I sat on the floor of the mayor’s living room. Two of his daughters, one 13 and one 34, and three of his grandchildren, a girl age six months, a boy age seven, and a girl age eight, were there, too. We’d started to watch Monsters’ Inc. in the neighboring room, the one with the sofa and TV, but the mayor’s wife had told us that we should all go into the next room because that’s the room with the heated floor. So that’s what we did. We turned off the TV and obeyed. No one made even the slightest hint of a complaint.
The question then became, Well, now what do we do? So we decided to play a game. And not just any game. It would be a game to help the mayor’s daughters and grandchildren learn English. An English teacher from the capital had come to their remote village after all. And he was staying the week at their house.
The game was simple. Pick out an animal, act the animal out and or make its sound, and everyone else had to guess what the animal was. If they didn’t know the name of the animal in English, we’d all get to learn a new word.
The 34-year-old’s selections included a snail and a hen. At one point the eight-year-old girl stretched out her neck pretending to be a giraffe. The thirteen year old climbed up on a counter top and jumped off it. I’m still not sure what that animal was. The little boy ran around the room on all fours and squeaked like a mouse. I gave my best impersonations of a gorilla and a penguin. But most importantly, we all laughed hysterically.
The next morning I was leaving the village. I’d arrived just two days before with another teacher to teach English at their local school. The other teacher was going to stay, but I had to get back.
That night after our game, the eight-year-old girl took my hand, looked up at me with her bright brown eyes, and said, “Please, don’t go. Stay just one more day.”
I told her I couldn’t. Without letting go of my hand, she pulled me over to a spot away from everyone else and started in on telling me something that to her was very important. I didn’t understand most of it. I got the impression it was some greatly exaggerated story. But as long as she didn’t let go of my hand, I didn’t let go either. I just knelt beside her and listened as I imagine I would listen to my own daughter, her hand in mind.
There are some moments you wish you could bottle up and keep forever.
There, for perhaps the ten thousandth time over these last years, I felt the pain of having lost something I’ve never had. Laura and I could very easily have an eight-year-old by now. She could very well have bright brown eyes like my new friend, the mayor’s granddaughter. I could imagine her being smart and beautiful and full of youthful life. I could imagine her looking up at me the way that little girl looked up at me, and I could imagine the feeling of her little hand in mind and of her pulling me to the side as if to confide in me some deep secret.
So though I’ve never had any of that of my own, the best word to describe it remains loss. It’s the loss of all that could have been. It’s the loss of a dream you’ve had all your adult life. It’s the loss of a vision that replays itself over and over in front of you no matter where you go. Children and child-rearing are one of those great human universals. You just can’t escape it. And for some unfathomable reason, for now at least, God’s decided we don’t get to participate.
I admit this has plunged me to depths I never wanted to reach—depths of despair, depths of hopelessness, depths of anger, depths of pleading, and depths of having to wrestle with God’s inscrutable ways. Compared to some, I know, I’m still swimming in the shallow end, yet in terms of knowing this yet mysterious God, perhaps this has been the single greatest impetus to get me to stop clinging to the side of the pool.
I love reading and writing stories because they have endings. Our story doesn’t have an ending yet—at least not from our perspective. We’re still slogging through the thick of it. We don’t know what’s coming up in the next chapter. All we can do is trust the Author, a Father who loves his children more than I would ever be capable of loving mine. If I a sinner am capable of looking into the eyes of the mayor’s eight-year-old granddaughter and feel what I can only describe as fatherly love toward her, how much more is my Father in heaven capable of looking down on me, his beloved son resting in finished work of his Beloved Son, and feel his perfect fatherly love toward me, even when the son’s petitions go unanswered?
And so, if it’s all we do, we’ll keep on trusting him. We would be fools to do anything else.