Write for God

The bond between a mother and a child is modeled on God's bond with us.

My sister likes to say that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. I think God must think I am Wonder Woman because I have chastened and severely tried during the past 18 months.

The latest trial was having a child in juvenile trouble this week. Since it’s our first experience in this area, every aspect of the process was new to us. Just as we were newbies in pediatric intensive care and traumatic brain injuries after the auto accident that changed our lives, we are now newbies in the court system and all of its ancillary services.

We sat in court for a hearing this week and saw a group of six or seven teens in handcuffs and jail uniforms coming before a very compassionate but also very no-nonsense  judge. Two of the teens were girls and the rest were boys in their mid-to-late teens. Their offenses ranged from robbery and assault to setting off a fire alarm while on probation. One girl was facing a long sentence for burglary with assault and one of the boys had battered a sibling.

Their stories seemed so similar: repeated offenses, a lack of real parental authority and surly attitudes. Seeing any child in handcuffs is the most heartbreaking sight for a parent, but hearing that these kids have been in these situations before other judges was even sadder.

I will always remember a young boy named Michael who was handcuffed and in court alone. Other children had mothers or two parents standing with them before the judge, but  Michael’s repeated offenses had taken their toll on his mother. As the judge explained, she had called him to say she was “fed up” and wouldn’t come to court with Michael any more. He would face his crimes alone.

I thought of what the future would hold for this teen who seemed to need support and discipline more than abandonment. If God abandoned us for our repeated offenses, our world would be bereft of mercy or salvation. I prayed that someone in his family or in the juvenile system would intervene on Michael’s behalf to save him before he became old enough to enter the adult correctional system.

Our oldest daughter told us that her neighbor’s teen son is in the same morass as Michael. Our daughter’s neighbor had kicked her son out of the house because she couldn’t deal with his criminal activities. The mother has asked the neighbors to turn him in if he appears in their apartment complex. When that mother first held her son as a newborn, could she have imagined the bonds between them would ever break? What would life be like for two teenagers whose mothers have given up on them? What would life hold for us if our Blessed Mother gave up on us?

In Psalm 27, there are words proclaiming God’s love: Even if my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me in. He will always take Michael and others like him even when their own mothers turn their backs on them.  God will rejoice when his lost sheep return to him:

If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray? And if he finds it, amen, I say to you, he rejoices more over it than over the ninety-nine that did not stray.  In just the same way, it is not the will of your heavenly Father that one of these little ones be lost.

A teen’s first offense could be a correction that sets his or her life in order or it could be the start of a pattern that ends in a mother’s desperation and abandonment. Within each young man or woman, there’s the potential to take either road and God will never give up on his or her capacity for salvation. St. Augustine’s life of sin and his conversion after years of prayers by his mother, St. Monica, are signs that God can always work miracles for those who seem beyond hope.

Father Donald Calloway

A few Sundays ago, the Catholic radio station in our market ran a testimony from Father Donald Calloway a priest of the Marians of the Immaculate Conception.  Before God called him to the priesthood, his life had been marked by drugs and crime but his mother never gave up praying for him. His profound conversion gives the families of the worst young sinner a lot of hope. We only heard the first part of Father Calloway’s story, so we will have to wait to find the second part at Lighthouse Catholic Media, a company that provides amazing testimonies and personal stories of God’s love on low-cost CDs.

Neither his earthly mother nor his Mother in Heaven gave up on Father Calloway. None of us Catholic women should give up on our children, either. If the Blessed Virgin is our model, then our sons have the potential to save the lives of others as Her Son did. God, after all, writes straight with crooked lines.

And, as Elvis Costello  says in The Crooked Line, “How I hope I’ll find you waiting/At the very end of this crooked line.”