February 23rd, 2011
Welcoming children is a mission and a call. Jesus modeled it for us when he threw his arms open wide and gathered up an armload of sweet, giggly, precious children. As a young college student (who felt called to be a summer missionary and lead Vacation Bible School for the rest of my life), I elaborated on this scene with my mind’s eye. I saw Jesus wrapping strong arms around children whose parents had dressed them in their Easter Sunday best and politely taken them to see Jesus, much like we line up in the mall to catch a glimpse of Santa with our tiny tots.
Forgive me for my inexperience. Not only did I miss the reality of the very Jewish context in which Jesus taught, I missed the essence of the real life stuff that happens when we fling the doors open wide and welcome real life children (and by the way, adults) into the embrace and lap of God.
When we lay out the welcome mat, we are saying EVERYONE IS WELCOME, and guess what, everyone is going to come. And then, the real work begins. Real life children come with runny noses, skinned knees, scuffed shoes, and sometimes no shoes! Real life children come with enough to eat, with empty tummies, with all that they need and with nothing at all. Real life children come with cancer diagnoses, learning disabilities, and medical needs that stagger the minds of the most brilliant physicians. Real life children come with two parents, with one parent, and with no parents. The thing is when we throw wide our arms, like the arms of God, REAL LIFE CHILDREN COME!
So, here’s the question, when real life children (and their adults) come, what in the world are we going to do with them? What will we do when your child with autism runs from the children’s Sunday School wing? What will we do when my child with sensory integration issues hides under the handbell table during Sunday morning worship to shield himself from the lights and sounds that threaten to overwhelm his system? What will we do when my child with a mood disorder explodes and scares your child sitting beside her half to death? What will we do when your ten-year-old has a melt-down reminiscent of a two-year-old temper tantrum, and my child laughs? What will we do when a child visiting our church for the first time calls the medically fragile child raised in our midst a scary monster? What are we going to do when your child loses it and hits my child? What will we do when the cold my child doesn’t even notice threatens your child’s fragile immune system?
These are the real life issues involved in answering the powerful call, “Let the little children come to me.” I hope we won’t be afraid to talk about them with each other. When we gather up our own real life children (with whatever gifts and challenges they bring) and carry them tenderly into the arms of God through the church . . . we are reaching out to Jesus for a blessing. You and I both come hoping that Jesus will touch the little ones we carry and that their lives will be marked forever by this embrace.
So, now, I imagine the strong arms of Jesus, the carpenter’s son, reaching to embrace your child and mine . . . arms broad enough to handle the load that loving all of God’s children can bring and gentle enough to rock the most fragile of our children through the day and through the night. So, let the children come and let the conversation begin: What will we do with them?
Stacey Buford is an ordained Baptist minister, having worked extensively in pastoral care, hospital chaplaincy and building families through adoption/foster care. She lives and works in Duluth, Georgia, where she and husband, Jon, are raising three amazing children.
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January 31st, 2011
The halls of the local women’s hospital often ring with banter. Banter is our human response to the intensity and immediacy of birth. It is how we sometimes respond to the mix of blood, sweat, tears, and laughter that hangs in the air anywhere life and death struggles take place. The hallowed halls, where the most poignant human dramas unfold, are often filled with raucous humor that can be a balm to sore souls. “Adoption! Can you get morphine with that?”
Adoption is my passion. I love its intricacies and complexities . . . new life springing up in the midst of a sea of contradictory emotions. Pain and uncertainty intermingling with hope, with newness, with embrace . . . a rush of acceptance as strangers choose connection, laboring against all odds . . . a gasp of joy as something new pushes forward into the world. Then a new family emerges, and a child is tenaciously embraced by so many who are loving her. There is gracious release and the widening of a welcoming circle.
It is, of course, a choice to adopt one another. Adoption means letting go of our exclusive claims to identity, to outcome, to sameness. Adoption is work, a lifelong labor. It is calling, and it is bliss.
Being the church is adoption. We make our way toward each other half expecting to find slight variations of ourselves. Surely our brothers and sisters will act like us, think like us, vote like us, worship like us. We gasp with surprise (and maybe a tinge of pain) when we find instead a glorious mix of “not like us”!
Still, we recognize one another! We see in each other a wished for child of God with unlimited claim on the family name.
It is, of course, a choice to adopt one another, to be church with one another, to claim kinship and belonging with one another, to love each other so much that we are willing to be forever altered by each other. It is a choice to stand in the midst of life’s blood, sweat and tears as one family, holding each other and loving each other against all odds.
Sometimes we cry out with the pain of bumping into our differences. We cringe as we are stretched, as our hearts are widened, and we move over to make room for each other. Sometimes, we throw our hands in the air and exclaim “Adoption! (Insert: Being church!) Can you get morphine with that?”
Then the tenacious embrace and gentle release of God who planned our adoption from the very beginning rushes over us, sustaining us and pushing us on as a new family emerges! We are church. It is work, a lifelong labor. It is calling, and it is gift.
Stacey Buford is an ordained Baptist minister, having worked extensively in pastoral care, hospital chaplaincy and building families through adoption/foster care. She lives and works in Duluth, Georgia, where she and husband, Jon, are raising three amazing children.
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January 10th, 2011
I have one of those yards. You know the kind. An amazing array of Georgia pines, unraked leaves and a weathered wooden swing set that has definitely seen its better days. My neighbors are tolerant. They have lived through backyard science projects, overnight campouts and a yellow lab puppy. They have smiled and waved when the stray jackets, backpacks, shoes and gloves that our children use to decorate the “lawn” have encroached upon the manicured spaces that make up our neighborhood. They have even graciously joined the hunt when the match to the ONE PAIR OF SHOES THAT FITS my youngest child can simply not be found in the house, the car, the garage or the confines of the wilderness we call our yard. This has been the greatest gift . . . that friends and neighbors might help us hold on to what truly fits.
The truth is that I have one of those “calls” in life. You know the kind. The messy, carry-you-to-unexpected-places in the world, in work, in family, and most especially to unexpected places in yourself kind of call. I once dreamed of a “manicured call” (and yard!). Lord, give me a call, a mission in life, that would carry me chronologically or even logically from point A to point B to point C. Give me a call and a purpose that I can always understand, one that never leaves me puzzled and unclear about what comes next and where you are in the midst of the backyard wilderness of my life. Maybe I was looking for that one pair of shoes that would fit. The pair that would work for all circumstances, would fit forever and would NEVER get lost under the bed or in the backyard.
Living out call has never been a neat, manicured or linear process for me. It’s been much more like my yard full of pine trees and unraked leaves. A yard sprinkled and sometimes littered with the treasures of my children and the unruly demands of living a life of integrity and holy love in the midst of all kinds of neighbors and all kinds of life circumstances.
Mary Oliver, in her poem “The Turtle,” writes about the powerful, instinctual drive of the mother sea turtle to carry herself out of the familiar ocean, across the treacherous sand and to build a nest and lay her eggs. “You think,” she says “of her patience, her fortitude, her determination to complete what she was born to do-and then you realize a greater thing-she doesn’t consider what she was born to do. She’s only filled with an old blind wish. It isn’t even hers but came to her in the rain or the soft wind, which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.” That then is call . . . not a circumstance that fits and can be lost (in the backyard or in the world of work), not a job or a vocation to be chosen or discerned, but a gate through which I walk again and again pulled by an old blind wish.
Stacey Buford is an ordained Baptist minister, having worked extensively in pastoral care, hospital chaplaincy and building families through adoption/foster care. She lives and works in Duluth, Georgia, where she and husband, Jon, are raising three amazing children.
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