Speaking My Language

I've been told I have a restless soul. By more than just a few people. I read this a few years ago, and found it again during the recent move. It makes even more sense to me this time....

We drove out of the city, where the land opened up into silty flats and, in the distance, mountains rose dark against a storm-churned sky. After a while, we turned off the highway and continued on down a dirt road raised up between stretches of rice paddies, gleaming wet and bristling with rice grass. Farther down, at the edge of one of the rice fields, stood a series of plain buildings, with a hand-painted sign at the entrance. This was the orphanage. The worker who met us at the front entrance told us to feel free to visit where we wished. We walked in, not sure where to begin.

We needn't have worried; the children came to us, ran to us, clung to us. They were starved for touch and voice. They could not get close enough to us. We each carried around several children, while others hung onto our legs and arms. They pressed their faces, dusted with talc to cool their skin in the sweltering heat, into our skin and clothes, smelling our living bodies, some of them gathering a shirtsleeve or collar into their mouth and sucking it. They caressed our faces, plucked gently at the hair on our arms. They didn't understand a single word we spoke, and yet they did - they understood the tenderness, the goodwill.

Leaving that orphanage was one of the hardest things I've ever done. We literally had to peel the children off of us - to pry loose their tiny clutching hands, unwrap their thin, entwining legs - and push them off, while the workers pulled them away and held them back. Many of the children wept and looked at us stricken, betrayed.

Then we drove away. In the car we were dead silent for a long time. We listened to the hum, hugely amplified in the car's hot interior, of the tires on the rough pavement. We listened to the blood sluicing through our veins and the wind needling through the door cracks. We watched bugs accumulate, in black flecks and bright spatters, on the windshield. When we finally began to talk, none of us mentioned the orphanage. None of us were able to, not for a long season.

Later, that experience spoke many things to me. But this is the one I wish to pass on: The longing in us for the Parent is so deep, so desperate, that deprived of Him, any stranger will do.

Those children haunt me. Many years later, I still see their dark eyes, bright at our appearing, emptied and extinguished at our departing. I see their chalky skin, as though they'd pressed their faces, sweat-dampened, into a bag of white flour. I can feel the tight brace of their hands on my arm, the tugging of their arms around my neck, the winching coil of their legs around my waist.

For one hour, I was the father they never knew. For one glorious, tragic hour, I entered their life, they entered mine, and the world was as it ought to be. For one hour, I felt, I think what God feels.

But that wasn't all. That morning in the orphanage, we visited another building, off behind the main buildings.

We entered a room darkened with shades. There were several cribs crowded together, and in each was a child. The children were small, frail, in diapers, but most of them weren't infants. Some of them were eight or nine years old. These children did not respond to us. No smiles. No laughter. No embrace. No speech. No eye contact. They lay still, curled up tight, or sat rocking in their cribs, staring blank-eyed. We spoke to them, stoked their arms and backs, picked them up. But there was an inertness in their flesh, like touching dead wood. It was as though we weren't there. It was as though they weren't there.

Some of the children were silent. But most of them groaned.

They had been alone so long - untouched, unnoticed, unloved - that they had closed up inside themselves. All that was left, or all that seeped out, was the groaning.

Paul says that the whole creation groans, waiting for the sons of God - for you and me - to be revealed, to come into the fullness of our inheritance and identity, to be filled to full with God's Spirit.

The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be reveled.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

What is this groaning except, at root, a longing for heaven? A longing that no father on earth, no matter how attentive and affectionate, can quite satisfy? A longing for all that's hidden and broken and scattered now to be gathered and mended and revealed: for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven? A longing for the Father to make His sons what His sons are not yet?

We hear the groaning in all things. In orphans. In refugees. In housewives, in businessmen, from history professors, from folk musicians. In the sated. In the famished. In the sleek, the sick, the wounded, the pampered. In victims and victors. We hear it in haiku poetry, in county-and-western laments, in street marches, in hunger strikes. We hear it in the rocks beneath the earth's crust as they tremble and slip, in the wood joists of our houses at night as they shiver and pull, in the bones of our bodies as they shudder and twist. We hear it in our guts. We hear it in our heads. We hear it in our hearts.

It is a whisper.

It is a thunder.

We hear it, and if you do not, then like unto a stone is your deafness.

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.

Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come. (2 Corinthians 5:1-2, 5, emphasis added)

I don't speak in tongues. But I have come to accept groaning as holy speech, the fire in my bones rising up, taking voice. It's the ache in creation echoed in me, answered by the Spirit. I don't stoke that fire. But I don't quench it, either, for this is the Spirit's testimony, His guarantee of what is to come. This is my eager expectation: that one day, the Father will come through the door, adoption papers in hand. And He won't leave without me.

Until then, homesick, I groan.

Buchanan, Mark. Things Unseen, Living in Light of Forever. Multnomah Publishers, 2002.