My household has welcomed a new addition: a set of bunk beds tucked into the alcove of my second bedroom, which, apart from the occasional visit from a friend, has stood vacant the ten months I’ve lived in this house.
The beds are half-made, the sheets piled on a nearby chair. I had started to make them up, unfurling new mattress toppers from their boxes, waiting for air to yeast its magic through polyurethane dough, encasing them in thin, terry-lined protectors (waterproof; I don’t yet know the age of their bedfellows).
I get hung up on the sheets. Freshly washed, Tide-scented sheets are a visceral sign of welcome and comfort and safety that does something for my heart even as an adult. The crux: I’ve only just started the process to get certified to become a foster parent, and the timing—both to complete the requirements and the wait until God brings the children He intends—is very much up in the air. I long to take the next step, yet it could be months before anyone dreams on that pillow.
I’m embarrassed to reveal specifics of a vision I know is tinged with idealism. Will this one tiny gesture lower by even a millimeter the high-water mark of trauma? How long will it take, in the crucible of single parenting, before dirty laundry accumulates in survival-fueled piles (just burn it!)?
What if they’re allergic to Tide?
***
I take a quick break to schedule my home study visits; the email coincidentally arrived just now, as I write about timing. Things are moving forward on their own schedule.
Later, at home, I cast about my living room, trying to see it through the disoriented eyes of a child uprooted from their own home, wondering if any of the objects so comforting to me might be a trigger for them. On a bookcase rests a framed collage of monochromatic magazine clippings overlaying snow on the ground, an iron-gray pond, a fringe of trees naked but for the black corpses of shriveled leaves clinging to brittle winter stems.
To the right, an abandoned farmhouse, exposed to a bleak and barren sky, stands long unoccupied and long, presumably, to be inhabited: colorless light shines straight through glassless windows and rotting siding. Beside it, a barefoot woman in a sheer white dress hangs tiny socks, blankets, bibs. Time collapses, condenses, in this image. For her, it is spring, yet she is waiting in another sense: veiled in translucent folds curves a belly swelling to full term.
But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:24-25
How long, O Lord?
In June, at 2 AM in a shed on a friend’s land in Peyton, I felt Holy Spirit inviting me to explore what it looks like to hold onto hope in such a way that I do not crush it—and it doesn’t crush me.
Biblical hope is a curious animal; the verses that reference it seem extra susceptible to being lifted, like optimistic balloons, out of context and made into something more akin to “wish”. In reality, the context of all of them is hope in Christ, hope in glory, hope in salvation; exceptions are stubbornly elusive. Not to be deterred, I recall the etymological connection, more obvious in Spanish, between hope (esperanza), to wait (esperar), and expected (esperado). I search “wait” instead. They’re all wait on the Lord, too, even Hebrews 6:15, “And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.”
What was promised? Something initiated by God.
I stand in the doorway of the spare bedroom, feeling the rightness of the beds there and checking in with Holy Spirit, that sense of knowing. Yes, it’s still there. I believe this invitation to foster (or at least the heart work needed for it!) has been initiated by God.
I snap open a folded sheet, smooth it over the mattress cover, carefully square the pillow at the head of the bed.
Eventually, they will need to be washed again.
I remain confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.
Psalm 27:13-14
Fire and Whisper 