the river, pt. 2
“Need to go upstairs,” Adam says, the very minute Kevin mentions that we should play a game together after dinner.
We gather around the family table, but Adam feels no compulsion to stay, may in fact find the relational atmosphere a bit overwhelming. When we ask him questions during the meal, Adam puts down his slice of pizza and wearily sighs before answering, as though the effort to find words to say, the effort to look at us and absorb all the information in our faces, to listen to us and our fast, unintelligible sentences as they blend into countless other competing sensory sensations, as though all of this feels just too difficult.
“Why does he need to go upstairs?” Our young nephew asks, tilting his head a little as he considers Adam with curiosity. We have extended the table this weekend, adding more places for more people, and from Adam’s perspective, more voices, more faces, more chaos. It’s hard for us to understand what he experiences because of Autism, this bombarding of sensory information without the ability to prioritize.
Of course, my nephew doesn’t direct his question to Adam, maybe because he wants to spare Adam the Sigh, the Laying Down of the Slice, maybe because he thinks Adam can’t or won’t answer, maybe only because he assumes Adam’s response won’t really satisfy his curiosity.
Adam would have said he wants to go listen to music, as I would have said I want to go read my book, but the truth, which Kevin mentions in reply to our nephew, is that Adam really just wants to be anywhere but here, doing something besides this, because, and this Kevin doesn’t say, Adam feels like he just doesn’t have it in him to stay.
I had, in fact, under similar compulsion, slipped away myself one evening during this visit, silently rushing up the stairs and away—away–with my book tucked under my arm, needing to go—I had felt it keenly, that need, and without experiencing any Adam-level difficulties with sensory processing. So, I feel some compassion for Adam, and I know it softens my eyes, because he looks at me and smiles, whispers, “sweet.” I am always telling Adam he’s sweet, which, in his mind (and rightly so), just means that I love him. He is saying now that he loves me, too.
“What if,” Kevin says to Adam, “we play a game tonight, before you go upstairs, and tomorrow, we go to the water park?”
“Water park,” Adam says immediately, and I watch his whole body rise, as a wide smile of remembrance lights his face. “Water park. Me too.”
And so, the Father turns the son’s heart, like rivers of water, as the psalmist says.
“But first, we play a game after dinner,” Kevin says.
“Yes,” Adam agrees, sitting back in his seat to wait. “Yes.”
I think of a Hebrew word often used in scripture for active hope, a primitive root, yachal, which means to stay, to wait, and I think about how Adam’s hope in Kevin’s in promise to return to the water park—that place that reminded me so much of how it is to live our lives swept up in the river of God’s delight, how that hope is the thing that makes Adam stay here with us. To hope is to stay amid trouble and to wait expectantly for something new. Adam abides, through the temporary difficulty of the here and now, because the promise of the waterslides has captivated his attention.
I have a living hope–an imperishable inheritance, the apostle Peter wrote, because of the resurrection of Christ, and I wonder, matching Adam’s smile, if my joy in it in the face of trouble produces a change in me as discernable and reorienting as this?
“Water slides,” Adam says emphatically, looking toward his dad, then glancing again at me.
“Yes.”
“Yes, I love it,” he says. “Water slides. Go to the water park.”
Who truly hopes and does not rehearse the promise, does not speak it again and again, like an anchor for remaining? What is the promise, I’m wondering, nodding my head as Adam speaks, that I need to repeat? Is it Peter’s words, about this undefiled and unfading future, about how I am being guarded now through faith until all is fully revealed? Trouble is, what I don’t actively remember I passively forget.
I have been born again to a living hope, an imperishable, undefiled, unfading inheritance, kept in heaven for me; me, who is being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
Living hope. Imperishable inheritance. Guarded through faith.
“Game first tonight, water park tomorrow,” Kevin says, and I know he has decided, for he would never promise what he has no sure plan to provide.
Another passage flits through my memory, one I’ve marked for careful remembering.
Listen to me…who have been borne by me from before your birth,
Isaiah 46:3-4
carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he,
and to gray hairs I will carry you.
That’s a promise I need to rehearse, too, to throw down like an anchor for my feet when I want to run.
Carried. Kept. Guarded.
Game box falls on the table with a casual clack, and the box top shudders as my nephew pulls it up, eyes shining, and Adam’s eyes, dark like a pit, lock with mine.
“Water park tomorrow,” he whispers, and I nod again, and he settles back against his chair. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the river is real, that the hope lives. Adam sits in a chair, remembering a raft.
Guarded through faith.
…Even to your old age I am he….
Now faith is the assurance of that for which we hope.
From my seat at the table, I can see Adam watching Kevin, can see him studying his father’s face.
…who have been borne by me…
It isn’t just the promise of the water park keeping Adam in his chair, but the certainty that his father will keep it. He repeats to remember, and he turns to us for assurance, for re-assurance, to be certain all over again. Faith isn’t the absence of doubt but the determination to re-turn to Lord for the faith that will guard our hope.
These three remain, faith, hope, and love, I’m remembering, and it falls on my heart a little differently every time Adam looks at me and smiles, as he fingers the game cards in front of him and whispers, “Waterslides. Me too.”
Why did Jesus spend his last hours before the cross urging His disciples to remain through trouble, except that He knew they would feel that they desperately needed to flee? It isn’t the running away that ever bears any fruit. It’s the staying, rooted right into the river.
“You’re sweet,” I whisper back to Adam, and he gushes, overflowing.
