faith, hope, and love
“I just hope God let’s me learn how to drive,” Riley ventures. Her voice waivers; the flicker from the TV only half lights her face. I don’t have to see her clearly to know that her ocean blue eyes glisten wet, threatening a storm.
“I know,” I say and Kevin nods. Riley has talked about driving off and on for the last twelve years. At just eight years old, before her legs grew long enough to reach the floor of the car, when her epilepsy still felt new, before she left elementary school, she envisioned the time when she would sit behind the wheel of the car. “One day, Dad will have to teach me how to drive,” she’d say as we motored down the road, as if to remind us that this would be true, or maybe, to will it so. It has always been Riley’s way to talk through the things that matter, often repetitively, even if it takes years to sort out her feelings.
For a moment, I wonder what inspires her to speak of this tonight. We’ve just finished watching a Disney movie–Onward, haven’t even moved to flick on the lamps so we can see beyond the TV, and the rest of us–save Adam, who declined to watch, sit wet-eyed for entirely different reasons. Zoe, having watched this movie before, keys in once again to the melancholy around losing (and then refinding, just briefly) a parent. “It’s just so sad,” she had previously commented, gripping a pillow in her lap. Kevin and I swell over the richness of family, thinking about how the relentless pain of loss blinds us, if temporarily, to a wealth of blessings. Until this moment, I hadn’t thought about how much of the movie takes place in the older brother’s beat-up van, how he teaches the younger brother to drive. So much of the plot centers on the relationship between those brothers.
Suddenly, Riley’s quavering emotions make sense to me. Riley lives a life of love, and while she’s liberal with her affections for everyone, she has a matchless love for her sister. Riley’s attention for Zoe is inexhaustible, extending to cover even small and ordinary details (sometimes to Zoe’s dismay), and although Riley’s challenges have of course limited and changed the expression of her role as older sibling, they have not diminished her natural desire to love from that perspective. From time to time, Riley’s passion on related topics flashes with unacknowledged anger; she feels clear on what should be, unclear on why “the shoulds” have not taken shape. So much about their relationship feels “out of order” to Riley, who naturally recognizes her own chronological superiority and must at the same time also recognize the milestones Zoe has reached first. Riley has become painfully aware of the fact that she may never reach some of these milestones. So, as the main character in our movie re-discovered all that his older brother is to him–and this through a wild adventure in his older brother’s van, Riley glanced toward Zoe, and in her own way must have thought, And who am I to you?
“Talk to us about that,” Kevin says to Riley now, sitting back to listen, and I smile over his wisdom about such things–that he feels no urgency to stop her tears, that he knows she needs to admit and express her feelings.
“I just really want to be able to drive,” Riley says, the word ‘drive’ rising like a bobbing boat on a swelling wave, higher, dangerously higher, and as I switch on the lamp, I see tears racing down her cheeks.
“What would you do if you could drive?” Kevin asks, drawing her out from the dark cave of her thoughts, inviting her to explore. “Where would you go?”
“On dates with Josh,” she says immediately, and I smile, imagining Riley pulling up in a car to take her boyfriend to the movies. She would see him more; she would take the matter in hand. Riley has never been short on determination. On adventures with my sister–I’m thinking that must be an answer too, though one I’m not sure she’ll be able to articulate right now.
“Okay,” Kevin says reasonably, “but you already get to go on dates with Josh, though not by yourself.” He says this not to minimize what she feels but to temper her emotional perspective with the truth. “Where else would you go? What would be different?”
“I don’t know,” Riley says miserably, having reached the tenuous inner limits of her own verbal expression. She pushes invisible stray hairs away from her eyes with her hands, a desperate gesture I’ve seen her make many times when feeling overwhelmed. Of course, we know this isn’t really only about destinations. This is about older sisters learning first and teaching younger sisters, about older sisters facilitating adventures, about older sisters being older. This is about what should be and what isn’t, about brokenness and loss and grief, and on that point, we all feel equally touched. And yet, while my mama heart breaks over Riley’s unrealized dreams, I have come to understand that this entirely human reaction must not come apart from the recognition of spiritual reality. While in the estimation of this world, Riley may never reach certain heights, she sits humbly before us as a spiritual giant. None of us, seeing as we do through a glass darkly, can yet imagine how blindingly bright Riley’s truest self shines.
“Driving takes certain abilities–not just one, but several different skills,” Kevin says, switching gears, “and unfortunately, you don’t have some of those abilities right now. But you do have a lot of other abilities.”
“You have abilities many of the rest of us don’t have,” I say. I mention her simply amazing memory for people; I speak of the way she loves. I tell her that she has no idea how much God teaches me by the way she lives her life. I say this remembering a time when, when asked to write down the name of the person we most wanted to emulate, every member of our family, including Zoe, wrote down Riley’s name. I say these things knowing Riley’s humility will not allow her to hold them dear or even to consider them for more than a moment, but hoping, somewhere in her heart, this absolute truth will take root. Paul wrote, “These three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love (emphasis mine), and when teaching his disciples on greatness, Christ himself said that the greatest among us will here be the least, the servant, the child.
“We should pray about this,” Kevin says, because in the face of impossibilities we remind our children of God–His sovereignty and His power. “God can give you these abilities and skills. He is able to do it.”
“And we should also pray for peace,” I say, “to be content if He says ‘no.’ And if He does, it will be okay; He’ll help us find other ways for you to get around and be independent.”
It’s faith that makes Riley smile when we speak of prayer, faith that, even as she palms the tears away from her cheeks, turns her mourning into honest joy, and she laughs, beaming. In this instant, I catch the tiniest glimpse of the radiant truth of her. Together now, we drift to her from the borders of the room, reaching our arms to touch her, and together now, we begin to pray.
