double portion
I run my finger over the scars on the dresser in my bedroom, Grandma, twice etched, raw, like an incision in the wood in Riley’s handwriting. Always in twos. I murmur the dark echo of an old cliché, the shadow of an old joke still half bitter to me, but only by half, because God has begun to heal my sight.
God storms after you till you have the gift you need, Ann Voskamp wrote in the Advent devotional I read every year, all the days of Christmas. His gifts aren’t always easy to receive.
I had been reading about Hannah in the Old Testament, how her heart broke because she and Elkanah couldn’t conceive a child. Hannah grieved, sobbing, wanting a baby, hurting so bad she couldn’t even eat. After their sacrifice to the Lord, Elkanah gave Hannah a double portion of meat, because he loved her. Here was a gift Hannah couldn’t receive in place of another one she wanted.
In ancient Hebrew times, the firstborn son always received a double share, or twice as much, of all his father’s wealth as an inheritance. So, Elkanah’s gift wasn’t just more food, it represented culture-shattering grace. In those days, a wife could be set aside for not bearing sons. I love you, with or without children, Elkanah had said by his gift.
I sat there with my thumb on those words, because he loved her, feeling certain Hannah probably stared at that meat, feeling it stick in her throat before she took a bite, certain it absolutely wouldn’t fill her up. Even if she could eat, she’d still feel barren and cavernous. I know Hannah struggled to receive her double portion the way Elkanah meant it, because just a few sentences later he turns to a whole slew of helpless questions. “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?”
Sometimes, that’s the hardest question of love: You mean more to me. Don’t I mean more to you?
The double portion is the love, and God gave up a son so I could have His inheritance.
I shake my head, looking down at the dresser, remembering Riley standing here in her pajamas, hunched over the corner writing tags for Christmas gifts, and me, folding laundry warm in my fingers, absorbed in feeling dead-tired, not even thinking that she’d be pressing down on the pen so hard, writing and rewriting. Sometimes, honestly, I feel double tired of twice the trouble.
I had been thinking about all this a few days ago, as our family sat in the theater in a row, stretched out in those recliner-style seats. I was completely captivated, because, as a friend of mine loves to say, The Chosen’s portrayal of Jesus feels personal, and this scene felt extremely personal to me, like God was already looking forward to it when we sat together mildly discussing how things had unfolded between Him and Hannah.
In the scene, one of Jesus’s disciples, a man who slowly and painfully walks with a cane at the rear of the crowd, a man who acutely feels his outward crumbling, has just asked Jesus, “Why haven’t you healed me?”
It’s a question I’ve heard before, a question I’ve asked myself twice over. Why haven’t you healed my children?
“Do you want me to heal you?” The man playing Jesus said from the screen, and I nodded a little, glancing down the row to where Adam shifted, trying to figure out how to lay his hands in forced symmetry on either side of his legs. He looked about as uncomfortable as a person could be. In the dark, I could see his fingers, shaking with the effort to maintain that awkward posture. He felt me looking and glanced toward me, forcing a grin.
“Good,” Adam whispered into the dark. I’m good, Mom.
I looked beside him to Riley, watched her chest rise and fall, one beat, two, watched her eyes in the movie screen glow to see if she would blink. When she does, her eyes sliding sideways because she feels me looking, I sit back against my chair.
Another seizure is always coming. Whenever I relax, that’s when it comes.
“The reason I haven’t healed you,” movie Jesus was saying, “is because I trust you.”
That grabbed my complete attention, jerked me like a hand on my shoulder, because I felt pretty sure the disabled disciple (who was staring at movie Jesus in dumbfounded silence) wanted to say, “As great as that sounds, I’ll take the walking without pain.”
Hannah maybe wanted to say tp Elkanah, “I just want to have a baby.”
Sometimes along the way, I have wanted to say, “Thanks, but I’ll take my kids safe and whole and independent, please.”
The experts who told me that my chunky fifteen-month-old Adam had Autism had been distracted by Riley, who, at three-years old, sat blond-head-bent in the floor beside our chairs, completely oblivious to the conversation happening above her head, creating a line of rubber dinosaurs, toy cars, and blocks that curved away from us like an exodus. It wasn’t about the things; it was about the line, and we all knew it, because Riley has Autism too. Adam had been chewing on a strand of my hair, his little fist shiny with slobber. I remember wondering how-in-the-world it could be possible that I had not only one, but two children with Autism, when I had avoided that word so hard for such a long time.
Almost eight years later, I listened while our doctor, our friend, told me to take Zoe to the emergency room immediately because, with a blood sugar well over 600, there was no doubt my daughter had type 1 diabetes, like Adam, who had been diagnosed with the chronic condition just 8 months after his Autism diagnosis. By then, I had settled into an uneasy relationship with the idea that things just happen to our family in twos. God had given us twice the trouble, or so I saw it. Jesus had also urged me, as I faced it, to take what I needed from Him. So, in a manner of speaking, I had reached out and two-fisted His cloak.
In my Advent devotional, Ann Voskamp continued,
You aren’t equipped for life until you realize you aren’t equipped for life. You aren’t equipped for life until you’re in need of grace. In the moment of realizing your limitations, your shortcomings, your inescapable sins, all that you aren’t—in that moment of surrendered lack, you’re given the gift you’d receive no other way: the gracious hand of an unlimited God.
The Greatest Gift, 159-160
As if on cue that day in the theater, Adam’s insulin pod issued a long, startling beep, breaking right through my ruminations.
Movie Jesus had been explaining that while healing James would make a good story, an even better story was James following Jesus with his disability, even when James hadn’t been healed, even when following was often harder for him.
“I trust you with that story,” movie Jesus said.
Our row began a slow ripple in response to the beeping, but I was tossing around the idea that maybe God hasn’t chosen to heal our kids because He trusts us. Maybe I, like Hannah, have received a double portion because He loves me.
I often tell the women I mentor that I see it as God’s grace to me that He left me with absolutely no doubt as to how desperately I need Him. Ever since that day in the hospital with Zoe, I have been clinging to Christ, taking from Him what I need, sure that I can’t do life alone and that my union with Him is the double portion of His love. My children, each in turn, for all their challenges and eccentricities, for all our exhaustion and often our frustration, have, within the quagmire of our everyday lives, also found deep, abiding relationships with Christ. The way they love Jesus, the way they trust Him, the way they press on through what is often difficult living, that’s such a great story.
Adam had clamped a hand down over his insulin pod, which continued to beep, and Kevin grabbed Adam’s pump controller and started pressing buttons. I saw Zoe at the end of our row, craning her neck toward Adam, shaking her head, her smile so wide I could see her teeth in the dark. We had been joking about how our family comes with inopportune sound effects. The pod, disengaged from Adam’s insulin pump, stopped it’s continuous blurt. But a few seconds later, the pump controller began to chime every few seconds, urging Adam to engage another pod.
In the dark, Zoe’s teeth again, and Kevin stuffing the controller beneath his thigh, and down the row, our shoulders beginning to shake with laughter.
A double portion, because he loves me. I whisper it now, a reminder, my fingers still resting on those scars on the dresser in my bedroom. All my scars, Christ redeemed by His own.
It will be another day when Kevin finds those words etched on the dresser; another day, when Riley happens to see his face twist; another day, when she scoots out the room and returns with two pages from her notepad, laying them over those scars in the wood, like love, covering a multitude of sin, creating a fresh, clean slate.
And it will be another day when finally, all of us are healed.
