Sober
Because I just don’t understand why you can’t be better now.
Why can’t you just stop?
Why can’t you just stop?
Why can’t you just stop?
Why can’t you just stop?
But I don’t know that I’ve ever asked
Why can’t you just stop?
It’s not that we can’t see, it’s that we don’t want to. The buzzwords of this day and age are objects we want to sequester: ideas that we can stomach as long as they go back into their box at the end of the meeting.
Compassion
Empathy
Healing
Anything rooted in love is undeniably messy. Everything clothed in grace is overwhelmingly inconvenient. The lengths to which people will go to differentiate themselves from the people they’d have compassion for from 9–5 is fascinating. I guess, by convention, that makes me fascinating, too.
Patience is a gift we can so easily lavish on other people’s children. Professional boundaries become our hedge of protection. How readily we embrace options that we’d never a day in our life consider for the people in our circle. When it comes to the ones we love, it’s different. The first things we lose are the ingredients that are vital to their healing.
And it’s only now that it occurs to me that it’s not that I couldn’t find out why: it’s that I didn’t want to know. Sometimes, we don’t want to understand. Understanding is messy, and there is no hedge in sight to contain the substance of the fallout. The more I understand, the more I see myself in you…and you in me.
I am easily distracted in class…and easily distracted, in general. 64 crayons on the floor instead of in the box on the table. My mind is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Thinking things like
Why doesn’t he want food? And
What’s he going to use the money for? And
Many other questions that I already know the answer to. What I don’t know is why I’m asking the questions. I open the door because my window is frozen shut. The air bites my skin and I wonder at the way that he blessed me when the wind is unbearable even for an instant. And then, as I drive away, the sting of conviction.
Because just like I told my little ones, life is not fair. How quickly I forget that I most definitely could have been there and, in all honesty, nearly was. Times when I was grateful to sleep on floors because there was a roof over my head. My mind floats back to the rush of cold air that filled my lungs when I opened the door and I remember the pain that accompanied people questioning my intentions.
I know as much of my story as my mind allows me to remember at the moment, time percolating, slowly, slowly through the dark recesses and bringing what once was to life again. Even when I ask what happened, I know I only have snapshots of the lives of men and women on the street, so often reduced to a faceless blur as we’re rushing to wherever we’re supposed to be. I wonder if I have the right to ask what they’ll use this dollar for, when I don’t even know if I could step into their shoes and live their life sober.
Sobering are the thoughts that swirl in the mind of my teetotaler self. Could I live with your pain if I hadn’t fully accepted God’s love? Even if I had?
Why can’t you just stop?
I jump from questions straight to solutions, running ahead and telling God to catch up. Even though I show love to other people’s children for a living, I guess it never occurred to me to ask
What do you need?