Hope Springs

Sheri and I abandoned the kids last night -- actually overnight -- and hit the town. We always have big ambitions of doing things, but usually end up having appetizers and drinking and talking in the same place for hours and hours and hours. We probably would have done that all night, but had a concert to catch -- Bruce Cockburn. For those who don't know, Bruce is a mash up of, I don't know, Thomas Merton, Che Guevara, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Louis Riel. There's just something about his music -- it's lyrical, passionate, angry, funny -- that always strikes me poignantly, especially in concert.

You may or may not know his song Lovers in a Dangerous Time. There's a line partway through that is one of those few moments when a human being looks at the grand, confusing universe around us, our place in it, and gets it. (And I'm not the only one who thinks this about the line -- a collection of his songs by a bunch of fellow Canadian artists uses the line as the album title.) I was ready for the line, feeling it coming, and when he sang it, the tears streamed down my cheeks -- not the coolest thing in a concert, but I don't think that anyone noticed.

nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight --
Gotta kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight

That's where I am. You can read through my posts here and I probably seem a bit flippant about all this. My anger and frustration, a growing depression, none of these are very apparent. But it's dark, and I've come to the point that I hope that we'll get a call from Taiwan not today or this week, but maybe this month. And some days I am sure that it will never happen, that this boy I believe is my son will disappear from us. In that darkness there is only one thing for us to do: kick, fight, tear at the very fabric of the universe around us, wrestle God to the ground. Passively sitting back, confident that all will be well -- sometimes that's just not an option. And, though it might not appear so, that is hope.