turn home {when all your living feels worthless}
Sometimes for weeks on end, I feel empty and lost. Gone.
I walk around like a shell of myself, dreading the things I have to do, wishing away the moments, missing the gifts.
I chew on my own tongue, finding it hard to say the healing things.
There’s this space, a gulf yawning wide between Love and me, swallowing me up, because there’s something besides God, besides my relationship with Him, that I feel almost certain I need.
God speaks to me, once, twice, three times, calling my name, moving closer.
And I run away like the Jonah I am, until life just vomits me up.
His word calls after me, a fierce prayer spoken from the stinking belly of a great fish:
“Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them (Jonah 2: 8).”
In the afternoon after school, we stand beside my bed folding clothes. I lay Adam’s t-shirt flat, showing him that the sides match, that the shape has symmetry.
I spread another shirt out in front of me, demonstrating. “Fold it in half, like this.”
He watches me intently, learning, mimicking my movements.
“Good job,” I say, and he smiles, and I want to wrap the moment in velvet and hide it in a box. Just days ago, I had found him empty. I missed his smile.
“Good job folding the shirt,” he says, waiting for me to continue.
“Now fold the sleeves in, like this,” I say, showing him.
He follows too quickly, moving with a jerk.
“No, neatly,” I tell him, spreading his shirt out again. “If you don’t do it neatly, you have to do it again.”
“No do it again,” he murmurs, halving the t-shirt again, moving more deliberately.
“So do it neatly,” I say, narrowing my eyes.
When finally the t-shirt looks as it should, I ask him to whom it belongs. He answers without hesitation, “Adam’s shirt.”
So we start a stack for Adam. I reach for my son, lightly touching his cheeks with my fingers.
Adam folds two, three more t-shirts in a row. I keep pulling the shirts out of the basket, spreading them flat in front of him. We fold and sort together. It still surprises me, the way he notices everything, so much more than he’s able to say.
Riley wanders into the room and sits on the bench at the end of my bed, waiting for my attention. I ask her if she wants to help us, and she jumps up, happy to be included. She loves to help. I spread a pair of Adam’s pajama shorts in front of him, showing him the symmetry again, how to fold them simply in half and then once more. He smiles, anticipating my question, his mouth twitching. He glances up at Riley on the other side of the bed.
“Adam, whose shorts are these?” I ask. I know he knows. I just want to hear his voice.
He watches Riley’s face. “Daddy’s,” he says quickly, his voice lifting, giggles falling out under the name.
To my autistic two, untruths are ridiculous, silly, frivilous jokes.
“NO,” Riley says, smiling at him, “those aren’t Daddy’s.” Her laughter warms the room, full.
Adam cackles, standing on tip toe, excitement moving his hands. He picks up the shorts and adds them to his own stack of clean clothes.
I spread a pair of Riley’s pajama bottoms in front of him on the bed, and he folds them easily, watching me only a little this time. I can see that he is already thinking about what to say, what slice of humor to offer his sister.
“So, who wears these shorts?” I ask him, but already he giggles. He can taste the words. He can hear the delicious sound of her laughter.
“Zoe,” he manages, her name squashed in the space between speaking and a gleeful shriek.
“NO,” Riley says again, laughing hard, bending over. “Oh, Adam.” His name is the smile on her face.
Before we finish the folding, they fall into each other, out of breath with laughter, and I laugh too, just because they find it all so funny.
And I think, This is how our ordinary moments become gifts, when we find each other in the middle of the every day.
Adam has a wonderful sense of humor, but he carries it close like a treasure, only sharing it with those he trusts most.
And then the days come when we lose him to his addictions, and he forgets how to laugh.
My son is addicted to electronic devices with screens. They steal him away like a thief.
Saturday, Adam walks in the kitchen to pick up something he’s left behind. Kevin speaks to him, just something simple, just an effort to see if our son will talk, if today he’ll really look at us.
“Hey, how’s my boy today?”
Adam ignores the question, walks the long way around just to avoid his dad. Kevin repeats the words, this time calling him, Adam. But there’s a space we can see in his eyes, a gulf between us. Adam chews on his tongue, as though the thick, sensitive muscle is just another thing in his way. That’s always been Adam’s tell, the thing that says we’ve lost him.
He chews, like he’s eating his own voice.
Adam picks up a notebook and presses it against his chest, ignoring the question still hanging in the air. So Kevin asks again, a third time, moving toward him.
“Hey. How’s my boy today?”
We’ve been fighting autism a long time. We will never give up. This will go on, the father asking, each time with greater insistence, until the son answers. Adam knows this. And so, our son does something I’ve never seen him do before. He runs away.
One glance at his dad. A flicker, and he’s gone. We hear his feet, machine gun thumps on the stairs.
Kevin puts down the dish towel in his hands. He looks at me, a little stunned. “Did he just run away from me?”
“I think so.”
“That’s not happening.”
Three words, and Kevin walks up the stairs to collect our son, and I walk up to collect all the electronic devices I can find, all the things that swallow him up. We’ve done this before.
And this is what we know: Nothing Adam likes to do is worth losing him. Whatever takes him away from us will go first. I would live without any of it before I’d give up my son.
We know that for the first few days, he will beg for these things. He will negotiate. He will complain while we have him help us do things around the house, while we insist that he play games, when we send him outside to play. He never thinks these screen fasts are a good idea.
But in a few more days, our son will remember how to laugh. He’ll make jokes while we fold clothes together. He’ll remember that he loves to be outside. He’ll want to cook. He’ll talk to us. Suddenly, in the middle of the ordinary, we’ll find him standing next to us, looking at us and really seeing. In the middle of the famine, our son will come home.
Adam lives at a terrible time to be addicted to electronics. It is a button pushing, digital, visual age, and we rely on devices for communication and efficiency. And when we fight his compulsions, these things that swallow him up, that’s when we feel like we are literally fighting autism. I would love to treat it like an addiction to a substance. I would strip our home bare of screens and hide our phones just to avoid that empty space I see in his eyes. But unfortunately, that won’t stop the addiction. And as parents, we have to think toward independence, toward our son’s adulthood. So, we take a break until he comes back to us, and then we teach.
Adam’s teacher suggested introducing a few devices that Adam will only use functionally—the game system for games, but the tablet only for his to do list and email—because one day Adam will need to understand the difference between a device used for work and a device used for games. So we’ll do that, knowing we’ll catch him sneaking in a download that we’ll have to delete, knowing that we’ll have to write rules and be clear on the consequences for breaking them. And it will be hard. It has always been hard. Because human beings have always been torn between our idols and the relationship we need.
I have my idols too.
I too am the runaway, the prodigal who returns again to the Father who runs to collect her. It’s grace that He never gives up on me, even when I’ve been gathering rot in my fingers and lifting it to my own lips.
Sometimes I bow to the approval of other people, their affirmation that I am worthwhile. Sometimes I worship the illusion that I am in control, that somehow all my doing will be enough. Sometimes I chase physical things—some preoccupation with my body or fashion or some admiration I never felt I had but always wanted. Sometimes I sacrifice myself to the need to feel special, the desire to be preferred. Sometimes I can think of nothing passionately except escape—a vacation, a beautiful place, even just the moments to think and breathe and feel free. My idols are all the things I think I need more than my relationship with God, the things I put ahead of Him, the things I go to instead. They are the things I follow the long way around, the stinking beasts that swallow me whole, the dark space between me and Love.
And across the widening chasm, God’s voice rushes to me.
“My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, cisterns that cannot hold water…They say to wood, ‘You are my Father,” and to stone, ‘You gave me birth,’ They have turned their backs to me and not their faces; yet when they are in trouble, they say, ‘Come and save us!’ Where then are the gods you made for yourselves (Jeremiah 2: 13, 27-28)?”
I see that God sometimes does for me what He’s always done for idol-worshippers. He strips me bear of the lifeless things I worship, forcing me into a fast. And for a time I writhe and complain and weep, believing I have suffered great loss. I never feel like fasting from anything is a great idea. But in those dark, desperate moments, God draws me out of the stench of slop to the abundance of Himself. He washes me in oceans of grace, celebrates my return, allows me to participate in what He’s doing. All over again, He reminds me how to laugh and how to see Him.
And then the ordinary moments again become gifts of grace.
