie finds herself adopting three girls, and then two more.

This is part of the tragedy of too much of central and southern Africa. Wracked by civil war, disease, high mortality rates due to AIDS and other factors we would find alien anywhere in the United States, children too numerous to count have been forced to become adults. Too many children have to care for younger siblings. Too many have to care for sick parents.

With the first three Katie adopts, their parents are dead or gone and their grandmother can barely find enough food for herself. And so a 9-year-old cares for her younger sisters, and the 5-year-old has to work in the fields to find food.

For more than a decade, we sponsored a little boy in Kenya through World Vision, until the development goals were achieved and the community moved to self-sufficiency.

We didn’t just send a monthly check; we followed Andera John’s life. He lived with an intact family in western Kenya. Our sponsorship meant he could go to school, and we received regular report cards. Sometimes we sent extra gifts, and over time his family bought two milk cows (one for the family and one to provide income by selling the milk to others), a goat, clothes, school uniforms and other things they needed. We have a picture of Andera John and his brother holding the leads for the two cows while his older sister stands in the background with a new sweater – one that was hers and not a hand-me-down. Our cost was small indeed, but it helped propel the family’s fortunes.

Right now through our church, we’re in the process of sponsoring another boy in Kenya and a girl in India. Lots of churches have programs like this, sometimes worked through the missions ministry, and organizations like World Vision and Compassion International have more children for sponsorships than sponsoring families can be found.

It’s not the same as officially adopting and raising five little girls, but a very small contribution can have a huge impact.

Related:

Compassion International’s web site

World Vision’s web site


To see more posts on this chapter of Kisses from Katie, please visit Jason Stasyszen's site, Connecting to Impact. 

Mark Sutherland's "Why Do We Celebrate Easter?"

My reading is nothing if not eclectic. And now I’ve read a simple, delightful telling of the Easter story, designed especially for children. (OK, so I’m a child at heart.)

Why Do We Celebrate Easter? by Mark Sutherland started as the words Sutherland told his own children (then ages 3 to 7) about the reason for Easter. He starts where the real story starts – with Adam and Eve at the creation and fall. The story follows the birth and life of Jesus, including his crucifixion and resurrection, including regular reminders that this was part of God’s overall plan.

Sutherland uses simple language, designed precisely for his 7-and-under audience. The story can be read by older children and easily followed by those younger. The illustrations by artist Julie Hammond match the simplicity of the text (although I think I enjoyed them as much as any young child might).

In about a year or so, I know what I’m going to be reading to my grandson about Easter. Why Do We Celebrate Easter? is a delightful rendering of a serious, important story.

My Two Sons

I’ve talked or mentioned both of my children here before, but I thought I would give a little more detail without embarrassing them too badly.

We have two sons, which in my family is no surprise. My older brother has two sons; I have two sons; my younger brother has three sons, I do have a half-sister from my father’s first marriage who has – yes – two sons. My nephews from my older brother have three boys and a girl between them (obviously, one of my nephews didn’t get the right instructions). And my oldest son now has – a son.

My oldest, Travis, is 30, is married to Stephanie and the father of Cameron. He manages a Hilton hotel here in St. Louis. And he blogs at Life Changes, Do We? His blogging was a real surprise because he never showed much inclination toward writing while he was in school. In fact, this was the child who told me during in his sophomore year in college, with real surprise in his voice, that studying actually helped him take a test.

He was born thinking he was an adult. He walked at nine months, and he walked for one day. After that, he ran. And he was quick. He tried to start my car in the garage when he was 2. He figured out how to escape from his baby bed by throwing the teddy bear over the side and then jumping on top the bear to cushion the jump. Or he slid down the curtains, bending the curtain rod.

He loved sports from the time he could watch television. We found him at 5 a.m. one Saturday morning when he wasn’t quite five, watching golf on TV. He loved (loves) all sports, but he especially loves baseball. He inherited that gene from his maternal grandfather; he certainly didn’t get it from his father, who once scandalized his wife’s family by saying he thought baseball was boring. I have since learned better. With Travis, we did Little League baseball for years. We did the teen leagues. We did basketball games. We did soccer. Did I tell you that I’m not sports-inclined? My mother-in-law beat me once in basketball – we were playing HORSE. And she was on crutches.

Our youngest is Andrew, who is 22 and gainfully employed with Farmers Insurance in Kansas City. We waited almost eight years to have Andrew, because Travis almost convinced us we would be a one-child family. Andrew arrived at the end of a very difficult year – the death of father, a blow-up at the church we were attending, and my career suddenly a shambles.

While his brother would crawl into the laps of strangers at restaurants, Andrew would become nearly hysterical at the sight of a stranger. He'd become hysterical at the sight of a neighbor.

Andrew also likes sports, but has always been more selective about it than his older brother. He loves soccer, and I think his life’s ambition still is to own a European football team. He was always the quiet and rather shy one of the two boys, and I think we worried about him until his sophomore year in high school. He came home one day and said he’d been nominated to this national program, and he wanted to go to Australia for three weeks in the summer. Swoon we did, but we played it cool and didn’t let him see us in shock.

He went, and he came back almost a different kid. He snorkeled on the Great Barrier Reef, camped in the Australian outback in the winter, learned to crack a whip, spent four days with a family in Sydney and went to school with their kids. And the next summer he went to Europe with the same program, and harvested tomatoes on Malta, discovered gelato in Italy and thought Paris was a pretty cool place.

Physically, my oldest looks like my wife’s side of the family, and my youngest looks like my side of the family. The photo above was taken at Andrew’s graduation from the University of Missouri in May, and you can see the family resemblance in both of them.

One of the coolest things about the two of them is that despite the almost eight years difference in their ages, they are really close to each another. Andrew was the best man at his brother's wedding.

They’ve both turned into rather decent adults. Yes, for a long time we didn’t know that would happen, especially the teen and college years. For both of them.

Just like their father. Except we still wonder about him.


To see other posts on children, please visit the One Word Blog Carnival over at Bridget Chumbley's place.