What we give to them

Introvert that I am, the most appealing thing about our city's annual Riverfest---a days-long combination of concerts, food, and other entertainment---is the first day's book sale to benefit the Wichita Art Museum. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but a nice hardbound copy of anything by Eudora Welty tops just about everything that can prance on a stage or march in a parade. An elephant ear is good eating to be sure, but that's why our family makes a pilgrimage to the state fair every year.

This year I was all set to escape with a box of books once again, but my children noticed the amusement park rides---and the ice cream. For all my big talk, I am mostly a pushover. So we weaved through the crowd to ride the rides.

Another reason, I remembered, that I avoid such gatherings is my low tolerance for poorly behaved children. We seemed to be surrounded by people auditioning to appear on one of those voyeuristic daytime talk shows, the kind that displays dysfunctional families for those of us are marginally less dysfunctional to cluck at.

Here was a boy of 8 or 9 trying to wreck an electric train display, physically wrestled back at the last moment by his mother and a man who was, as the boy barked for all to hear, not his father. There were two children urged by their parents to slip into the front of the line for a whirling children's ride.

And here was a little boy of perhaps 5 or 6, his face contorted into a perpetual look of fury. He yelled at the smaller girl standing beside him, and seemed to refrain from striking her only because a bigger boy threatened him in turn. Later I saw him sitting with his mother, whose face was similarly bound up in barely contained hatred. What she hates, I don't know. Perhaps all of creation, or maybe just her corner of it.

Watching that little boy snarl and cower under her looming figure, I was struck by the amount of pain that can be packed into such a small body. Perhaps his mother grew up with someone who taught her to scowl at the world. Perhaps one day this boy will have his own children, and he will teach them the same thing in turn. Lord have mercy.

That got me to thinking in turn about how all of us are like relay switches for sin, transferring it to our children who deserve better. I am filled up with my own deep-running anger, this intolerable pride, a black flame of lust. These are not sins with which I sometimes struggle; they are my daily battle, my hourly battle. How much of this sickness will I pass to my sons? Christ have mercy indeed.

I pray someone will love that little boy. Despite how deeply the roots of wickedness sink into our souls, I have to believe that love reaches even deeper. It is the love of God that makes us alive when we are dead in our trespasses and sins. It is love that sustains us in the darkness, when we are quite certain that no good thing ever has or ever will come from our hands. Lord, I am praying, if nobody else will love this child, will you please do it? Have mercy on a world that has so little of its own to give.