Sandy and I saw Colm’s signature performance as Jean Valjean in Les Misérables on Broadway for our 10th wedding anniversary in 1993. Our little boy would have been three years old at the time, and – we would never have guessed that this, one of Les Mis’s most-beloved ballads – would have deeper meaning for us by the time our little boy had become a man of 24 – just last year.
The song’s story is that Valjean has taken young Cosette into his care as a promise to Fantine, the child’s prostitute mother, now deceased. When Cosette grows into young womanhood, she falls for the handsome rebel, Marius. Valjean is unsuccessful in his attempts to keep the two separate and, in time, develops a fatherly love for Marius.
Bring Him Home is the prayer of Valjean, sung over the sleeping Marius who insists on fighting with the rebel army at the barricade. Valjean knows they are outmanned and outgunned and the battle will result in great loss. He begs God to spare Cosette’s young man – and his ‘son’ – offering himself to die, if necessary, in the place of Marius.
Its a ‘box of tissue’ type of ballad, emoting on multiple planes. For my wife and me, it bespeaks of our labor and loss with our only child, Graham.
A week before Christmas last year, Graham lost in his battle with his mean world but gained in the end, beating devil and damnation by the grace of God, and entered the bliss of his heavenly home. On the very day we were finding air fares for his imminent Christmas visit, we learned of his unnatural demise, and by the end of the same day, Sandy was touching down in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
When the medical examiner finished his investigation and released Graham’s body, Sandy would not arrange for her return flight until she knew her boy was in flight and en route to his final resting place in Georgia. There was no way in God’s creation she was going to leave him behind!
Our son had spent the remaining months of his life with his biological family, but his ‘home’ was with us and the full life he had forged in Georgia. While his Minnesota family was gracious in their agreement with the arrangements, as we knew they would be, it was indelibly important to us…that we bring him home.
In the years God gave us with Graham – good and bad – our prayer, like Valjean’s for Marius, was always and ever that His grace would bring our child Home. Graham ran as far and fast as he could in the other direction at times, but in the end, hidden beneath tattoos and wounds and scars and self-hatred, was a soft place where God lived and latched onto our boy. And, because of it, our prayer was answered.
God brought him Home.
God on high Hear my prayer In my need You have always been there.
He is young He’s afraid Let him rest Heaven blessed. Bring him home Bring him home Bring him home.
He’s like the son I might have known If God had granted me a son; The summers die One by one, How soon they fly On and on And I am old And will be gone.
Bring him peace Bring him joy He is young, He is only a boy.
You can take, You can give Let him be Let him live.
If I die, let me die Let him live, bring him home Bring him home Bring him home.
I lovingly dedicate this entry to Graham’s ‘mama’ – my Sandy – and her epic love for our sweet boy who left earth one year ago this day; though he pierced her soul and died too soon, he always knew he had a home in her heart.
And the Child will pierce your heart also, Mary.
- Simeon, Luke 1:35
• • • •
The keen-eyed prophet looked up from his petitions when the young couple gingerly entered the temple grounds. Their eyes darted to and fro, nervously surveying the lay of the property. His own expression, however, told the full story of his mirth as a smile stretched and lit up his face like the gleam of a midday sun.
Their bundle which cooed and giggled and scuffled against its tight wrappings was the hope of his people but the pair appeared not to be aware. But the prophet was! He had lived to see this Day of Visitation after all! And here he was, within feet of Messiah in the guise of an eight-day old baby.
Not wanting to startle the couple, he could barely contain his adulation, but still carefully approached the young parents and when they simultaneously spied his approach, he smiled kindly.
The husband was more on edge but offered a respectful nod as the elderly man drew near. The new mother, quite young, looked shyly down upon her newborn and fiddled playfully with the child’s stubby fingers. The prophet paused, in awe of the scene before him: God Himself, accessible and interactive, gazing up at His mother, eyes alert and sparkling like the stars He had laid out in the night skies eons hence…
It was all too much – but joyfully so!
As Simeon drew up to the cautious pair, he kept bobbing his head in quick, successive and reverential bows and mimicked the quiet clapping and rubbing together of his bony hands. He had no idea, when he awakened this morning, that this day would provide the coda for his entire lifetime. He could fairly burst into song!
The new mother stole another quick glance at their visitor and smiled in return, ever so sweetly. He was struck by how young and innocent she was, little more than a child herself. Her attachment to this newborn was clearly evident, as if her baby boy was her universe.
Dare he ask to hold the Child?
Did she know Whom she was cradling against her breast?
Did he himself know for certain?
Indeed. So much so, in very fact, his hands, veined with thin ropes, began shaking and his breaths became shallow in this high and holy moment. This time his bow came from the waist and he lingered in abeyance for a beat or two. The couple seemed uncomfortable with the gesture and eyed him warily.
“You needn’t fear me, children,” Simeon offered in whispered tones.
He looked at the bundle in Mary’s arms with a look of reverential awe. “I know Whom you bring today.”
They were suddenly alarmed. Mary pressed into her husband’s side for assurance of his handling the matter.
“Your Child,” he indicated by tilting his head ever so slightly at the Baby, and continued, ” is our long-awaited One.”
Simeon’s smile broadened and glee spread out across his face, but Joseph quickly looked around, unsure, to see if anyone was listening. Mary looked instinctively at her fidgeting bundle.
The Child, only eight days, was now fixated on the old man who was now at Mary’s side. His round-as-marbles eyes seemed fascinated, taking in the moment, watching the kind man with interest. What could have been a smile – but surely wasn’t! – began to play at the corner of his tiny mouth.
Simeon held out his hands. Mary somehow felt the necessity that called instead of cautioned in the moment and gently released her Baby into the waiting arms of this righteous man. A startled gasp erupted from Simeon as he took Messiah into his palms. He looked down into the face of Deity and appeared to be listening, then looked up and then straight into the wide-eyed wonderment of the young girl before him.
“This Child is given for the salvation of many. But many will also reject Him and perish. He is God’s appointed One and will expose all that is in men’s hearts,” he declared aloud.
But then his eyes dampened as pity softened the edges of his prophecy. Simeon’s voice broke a bit as he added one more word for the sweet young mother of Messiah:
“And you, too, will have your heart pierced by Him…”
And the strangest thing…
Mary already seemed to know…
• • • •
In the fairy-est of tales, fraught with wonder and legend, my wife’s prayers for a child were answered in the fullest of ways. Our Graham came to us like a dream you never want to wake up from.
A year ago today we were looking at air fares for Graham, happily anticipating our son’s visit for Christmas. In mere hours, however, we were scrambling for a flight for Sandy – to be where he was. Well, his body. He wouldn’t make it after all. Death had intervened.
Rather than a festival we made plans for a funeral, and my wife, the mother of our only child, now deceased, was a sight to behold. Through it all – and since – her handling of it has been the stuff of fantasy. I’ve never known someone so deeply and consistently wounded and pierced through, and yet so marvelously forgiving and accepting … and so mythically and stunningly … content.
Mary – grander scale, we know; cosmic, to be sure – kept having more and more drama added to her narrative and yet kept quietly processing, finding sense in, and looking for God’s riches in it all (Luke 2:19,51). I’m watching my bride do this also and I’m fascinated to see Christ being formed in her in these tender days (Galatians 4:19).
Graham?
He’s missed –oh! – you’ve no idea!
Christmas is quiet. Joyeaux Noel is downplayed, though not in Minor key. We cry, but we don’t mourn (as much). We still talk about the could have beens, but without regrets tinged with bitterness. The motion of the world carries forward, but we still want to stay a few steps behind. Our choice. We’ll catch up, but not today. Today, my wife holds her hand over her pierced heart, hurting. And remembering. And treasuring.
And I? I hold my hand over hers.
One of the last mother-son pics – it says everything
How will the dead be raised? What kind of bodies will they have?…And what you put in the ground is not the plant that will grow, but only a bare seed of wheat or whatever you are planting…God gives it the new body he wants it to have…Similarly there are different kinds of flesh—one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish…There are also bodies in the heavens and bodies on the earth. The glory of the heavenly bodies is different from the glory of the earthly bodies…The sun has one kind of glory, while the moon and stars each have another kind. And even the stars differ from each other in their glory.
– Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthian believers (Chapter 15:35-41, NLT)
Once upon a Sunday night, my little boy was staring out the passenger window and looking into the evening sky. He was silent for several minutes.
“What’cha thinking about, buddy?” I asked.
He turned to me and I saw the most serious expression on his sweet boyish face.
“Dad,” he began, “you know when the clouds go away they become stars?”
“They sure do, buddy.” I smiled at my prodigy.
My boy.
Sigh.
Oh, the insufferable ache!
Fifteen or so years later, give or take, I’d be looking into his casket; face, neck, hands and arms – every exposed place – just covered with tattoos. Innocence erased. Boyish wonder swallowed by a life that had stolen away too many spring-times and summer adventures and given only harsh winters in return. My little boy far afoot. A young man who tried to grow up way too fast and far too free.
Looking back, I’ve said some pretty hard words in my years of life and ministry…but nothing I’ve ever had to say compares to this:
My sweet boy died from a heroin overdose; cold, alone and homeless.
This is not the eulogy Sandy and I would have imagined on that morning we laid eyes on our little boy for the first time. Chattanooga seems so far away…
First look, Erlanger, Sept 30, 1989
Surely not this tiny bundle?
This same little boy who, on the way home from church on Sunday, with family settled in for the quiet ride, begins singing “I Love You, Lord” word for word – and in perfect pitch – from his little fastened-in car seat? And, oh, did I mention he was only 18 months?…
This same little charmer who sidled up next to his mama and bravely watched a drama depicting the five missionaries who spilled their life-blood in Amazon sand and were added to the hallowed list of martyrs, at which he looked up at her with fiercely honest eyes and remarked, “that’s what I want to do with my life!”…?
My little third grader whose girlfriend Stasia ‘broke up’ with him, then later, on the playground, told her best friend he broke up with her, which led to that friend pushing him down and calling him a “stuck-up ***-hole”, then mocked him, saying, “aren’t you going to cuss back?” and our Gravy Train picking himself up, brushing himself off and replying with a sense of bravado, “Nope. I’m a christian”, to which she then called him a “stupid christian” and he just smiled…?
You mean, that brave little guy?
My precious seven-year old who told me he wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, and when I jokingly asked “you don’t want to be a preacher?” (I never pushed this on him), honestly replied, “I’ll be an astronaut who goes to church and loves the Lord”… Him?
Our darling first-grader, holding the ‘S’ sign for his Christmas program and standing ramrod-straight and belting out the all-too-famously encouraging Advent passage of Luke 2:10,11 loudly and proudly? Surely not him?…
The very Gra-Gra Scott who changed his “when I grow up” dream a year later and told us he wanted to be THREE THINGS: “a father, a ‘ski racer’, and a husband”, then proceeded to inform us with utter sincerity “I won’t even kiss a girl before I’m married, and if she asks me to dance, I’ll say ‘uh-uh, not until I get married!’”… Not, for the love of Pete, him?
Our little ‘Bubby’ who would not be silenced on McDonald’s playgrounds, telling other little boys and girls about his True Love Jesus, and Sandy getting a couple different stare-downs from appalled mothers, to which she could only smile and shrug, and the day our little guy actually “led a little African-American playmate named Terrance to Jesus”…?
Him? Dead of a heroin overdose at twenty-four, all alone in the back seat of a car?
Our precocious nine-year old who walked in on Mommy and Daddy one morning in Clearwater, Florida, then ran out giggling and telling Grandmother about what he saw?
Not my ten-year old little shadow who lamented to me one day he didn’t have a best friend, then me saying “sure you do, buddy, tell me who you’d rather spend your time with more than anyone else on earth” and hearing him say, “you, Dad”…?
Him?
Oh, dear God, no…please…
But…yes. The very same.
I have an entry in my journal, dated July 1, 1999, when Graham was not yet ten, where I’m crying out to the Father for the soul of my son who was struggling with his young faith. He was in an unsettling phase of questioning everything about God, along with a bent toward the far country. I find myself drawn to a single phrase that apparently reflected the fear I held for my child:
Dear God, I beg you, do not let my son run in rebellion…
The prayer was a daily plea until the end of his life. You’ll find it in every form all over my journals. I pled for the Lord to keep our son from drugs, pre-marital sex and a prodigal life. I wanted him to go to his wedding day a virgin. I begged God to make my son “a man You would write about.”
Over and over…
and over…
again.
How we wish for better endings. Sigh.
And yet…
December 16, 2013 was not the end of the story. While we were planning to see him at Christmas for a visit, the Lord gave us something worth eternally more. His body came home to us, but our son made it beyond the clouds. We gladly trade in our sorrows for the Father’s grander story for Graham.
Among those whom we shared a hug with in the five-and-a-half hour long receiving line at Graham’s viewing was a blind man who sees things mere mortals can never see, a friend, arm-in-arm with his wife who guided him to me. Tom handed me a note and told me to give it to Sandy later. He said it was “hefty and robust” and she needed to know what God spoke to him.
Later on that night, home and still reeling from the impending chore of burying our only child the next day, I unfolded the note, read its contents, and silently broke. The words told my wife that “one day you will see your son, running to you, skin gleaming.”
For all these stories and recollections of our Gra-Gra, Father, we thank you. Thank you for allowing us to be his on-loan parents. Each and every memory is its own separate “star” in an evening sky clouded right now by heartache, questions, grief and wish-fors. Even some regrets.
But, in the end, when the clouds roll away, there is nothing left but a brilliant galaxy of truth, lit by the unarguable proof from our Father that the same tattooed shell we saw in that casket is right now and forevermore adorned with everything his crying heart on earth hoped for: real peace, real hope, real answers, real freedom…real life.
You were right, son. When the clouds go away, they turn into stars. Tonight we’ll look up and ‘see’ you shining and feel you running toward us with skin gleaming.
And we’ll be okay.
Resurrection Sunday, 2006Teen Challenge, PA
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