but first
I lose my patience promptly at 11 o’clock, as though the last of it just fell away, grain by grain, at the turn of the hour.
“What have you been doing for the last hour?” I ask, bleary-eyed and frivolous, sleep seeping in at the edges of my vision. Riley stands just outside my bedroom in the hall. Her hair, at least already unbraided, floats in limp waves over her shoulders. I take in the rest of her, still as yet unbathed, the Friends t-shirt she smudged with mayonnaise over lunch, the exercise pants she wore to school because of P.E.. I can see the exhaustion puffing up around her eyes. She looks as weary as I feel, and at this point, I feel helpless to do anything about it. That helplessness, more than anything, causes my frustration.
“I have no idea,” she says, which of course I knew already. She half sings that meaningless refrain, what amounts to hebel, literally vapor, as the writer of Ecclesiastes penned–and then she says no more, just stands in front of me looking blank. I feel it, the fading mist.
I had seen the tired clawing at her expressions from the middle of the afternoon and had begun then to encourage her to take an early shower.
“I’ve been asking you to take a shower for the last seven hours,” I say now, shooting Kevin a look that says, how can we still be doing this when she’s this old? He shrugs, looking at both of us with love, and Riley just blinks. I can see that she’s wondering why I’m getting so worked up.
We do this dance, Riley and I, flirting with her independence, and then, of necessity, spinning back toward firmer guidance. In actuality, I had not commanded her shower at 4 o’clock. I had begun more gently, with a reasonable idea offered up as casual suggestion. You know, you’ll feel better if you take an early shower. You can settle in, then; we could spend some time together. I had hoped she would hear this and, recognizing my love for her and respecting my wisdom, would make her own choice to set aside other things. In fact, she had received these comments with easy agreement. Yes, that would be good. It certainly would. Even so, I felt a little like we were performing an unholy liturgy–the ritual without the meaningful attention. I know how compelling Riley’s routines can be, how obsessive and debilitating.
Even as I gradually become both more blunt and more repetitive in my directives, when I spell it out, okay, it’s time for your shower now, and Riley verbally commits, her idea of doing that next involves several other completely unnecessary finishes first. She’ll take her shower after she finishes a snack, a gigantic cup of coffee, and a glass of milk; after she finishes checking things off in her planner; after she finishes an episode of her favorite sitcom; after she clears all of the notifications on her phone; after she reviews my planner thrice and asks me the list of usual questions; after she empties her bookbag; after she shuffles up to every doorway, whispering who-knows-what under her breath and bends at the waist like a bobblehead doll. Of course, from Riley’s perspective each of these items amounts to a tiny have to as ordinary and necessary as for me would be folding a load of clothes or finishing dinner or answering a quick text from a friend.
Now, fully seven hours after I began to encourage Riley toward the shower (indeed, my this is the way, walk in it had consumed an entire afternoon and evening), as I stand in the doorway asking her what-in-the-world she’s been doing all this time, I can’t help but think of all the times I’ve been this same child before God and how much longer He’s been urging me.
“Where are you?” God calls through history to His errant little ones, and our human answer forever returns from the weeds, “I’m really not sure.” Which, of course, He knows already. So why does He ask if not to offer us the agency to consider our own choices, to begin to realize what it was that took us off course?
The same question I have posed to Riley–“What have you been doing all this time?”–God Himself has posed to me a countless number of times, and each time I have scanned my mind and discovered a discernable blur between first inspiration and this transformative intervention toward obedience. In truth, I have no idea, because my hebel, my but-a-breath-passing life, has run away with me. I have become consumed with an endless list of things I must finish first, most of which must certainly be inconsequential from a holy perspective. In these moments, I look blankly toward my Father; obedience was always coming next.
This accounts for why certain moments in the New Testament have also always felt unreasonable to me. For example, Matthew records that when bidden to actually follow, a disciple of Jesus offers up a seemingly legitimate delay to his obedience. “First let me bury my father,” the man says, to which Jesus enigmatically answers, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead (Matthew 8:22).” The same me delayed by but I have to‘s wonders what could be so off about the poor man burying his dad first. But I see now that Jesus never actually questions the legitimacy of the suggested delay nor offers any commentary on the validity of it. Jesus never has been flippant about death. He seems merely to want to distinguish between two entirely different categories of choices: the ones that will seem important now for a little while, and the ones that will matter forever. Jesus offers what feels to me like an extreme example because the point is that nothing could be so important here as to delay following Jesus. Nonetheless, my childish sight often amounts to blindness, and I can’t understand why a few dozen detours should matter.
“Don’t you see?” I ask Riley now, even though I know that I myself am blind. “I wanted you to feel better, to get the best rest you could tonight because you’re so tired. How could you have spent the last hour ‘getting ready for your shower’? I don’t understand.” Meanwhile, in my soul, I know how much time I have wasted simply getting ready to obey.
She stands in the hallway not knowing what to do, and finally she says, “I’m sorry; I didn’t realize.”
As completely imperfect as I am, me, with my finite patience and my vulnerable form, I soften the moment she repents. I see that she’s but a breath as I am; I know she did not know what she was doing. I relent; I forgive. Attempting a gentler tone, I say, “I think tonight you should just go to bed and get some rest. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
As at last she turns away, I can tell that she feels sorry to have upset me, even if she still doesn’t quite understand why. What I feel for her, what conquers absolutely every other thing, is only love.
And just that quickly, God lets me see it all a little more clearly.
