the prodigal wait....

She was born June, twenty-two years ago, in a country a world away.

And I had traveled from home and high school, without hope of college or higher education and moved to Japan.

Some days I forget. 

How He's making it all new, every day and I'm not who I was or even who I am. And parenting is a crucible for which we lay down our lives and sometimes we feel we laid it down all wrong.

In hindsight I see all the crooked turns and all the ways I lost myself in the world and how I had passengers traveling with me. Never a turn alone, never just one in a crook, but two or three.

I was looking for Something but the world offers so many some things.

It's the loud clambering noise, always advertising the next best fix, the world has to offer us. So we grab the wrench of how-to's in hopes we'll find ways to tighten our loose ends. But it doesn't work or not for long. Until we return to the worldly toolbox looking for ways to nail down a better path to secure ourselves. On it goes in a deseperate grasp for some tool to do the trick and fix the machine of life and self.

And so my life went 'round and 'round but not 'round the One place I needed to circle back. Not for several years.

So it is, some days I forget. A life I once lived, no more.

Twenty-two arrives next month and it's such a lifetime away from where I was, from where I am today and how it's all miracles every day the change of One thing. Not a tool box, or a fix, or self-help temporary shelf-life, but this eternally deep abiding change which clears out the old for a constant pouring of the New.

And if He can do it for me, He can do it for her too.

My tool box I dropped years ago, to only be found by someone else.

The cold, steely reserve of worldly tools I hadn't meant to give to anyone. Sometimes people just need to try for themselves. And so it is my daughter inherited the thing I never meant her to have.

But I know Someone who's a miracle-maker, giving us more than we ever had and grafting us to the Family tree.

Grafting. A broken, open wound of a branch merged with an open wound of the Source plant until the two become one. And my daughter, born to me in a far off asian country while still a girl myself, has inherited more than what I meant her to have.

More than all the gold of the universe, more than all the pits of things I wasn't, she inherited this knowing of what He has and means her to have (more than I could ever give)...

.....and all she needs, is grab it.

At Em's "Imperfect Prose".