discovery of assets
Riley walks in the door in the afternoon, backpack slung over one shoulder, conversation and friendship glowing warm on her cheeks. It’s as though laughter rests on the tip of her tongue.
“How was school?” I say, rising from the worn table where Zoe and I have been sipping coffee, where our meandering words have just begun to fade, like curls of steam.
“It was a-maz-ing!” Riley says. Her voice flies, rising and falling like a song. Of course, she answers my question exactly that way every day. Even days that ripple with anxiety, even days that blank with seizures, even days that start off hurried and tearful are ultimately amazing for Riley.
“What made it amazing?” I ask her, leaning forward to plant a kiss on her cheek. I hardly ever use that word, and yet I live in awe of Christ.
“Well, what made it amazing was that I got to see my friends, and I got to help my teachers, and I got work on my science project.” She lists things most of us would not immediately list, ordinary-extraordinary gifts over which we sometimes sigh, emptied, having exchanged our gratitude for busyness. But Riley’s wealth is love, friendship, service, experiences, and every day for her is full of these.
Earlier in the day, I explained this to the state’s attorney, sitting in a conference room with her and a guardian ad litem appointed by the State. I tell her that Riley doesn’t like to complain; it isn’t part of her nature. It feels odd to me, sitting in this office staring at shelves and shelves of files and talking about why my daughter still needs me. God appointed us Riley’s guardians a lifetime ago, when He knit her together in a cavernous part of me, and now here I sit, asking that it might officially be so a little longer. It feels as though we should be sitting at our kitchen table where life actually happens, that I should be doing something with my hands—folding warm clothes, maybe, or stirring our simmering supper.
I struggled with the paperwork too, when we started this process. How do you write love down on these forms with their strong black lines and sturdy boxes? My pen halted, hovering over the discovery of assets. How could I quantify the value of her life? Riley is my asset; a grace gift I’m still stunned to receive, newly, every morning when she wakes, every afternoon when she comes home. I wanted to write, “there’s not enough money in all the world.” I wanted to cram the letters in the boxes and let them spill off the sides of the paper. Of course, I know that’s not actually the point of the activity, but for some reason, it still hurt me to recollect the amount of her weekly allowance, the material value of her possessions. Riley has always been about so much more than things; not just to us, but in her own heart, where the functional use of money receives only practical notice. Riley collects what can neither be bought or sold–love, joy, kindness.
On paperwork day, I put down the pen and stood in the doorway of Riley’s room, taking in the bulletin board where she carefully pins new addresses when our loved ones move, rainbows of sticky notes neatly printed and curling at the edges; the ribbon board so stuffed with cards and notes from friends–they have a post office at school–that I wonder how she could add anything more; the jewelry tree on her dresser over-full with necklaces nearly all made or given by someone she loves; the bed covered with stuffed animals, all gifts. The form will say she has nothing, but that’s certainly not what I see.
Riley lives in fullness, even when life looks empty.
This morning, I flip the pages of an old letter, a letter penned in a prison in ancient Rome. Paul put it in the hands of a friend who journeyed far to deliver it to the church in the thriving commercial city of Ephesus. This letter, with its script curving into words about glorious, boundless riches and immeasurable power; into adjectives like surpasses, built, whole; into clauses that push out the edges of fullness–survives the centuries on the pages of scripture as one of the apostle’s most encouraging messages. I read it and think of what I might have written under the same circumstances, the way sometimes I can speak out of the scarcity I see instead of the fullness I know. But Paul wrote of what would never fit on earthly ledgers, of gifts that overflow those flat black boxes and spill right into and out of our hearts. He wrote of love that surpasses knowledge, of the riches of grace, of the fullness of Christ. He wrote of treasure no prison could ever strip away.
So I turn the page and chuckle, thinking of Riley. What must it have been like for the church to receive these words from his hand? Did they shake their heads in disbelief as I sometimes do in the late afternoon, rising to meet her?
Because it’s as though someone said, “Hey Paul, how’s life?”
And in reply, he penned a song.
