Jesus Isn't Available for Me

It was ten after six in the morning and I was listening to a Bible teacher streamed on the Internet. He was relating a story of how he was a toddler, sitting in his high chair. His father, dominated at the moment by his own demons, threw a plate of spaghetti at the wall. Even as a toddler in a high chair, he can remember saying "What do I do?" It was the beginning of a life in which he was manipulated by grief.

When he relates that story, it cuts me to the bone. Of all my legacies, the one that makes me blush and worry is the one about how my kids will probably carry guilt because of my failures to deal with my own internal demons.

Jesus wasn't around at ten after six to talk to about that. I wish he had been. But then again, maybe I didn't. My experiences with Jesus thus far had not been fruitful. He was very good at holding a mirror up that didn't allow me any wiggle room. And as much as I wanted to blame Him for it, I knew the mirror was accurate, more or less.

Of course, the accuracy of the mirror so far had also shown me good things. One of the things that was different about Jesus was that he seemed to know all the bad things, and yet, for some reason, He didn't run away over them. I would have. I would have run screaming for the hills, proclaiming to all who could hear me that this was one you needed to stay away from. This one was bad and he would make you sorry.

But Jesus saw all this stuff and made me see it and yet He didn't run away on me.

I got up from the computer and walked to my son's room. Since we'd put the loft in his room, I could look in on him sleeping any more. So I looked in on the room that represented him. It was less a mess than normal. My wife had spent time over the Christmas vacation weeding out the things that a boy doesn't need any more once he turns seven. My son didn't care about such an activity. After all, there were important things that a seven-year-old boy needed to do. Maybe more important, in the long run, than cleaning up his room.

I pulled the door shut and glanced in on my daughter. For once, her room was clean. It had been a battle for her. She'd started middle school in the fall, and it was academically demanding. On some nights, she'd do homework until after eleven. And she was still swimming. And she was going to youth group. And she was still involved a little bit in Girl Scouts. In the past year, she'd grown from a sweet girl to a blossoming young women, filled with doubts and confidence. She was learning what she couldn't do, but more important, she was learning what she could do.

She might have a chance, I thought, to get past her equivalent of the plate of spaghetti.

Then I looked in on my wife, sleeping soundly until the alarm sounded in a few minutes. She hated to get up early, and yet she did. Every day. And the first thing she would do is to wake up my daughter. I'd have told her to get an alarm clock. But my wife went in every morning and laid down on the bed next to her and eased her out of bed. In order to get the bus at 6:05, she needed to be up before 5:30. It was a heavy cross to bare for one so young, and yet she did it mostly without complaint. And my wife got up early with her, even when she was dead tired, mostly without complaint.

I went back in the room I use more or less as an office. A fortress of solitude is more like it.

I sat down and stared out into the house and thought "My God, what have I done? What have these people learned from me?" I put my head in my hands and I begged a God that I can't see for forgiveness. And before long, I could feel the tears rolling from my cheeks onto my thighs. And I felt alone and afraid and small.

And Jesus wasn't there.

I needed Him now, to help me deal with the mess I had become and He wasn't there.

Later that day, I went to the cafe in the ground floor of my building to grab some lunch. The morning had gone poorly, but then again, I would have predicted that, given how it started.

Jesus wasn't there, either.

So I grabbed a sandwich and went back up to my desk. I needed to get a report done, anyway. And I needed to call a radio station to set up a field trip for my son's Cub Scout den. And there was swim practice tonight and we still hadn't finalized the plans for the Winter show, which I was basically running because the president was out of town and so was the other person with the most experience.

By one o'clock, I'd at least found out who to contact about the radio station. It was a country station; my wife would be pleased. And I was just getting ready with the report that I needed to have done by the end of the day when my cell phone rang. Maybe this would be Jesus.

"Mr. Hamilton, this is Ms. Johanson at school. Your daughter is here running a fever. Can you come pick her up?"

"Yeah, sure," I said without thinking. "I need to tie up a couple loose ends, then I will be there."

"I don't think you understand, your daughter is sick."

"I understand completely," I said, trying to run the report as I spoke. I could run it while I was telling people I had to leave, then fiddle with the data when I got home. "But I can't just pack up and leave without telling people. I should be there within the half hour."

We argued some more and I hung up. The report had run by the time I got done notifying all the people I needed to notify. It was situations like this that justified the amount of money high speed internet service cost. I would work from home. And, even though my daughter was sick, I'd still probably go to practice, at least for a little while, to get the Winter show stuff ironed out. Within ten minutes, I was in the car, and within 45 minutes, I was carrying her backpack into the house while she trudged after me.

She drew herself a bath, which was what she seemed to want, and I hooked up to my company's internal network. There were a couple support calls I needed to fix, including one with someone who had obviously not taken the training we'd created for the procurement tool I supported. Still, I took the 20 minutes to guide her through what the training would have covered in ten. I got her to promise to take the webcast, then started the report analysis.

"Thank you from bringing me home, Daddy," my daughter said. She was in her pajamas and her voice was small and child-like. She wasn't the self-confident go-getter right now. She was my little girl. I got up and hugged her and walked with her to the living room as she got settled on the couch and turned on Nickelodean.

Then I finished the report, and got the call-back from the radio station. There were a few hoops to jump through, but the radio tour was probably a go. Then my wife and son came home and I shut the door and finished my work, sending off the report just in time to leave.

I knew I would catch flak from the people I needed to talk to about going to practice when my daughter was sick, but I needed to nail some things down.

As I was driving to practice, my cell phone rang. It was Jesus.

"You needed to talk to me," Jesus said.

To be honest, with all the stuff going on, I'd forgotten.

"I think I'm good for now," I said.

"Did your question get answered?" He said.

"Which question was that?" I asked. Though I knew. And I knew that He knew.

"The one about why you are in the family you're in, in spite of your flaws."

I thought about it for a minute. Then I remembered that I had to fix the synchronized swim team's website with the results from the first meet when I got home.

"Yeah," I said. "I think it did."