we have a problem with no solution but to love and to be loved

This is probably the only public entry you will ever see me post because it is the most important.

The story is complicated and begins with a scrawny nineteen-year-old boy making babies out of false boyish passion with his older lover. But we won’t go that far back. In fact we’ll just go as far back as this weekend when I stood in front of the fridge to once again find nothing but a crusty-topped bottle of mustard and a heel of bread stuffed back in the corner and thought “what the hell are we going to do now? Because my sick mother is working her minimum wage job and I’m home without a car, waiting for a measly paycheck that has yet to arrive. So I’m cleaning every crevice to keep my mind off the fact that I’m hungry, hungry but too embarrassed, too shy to eat anything that could go to my seventeen year old brother who is out working forty-five minutes away washing dishes for the wealthy until 11 o’clock at night but can’t afford to buy a meal for himself. But most of all I am trying to keep away the thought that that scrawny nineteen-year-old turned out to not be very passionate at all.

The image of the empty refrigerator folded and so did I. And in a moment of absolute desperation I found myself calling the one person who had a slight hold on the mess: my sister. My sister who teased my hair when we were kids and made me wear a full face of makeup into town as a toddler. My sister who’s tenderness for me seemed to hinge solely on the direction of the wind. My sister who’s conception came from the scrawny boys’ lust-- a product of hormones, good (or was it bad?) timing, and properly aimed semen. But, it was my sister who had enough power and connections to cause a raucous that might just put food in our empty bellies.

Let me interrupt to remind you that while you’re shaking your head and thinking “poor girl” with sympathy shadowing your eyes that everyone has their advice, their ideas, their prayers, their input, their criticism, oh, and a head for nodding. Don’t you? What a world of hope you have offered with your opinion!

Everyone seems to know how to live everyone else’s life. But among other things this past year, here’s something I’ve found out: you don’t know someone’s pain. You never will.

Thankfully, but no thanks to ideas, advice, or half-hearted prayers, this story gets a happy (almost) ending but first we must go back ten years to a boy and his mother in front of an empty refrigerator and her sobbing as he watches thinking of how one day, he’ll make her better. He’ll make it all better. And the people who showed up on his doorstep to leave paper bags of groceries and that first kiss with my sister at Church camp and the years and years between them that mean nothing. Until that night, over this weekend when she picked up the phone and asked him to pray for her little sister. And when he did it meant everything because he meant everything. He didn't use the prayer to shake me off from his mind or to make himself feel like a good person. He picked up his phone and called his mother across the country, across the miles and miles and miles they gathered money to wire to the girl (that’s me) crumpled on the couch waiting for God to hear her. And as I laid there dying of a disease that is by no means real but apparently quite feared and contagious as evident by the lack of hands willing to hold mine-- I learned of this young man who’d never met me, who’d never seen my face or heard my voice. But he’d felt my pain. And so did a lot of other people I’d never met, a lot of people who live all kinds of lives all over the world who gave even more money, who for some reason also knew my suffering, knew the emptiness in my stomach, the cold in my veins, the sadness in my heart and felt compelled to save me, if only for a day, even though they didn’t know my face.

And they did save me. Because as I sat crying in the grocery store parking lot with over $150 in grocery money God held me just as He held them and made me promise that one day I would do the same. That I wouldn’t just sit and shake my head with self-righteous mercy if I had the means to hold out my hand to someone drowning. So it hurts and it’s scary but it is a blessing to me, this suffering, because just as that young man and his mother cried in front of an empty fridge years and years ago and God healed their hurt with the love of other’s, he did so for me and I believe in a way, it validates their pain, their years of suffering-- and not just theirs but my sisters’ and the strangers’ across the world, to reach out and offer a hand to this drowning girl so that she may live to one day do the same in the name of God.