Three Hours One Tuesday

For three hours on a Tuesday afternoon my wife and I were having twins. Healthy twin girls. I can't tell you how excited we were. My wife cried...said something like"poor Christian"...and we immediately made plans to move him out of the big bedroom upstairs to make room for the girls. Amazing what you can do with three hours. I had them graduated from high school, going to college, becoming doctors and lawyers...pastors...

I remember it well...we came home and I went back upstairs to finish painting the bedroom with this rock in my gut. "Why didn't they say everything is ok?" I kept asking myself that question over and over. "Is everything ok?" I asked the technician. "Didn't she say anything?" - referring to the doctor that had examined the sonogram in complete, horrible, silence. "No..." "Well it's hard to tell with twins..." And that was that. So I went home and painted, listening to Sufjan Stevens, afraid to let myself relax.

I came down a few hours later, having finished the bedroom, and noticed my wife was on the phone. She was crying. She scribbled down some weird technical jargon for "one of our girls is not going to live". She had a terrible condition - there was nothing we could do - one would live and the other would die.

Terrible thing being a parent. Frightening. I don't cry easily...my wife will tell you that...but now when I see or read about the plight of children my heart breaks and tears well up in my eyes. That's what being a father does to you. So what do you do when you can't do a damn thing. Nothing but wait. Wait for a daughter to be born to die. This is what my summer consisted of...waiting and preparing for the inevitable.

For some reason I kept thinking of Paul's words in Romans..."Jacob I have loved...Esau I hated." Hated? What does that mean? I know I'm taking the text out of context...but I can't get the words out of my head. One lives, the other dies...doesn't make much sense. The randomness of the whole thing...the "rotten luck" as our doctor put it. She kept telling us it was nothing we did...these things just happen...but it's hard to live with "things just happen".

Don't get me wrong...I'm not pissed at God or anything. I don't question his goodness. I don't scream "why me!!!" I'm just pissed and I have a right to be. The Old Testament lets me be pissed. David, Job, Israel, Jesus - they all let me be pissed. But I am thankful for the experiences of others. I am thankful for Jurgen Moltmann, Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, and countless others who have helped me make sense of the Biblical narrative. Who have helped me contemplate the meaning of Exodus 3:7 "For I have seen the misery of my people...", and the forsakeness of Christ on the cross. I am thankful for their help in understanding what the resurrection of Jesus Christ means for my daughter...along with the hope of bodily resurrection and new creation. I am thankful for my years at a Catholic high school - for going to mass on Thursdays...and for experiencing the Stations of the Cross during lent. I am thankful for St. James Episcopal Church in Oskaloosa, IA and the sickly old lady who always sat in the back pew, bent over the kneeler pouring her broken humanity out in prayer. And for the thoughts of Moltmann...who helped me wrestle with the history the dead have with God...and N.T Wright who gave me the green light to offer prayers for my dead daughter. Frankly, I'm passed the point of caring if it is heretical or not...if loving my dead daughter and trying to make sense of her death makes me a heretic...so be it. But most of all...I am thankful for all of those people in my life who let me curse what has happened, without questioning my faith, and just give me the space to be righteously pissed.