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wheels turning

We have been laboring. I have been working the jobs and moving in to a third-story apartment. Arranging furniture and spray-painting metals and chopping, hanging, and mis-using various woods. Transferring bills and arranging payments and visits. My wife has been shuttling between her two jobs and simultaneously keeping Hiro in and verbally coaxing him out. She has the harder of the labors. We expect him sometime this month. Expectations are high, and the attendant anxieties.

I drove to Omaha last weekend for a wedding. Rain from St. Louis to north of Kansas City. About 8:00, the clouds raised enough for a northwesterly drive into the sunset. The air had thinned out. My windows were down and I looked over fields, sprinklers, fireworks tents. I was listening to The Smiths' "William, It Was Really Nothing." A semi was a hundred yards in front of me in the right lane. The sun reflected off its tires. I am ripe with tears.

I thought of Rachel back home, looking down at her belly the way she does, like a child peering over the edge, wonder-fully and incredibly and daringly. Inside that stomach, our child, a wonder to us. I cried. I often cry on road trips, but it's always for the past. This time, I think, it was for the future. I thought of Hiro, in his 20's, driving somewhere toward something, the same sun, fields, trucks, fears, longings, loves, insecurities, drowning, rising. I felt, at that moment, like a stunt double at a baptism. I don't know how else to describe it.

And I cried for the future of our family. For the possibility of redemption, of goodness, our hearts ripped out and laid at each others' dirty feet. For the possibility of hiding, accusation, distance. Sometimes there's too much possibility to bear.

Is God faithful? Sometimes, Jesus hid himself; he hid himself when the crowds expected, and even demanded, the wrong things, the self-protective things, from him. He is faithful only to his expectations, his demands, his un-self-protecting promises--his own words.

With those words, does he promise redemption? Heartache? Speak into our lives sun and fields and fears and longings and loves? Trucks and sunshine turning on the wheels? I'm not sure. But I am sure that when I shrink into myself, try to protect myself, he doesn't say, "I said, 'Don't mess up'" but "You messed up, and I have promised to love you still; there is a future for us."

So help me, God, help my wife love me still. Help my child love me still. May I say to him not "Don't mess up" but "When you do . . . ." This is labor. The sun is setting. The fields are ripening. We need not protect ourselves. We have a future.