all our awkward angles
We are not an easy family to love.
I mean, even for us the loving isn’t always easy. We are difficult, tired, a ball of chaos with accessories. Everywhere we go, there are tote bags filled with an eccentric conglomeration of things—our accoutrements, I call them: stuffed monkeys and calculators; dry erase markers, insulin pens, glucose meters, calculation worksheets; emergency supplies like glucagon and diastat; calendars, a sleeve of music CDs, books. We have emergency warning signs on our car. Person on the autism spectrum may not respond appropriately. The kids wear bracelets spelling out autism, diabetes, epilepsy, my cell phone number engraved carefully there ICE, in case of emergency. I feel like I am always forgetting things I meant to remember, taking weeks to respond to something important. I often wonder how I have such amazing friends when I am never as good to them as I want to be, how our extended family hangs on when we can be such a mess. I have this list of I need to… that only grows. Sometimes the doing takes me months.
And sometimes, even Kevin and I wonder how God saw fit to make two introverted people parents; how it is that solitude-seekers like the two of us can ever reflect a Savior who moved through crowds so tight His disciples thought it ridiculous that He noticed a woman’s fingers lighting on His cloak; what it is in us He saw that makes us uniquely qualified to love them. And yet, in His wisdom, they are ours and we are theirs. And the relationship finds perfection only in His ordaining.
We are so deeply flawed, and in this, perhaps, we are the truest reflection of His grace poured out and overflowing. We are what happens when Holy loves human, and when Holy loves through human. That love is the clearest evidence of our redemption.
We sit on the beach watching them, our three, as Zoe extends her hands, calling, reaching for brother and sister. “Come into the circle of friends,” she invites, her voice cheerful, lifting with the wind. “First, we will dance around and around and around,” she says, half dragging them, pausing until the words catch up to them and their arms form a crookedly linked ring with hers. “Up and down, up and down, let’s bounce,” she says to them, demonstrating.
Kevin looks at me. “God gave them the perfect sister,” he says, but it’s only the summary of a whole paragraph we don’t have to put into words for each other.
Unusual things happen here by the sea, where waves beat the shore in rhythm, sculpting; where the broken, tossed fragments of seashells glint just as beautifully as the unscarred treasures; where sand sugar-coats our feet.
On the beach, nothing else competes for our attention. Just briefly, not one of us has something else we’d rather do nor somewhere else rather to be. Here, we can leave behind our accoutrements. No one protests, not even Adam, the one among us most imprisoned by distraction.
Here, the three of them connect a wildly uninhibited masterpiece. Adam grins, giggles escaping. His bright blue eyes shine, his attention focused on his sister. He bounces as bidden, the circle of them bobbing up and down in the shallow water. The ocean still wears the shadow of winter, the salty splash icy to the touch, but none of them seem to notice. Some of the days have been warm. It won’t be long before our beach days will find Riley stretched out flat, melting her body into the surf.
“Okay. Now, let’s write 12:00pm over HERE!” Zoe races a few feet away to a spot where the sand is flat and firm, pressed down but still untouched by the tide.
Kevin and I share a smile. Only in a family like ours would writing times in the sand be part of the game. Zoe knows that this step will delight her brother. She includes it easily, happily, folding it into an unrestrained current of imagination, something about a beach class and her the teacher. One, two, three in a row, they race up the beach, scribbling in the sand with extended fingers. Adam’s voice cuts through the breeze, all happiness. “12:00 pmmmm,” he trills, nearly singing.
“Okay,” Zoe calls, “this time, it’s jumping jacks in the circle. Come on, friends, join us.”
“She has enough imagination for herself and both of them,” I say to Kevin, gratitude layering the words, the recognition a divine embrace.
“Zoe, let’s jump the waves,” Riley suggests, back in the water, giddy. “Let’s jump this one.”
“Okay, we’ll jump the small waves and run away from the big ones,” Zoe amends, grabbing Adam’s hand. “Come on, Adam, over here.”
Kevin and I exchange a glance. “It’s amazing what God has done for the three of them in giving them each other,” I say, thinking about how each one blesses the other in a different way, how they have taught each other things they’d never have learned apart from these beautiful, unusual relationships. And so it is with all of the relationships He gives us.
Instantly, Zoe stands next to me, serious. “Why are you guys laughing?” She asks it like an accusation. She’s always concerned that we will find her ridiculous.
“Mom and I are just happy, Zoe,” Kevin tells her. “We are delighted to see you all playing together, loving and enjoying each other, having fun. We just enjoy watching you together.”
She considers this, watching our faces closely for some sign of a carefully concealed joke. “Now go back over there and play,” Kevin says, offering her an honest smile, squinting into the sunlight that streams behind her head.
And as she walks back to Adam, who is kneeling in the shallows, and Riley, who stands twisting, watching her, it occurs to me that our delight in watching them is God’s delight in all of us when we love each other well and He gets to watch, when we aren’t simply tolerating each other’s eccentricities but embracing them, folding them easily into being close. And watching them I see another truth, one not unique to our crazy little capsule of personalities, but something brilliant, bright enough to blind, in all the relationships God gives us: He places us together because we are uniquely qualified to love each other. And it has little to do with us, really, but everything to do with the way He creates and equips. None of us are easy to love, but our relationships find perfection in His ordaining.
We are puzzle pieces interlocking smoothly, something mirrored along the fault line between us—color, texture, the outline of shape created where our lives intersect. In other places, we are entirely different. In fact, it might be hard to imagine at first that we fit together at all except for the odd notion that something strange and jutting in one of us just might fit the notch in the other, the awkward angles matching up where least expected. And yet, were it not for the connection, something would be missing, the entire picture lost. And of course, the picture we create together is at once grand and powerful: It is the image of His glory from behind, as He passes by, as He shields us in the cleft of the rock.
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us (1 John 4:11,12).
