When I was in high school, I saw something that I’ll never forget. On a ski trip to Colorado with my youth group (there’s nothing white Christian kids love more on spring break than to hit the slopes for Jesus!), I was fresh out of ski school and toward the end of a green trail which, it seemed, had LIED TO ME because the finale of that trail was a downward slope that might as well have been a jump off a cliff. I turned to my right, hoping a snow angel would appear to escort me down, and noticed a group of skiers congregated together, all wearing fluorescent bibs over their ski suits that read “BLIND SKIER.”
Well shit, I thought (though at the time I was a Good Girl so it was probably more like, Well good grief, Charlie Brown), my self-pity forcefully evaporating in an instant. If they can do it… I turned my skis toward the bottom of the cliff, arranged them in a V open toward me, and made my way down my own path at approximately 0.5 miles per hour, terrified but moving.
While living in New York, I attended church one evening and heard the familiar strains of one of my favorite hymns, “Be Thou My Vision.” I had listened to Ginny Owens’ version countless times in the years preceding my move, typically from the bottom of relationship valleys or the top of ill-advised personal cliffs I couldn’t see a way safely down, and it had saved me from despair so many times, pointing me home. On this occasion, it being New York, I looked up and saw Ginny Owens herself take the stage, and was reminded immediately of one of the primary features that had led her to a life of music: her blindness. And girlfriend was singing “Be Thou My Vision.” I thought about that. I thought about the blind skiers. I thought about all that had changed between that moment and this one, how in high school I had seen the skiers as a reminder from a lesson-oriented God that I should be more grateful. And how now, I just felt loved by him because of this woman he had put in my path who, in her weakness that was actually strength, pointed my skis back toward him before he picked me up, reminding me he can carry me down every cliff.
So imagine my shock recently when I realized my vision still isn’t perfect, after all these years.
The Kid is very into signs right now. He asks me what every sign in the world says, saving particular urgency for the “do not”-type signs: the forbidden sins of the law. I’ll tell him (amending the content at times; the “no guns” sign on the front of his school, for example, becomes “don’t bring your own toys because we have some here”). Each time I provide him the directive represented by the sign, he says he wants to do that very thing. My sweet little rule-follower; he and I both know the closest he’ll come to law-breaking is just saying he will. What he wants to know are the consequences. They give him context for what these rules mean. So when I tell him we can’t make a U-turn here and he says let’s make a U-turn and I tell him again that we can’t, he leans back in his seat and responds sagely, “That would be a time out.”
In seeing seemingly everything, he is showing me all I am blind to; all the things I miss. He never fails to notice where the sun and moon are, whether they’re little or big or orange, or whether the clouds are white or purple. And it’s beautiful, it really is. And it’s not lost on me that a few short months ago, he was “asking” me what things were by pointing at them and screeching. Now, it’s “that one Mommy, what’s that one?” It’s so wonderful and exquisite and blessed and sometimes I feel that if he tells me how to drive one more time I will RUN THE CAR OFF A DAMN BRIDGE.
Because the thing about having a suddenly verbal and always-bright child is that he has A LOT TO TELL YOU. Particularly, about how to get home. Like which lane to take, and where to turn. Like his mother, he would prefer that a driver go ahead and pull into the exit lane way ahead of the exit–but his preference is on the order of miles. So I hear his whining from the backseat whenever I don’t move according to his timetable, and I hear myself saying things like, “You have to let me drive, buddy. You have to trust Mommy to get us where we’re going.”
Good advice. I should listen to it myself.
As I dispense this advice, I hear grace whisper into my ear, gently and not in a lesson-oriented way, but unmistakable all the same, about the irony of my saying such things. About my own inability to take my hands off the wheel, my own need to direct the car, whichever road trip I’m currently on. “No thank you, we will not be uprooting our lives and moving across the world,” I directed, before pretending I was open to it by asking for a change of heart if necessary, and clear signs. Because that’s how we overly-spiritualizing grown-ups do it: we pray for clarity, which is really just asking for a sign, which is really just asking for control over the situation. A hand on the wheel. When the whole time, we’re always going to get home.
“Let the little children come to me,” goes the old story, and we talked about it on Sunday, how that may mean something different from (just) what we were always taught: how it might not just be about blind faith like children seem to have, but it might also be about the divine recognition of the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy things about kids–their petulance, their demands, their insistence on knowing the way–and that same divine recognition of all that stuff still in me, and the fact that we’re still invited in. The kingdom still belongs to us, not because we’re (just) joyful and trusting and excited, but even when we’re not. Maybe especially when we’re not, because it’s then we know that it was never about us or what we did/were in the first place.
As for my sign that we should move to Australia? It’s sitting in our entryway, boxed up and ready to travel with us: a wrought-iron plate with a post that will be embedded in our front yard, and on the plate, our family name and the numbers of our new latitude and longitude there. I didn’t see it in the catalogue until after we made the decision to go, after the whisper in my heart was unmistakable, even in the absence of a neon YES or NO. Maybe that’s because we’re not given signs; we’re given invitations, and once we recognize that the “yes” was always there, on our side and on grace’s, we get the signs then.