The thing you need to know about this story is she loves her child. By the end you will doubt this to be true, but there is one thing I can assure you: she loves her child.
Jesus stared down at her from the cross as he often did - a wooden Jesus on a wooden cross: his Calvary not outside Jerusalem but mounted on a 2-foot piece of drywall over the kitchen entryway. She determined the kitchen as the best place for her suffering messiah. She spent most of her time at home there…drinking coffee in the morning, prepping meals, washing dishes, feeding her child.
Sometimes the wood-Christ looked down on her with love. In those moments she found it easy to glance toward his fixed gaze. As painful as it was for him, impaled on the kitchen wall, she knew his love for her put him willingly there. Other times his stare burrowed into the secret chambers of her heart…the ones decorated with guilt and shame. No matter how deeply she tried to bury those secret locations, he could access them. In those moments, she wouldn’t dare lift her face toward his scrutinizing eyes. At other moments the focus wasn’t his eyes but the cross itself - not as the instrument of human atonement but as a scaffolding for building real Life. On those occasions, he whispered from his perch, “If anyone would come after me, she must deny herself, take up her cross and follow me…”
This morning, as she poured a cup of coffee, she couldn’t discern which Jesus looked at her. She sat down at the small kitchen table. Her daughter would wake soon and bounce into the kitchen for some Captain Crunch. She reserved The Captain for Saturdays only and so it became a weekend priority for her daughter. Her hands trembled. She grabbed her mug and brought it to her lips hoping that by occupying them, she could settle the tremors.
She had worked the math. She’d worked it over and over again. Math doesn’t lie. Einstein’s math predicted gravitational waves a hundred years before scientists ever detected them, and her calculations always led to the same conclusion. In a world with seemingly infinite uncertain possibilities, this one was certain. Two + Two always = Four.
Only this one calculation could disarmed all the variables…the seemingly infinite variables.
Take Jason for example. You wouldn’t like him. At first you would. He registers high on the charismatic scale, but it wouldn’t take too many encounters before you determined he was an ass. Why is Jason a variable? He is the Dad and despite a primal instinct to keep her daughter away, the courts can overrule a mother’s intuition. He will influence her - his use or be used philosophy of relationships, his excessive consumption of alcohol, his propensity to bend the truth, his distrust of religion, and his obsession with money. Perhaps it wouldn’t stick, but perhaps it would - altering her daughter’s trajectory, spiraling her away from the arms of Jesus.
Then there’s fucking TikTok. I added the word fucking. She’d never use it. How can you control a mathematical algorithm that knows your brain better than you do? Endless scrolling of be prettier, be skinnier, be funnier, be more productive, be smarter, be a goddamn goddess-fire-breathing-fairy! The Pastor says it’s simple, “Don’t let you kids on TikTok! That’s how you win that battle!” Well, the pastor’s kids are grown; he clearly knows little of the current social media culture. Never mind kids are savages. If you think you are going to out maneuver your teenager on the backdoors and secret passageways of the social media landscape, you’ve already lost. And what if you do…what if you ban your kid from participating? That leads to a whole other variable - being the outsider, excomunicado, the weirdo. Human survival depends on social belonging. It’s a tightrope and stepping off on either side leads to a death plummet.
So many voices in the span of a lifetime…80 plus years of screams and whispers luring her daughter toward the path of the prodigal. She’d seen too many parents with broken hearts turn their house upside down for the lost coin, wander the fields with headlamps for the missing sheep, die empty waiting on the front porch for the prodigal to return.
She sipped her coffee and glanced upward at the Wooden Christ. He reminded her, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
The variables already chart exponentially and we’ve yet to add suffering to the equation. It is by far the worst part of being a parent: watching your child suffer. Even now, at this early hour, the morning show hums in the adjacent room, “The refugee crisis continues. The numbers grow by thousands each week. Aid is difficult due to the political turmoil in the area. Children are literally starving to death. We’ve got Katie Polowski here from Convoy of Hope to discuss some of the challenges in getting aid to the growing number of refugees…”
She nods as if the television host affirms her conclusion. Of course she is helpless against international power politics and the potential for a few yahoos in Washington to upend her daughter’s life. And foreign chess is only one side of this multisided pain dice: cancer - take your pick from 200 different types; or ALS or MS. There’s enough disease to fill the oceans. Not to mention broken hearts, divorce, unemployment, loneliness, mental illness, anxiety, social ostracization, loved ones dying…She couldn’t control any of life’s shrapnel hurling toward her daughter. Sure she could teach her to bob and weave, she could foster resilience but eventually it will hit, tear, scar, bleed, maim and likely debilitate.
She sighed then whispered words from a childhood hymn, one deserted by contemporary churches but whose hope cozied itself in her heart: This world is not my home…I’m just a-passin’ through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.” Yes there beyond the blue would God’s presence neutralize all threats! That’s the end game, the goal, real existence. As a mom, her greatest duty was to ensure her daughter made it.
“Two + Two always = Four.” She reiterated to herself.
Crossing the small kitchen, she reached into the cabinet and pulled out the Captain Crunch. She could hear her daughter’s morning movements. She would descend the stairwell soon.
Her heart accelerated. She tried to regulate it with her Pastor’s words from last year’s infant funeral, “Daisy has left a giant void in our hearts, one that will never be filled in this lifetime but I can assure you of this, such innocence as found in a child, as found in Daisy is certainly in the arms of God - at peace forever!”
She moved slowly but deliberately now toward the refrigerator and grabbed the whole milk.
She felt a clamminess envelope her hands. She glanced up to the Wooden Jesus for support. He responded, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” At Christ’s words, she straightened herself and looked him in the eyes perhaps for the first time, “What about laying down one’s soul?”
She could hear the footsteps pattering down the stairs. She poured the cereal into the bowl. She covered it with milk. Then she retrieved the small vial from her purse on the counter. I wont’t tell you how she came to acquire the vial. And I definitely won’t tell you the contents of the vial for fear you might use the chemistry for a nefarious purpose. She carefully stirred it into the breakfast bowl as tears streaked down her cheeks, the most bitter-sweet tears to ever wet a face.
“Good morning Baby! Are you ready for breakfast?”
At this moment, you see her as a monster, but in the scope of eternity she is better understood as a martyr and a saint.