The spare room

I’m posting this on Chinese New Year, so the pictures are taken from places that are celebrating today.  Happy Year of the Dragon!

“There are many rooms in my Father’s house”, said Jesus, “and I am going to prepare a place for you.  I would not tell you this if it were not so.  And after I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to myself, so that you will be where I am.”

(John 14:2-3, GNB)

I love these verses. The fact that Jesus wants me to be with him, where he is, is staggering.  And the idea of him lovingly crafting a room just for me – enjoying preparing it, anticipating how I will love each detail – it’s just wonderful. 

It makes me spin off in two different directions…

Firstly there is the simple wonder of his love for me.  For each of us.

You’d think that Jesus deserves a bit of a break after the incarnation – he’s endured leaving heaven, taking on a human body, being born into poverty, fleeing as a refugee, being taunted as an illegitimate child, being misunderstood by friends and family alike, being poor and homeless and lonely, betrayal, abandonment, injustice, torture and an agonising death… and then proving himself to a scattered and disbelieving band of followers after his resurrection.  But now he’s back home, he’s not sitting back.  He’s interceding for us (Hebrews 7:25), working within us through his Spirit (Romans 8:9-10), advocating for us (1 John 2:1-2), ruling in power (Hebrews 8:1-2), directing the defeat of his – and our - enemies (1 Cor 15), and overseeing churches (Revelation 2:1-4).  Given the scale of the list, it’s amazing to me that preparing a room for each of us is on there.  He’s got the universe, the world wide church and the powers of Satan to think about, and he is still preparing the perfect place for each of us to come and be with him.   Wow.

Foster carers prepare too.  In fact, by the time my first young person moved in, I was beginning to wonder if the preparation would ever end.  Getting from initial inquiry to approval as a carer takes many hours of very invasive discussion, as every area of your family history and life story and current situation is probed in minute detail.  There are a host of mandatory training courses.  Friends and family read books and articles and talked about possibilities.  A prayer support group formed.  And a steady stream of tradesfolk got my house ready – changing the bathroom door lock so a child couldn’t get stuck in there.  Screwing the bookcases to the walls so they couldn’t fall over.  Putting in a secure area to store sharp knives, matches, alcohol, the pizza cutter, an emergency phone.  Setting up parental controls and security settings on the wifi, the TV, my laptop.  Installing a carbon monoxide alarm.  Buying and making mountains of flatpack furniture – beds, desks, wardrobes.  Collecting toys and books and items for a child arriving late in an emergency.  Prepping the house for an unknown young person, of unknown age, with unknown needs, is hard work.

And then he arrived.  And so much more work was needed.

I didn’t know him, so I hadn’t known what we needed.  Some of what I’d done was useful, but it turned out he didn’t want to sleep in a bed, but on a mattress on the floor.  The dressing gown I’d got came just past his elbows.  I hurriedly bought Vietnamese recipe books and a huge sack of the kind of rice he recognised in the Chinese supermarket.  We ordered picture books to learn English, and worked out how to change the language on the laptop, and tried to find some local Vietnamese-speaking teenagers.

It was a massive learning curve, and I worked like crazy over the first couple of weeks to get things set up.  Despite all the preparation, nothing was actually ready.

That’s not going to happen when we get to heaven.

Our rooms are being made by the one who knows us perfectly – knows us better than we know ourselves.  He was there at our birth and for every moment after.  He sees our actions and reads our thoughts and knows our anxious hearts.  He draws out the potential we don’t know is in us, and reveals the sins we would rather hide from ourselves.  His preparation is perfect, because his knowledge of us is perfect, and his love for us is perfect.

The room he’s preparing will be perfect, and we will finally be perfectly at home.

And that’s wonderful.

And then there is the other thought.

What about the rooms in his house that are empty?

Again, I go back to those early days when I was just learning what it means to be a foster carer.  And boy, was there a lot to learn.

Some of it only comes through experience.  Some of it is specialised to a particular child, their situation or background.  Some of it is learning about yourself, and some of that is learning you’d rather not have gained (fostering doesn’t always bring out our best).

And some of it is stuff that honestly feels pretty obvious on the flip side.  Doesn’t stop it from flattening you in the middle, though.

Like this: when you first get a phone call about a young person you could take in, there is a very, very, very long road to travel before they actually arrive.

I didn’t know that at first.

So when my phone rang, about four weeks after my approval, and the lady from the placements team told me about a girl who might be a good match for me, I got super excited.  An hour later, I’d chatted to the team, chatted to my social worker, chatted to God (OK, just constant-babbled at him) and I rang them back to say yes.  The adrenaline was surging.  In my head everything was all lined up, and a few confirmation phone calls later, she’d be arriving.

To be honest, it wasn’t ideal timing.  My brother in law Dan had just fallen down the stairs and I’d sat with him, my sister and their kids through a long, long evening of pain waiting for an ambulance.  Watching people you love hurt that badly is awful.   I was exhausted and my heart was bruised.  I’d been on my way to the beach, for some much-needed ocean solace.

Those feelings were utterly submerged now with the cortisol streaming through my bloodstream.  I turned the car around and headed home, making a mental shopping list.  She was Syrian. What did Syrians eat?  Maybe I should get some hummus. 

(I kid you not.  This was the level of my feverish preparations).

So when placements rang me back a couple of hours later and said, sorry, not this time, I was floored.

What?  I thought she was coming?

I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. 

A few weeks later I had learned a lot.  I knew I’d needed more time to get over Dan’s fall, knew I hadn’t been ready.  I knew that this ‘no’ was a merciful answer to prayer, despite the immediate disappointment.  I knew that the enquiry phone call was the first in a long, long series of negotiations and asking questions and never quite getting straight answers and making best guesses in the twilight.  I knew that about 20 different people could each say no and stop the whole process, and that I might not even know that had happened for days.  I knew that I couldn’t stop my head from getting excited – but that self-preservation required me to try to ignore the twittering cascade of possibilities that each call set off… because nearly all the twists and turns stopped short in a dead end.  And despite knowing all this, every time that happened, it hurt.

This is what I wrote 24 hours after that first phone call:

I still have a spare room.

I thought this morning there would be a child there.  Someone who needed love and care and nurturing attention.

I thought last night we’d make dinner together and talk about what she likes to eat.  Work out how much English she can speak.  I thought I’d make something vaguely Middle Eastern and we could laugh at the things I do wrong.  Get out the recipe books.  Choose some favourites.

Or she’d be scared and withdrawn and we’d watch a film, facing the TV to take the pressure off, both hyper aware of a stranger’s presence and waiting for her to become known.  I’d work out how to get Arabic subtitles.

Or she’d be upset and we’d colour together.  Put on some music.  Share chocolate. 

I thought I’d know who I was praying for.

But this morning I still have a spare room.

I know it’s for the best.  I knew when I said yes that it was the right thing to do, and that it still might not happen.  I get that it’s complex and I’m new, that the agency want to make the right choices.  I am relieved because I’m so exhausted, I don’t know if I could take on someone else’s hurt right now.  But I am still sad.

I cried last night.  Proper crying.  I don’t know why but I know God did; I know he heard it as a prayer.  He understood what I didn’t, I only felt.  Was it about disappointment, and feeling useless, and being frustrated?  Was it about the trauma of Dan’s pain?  Was it about the evil that family have been through?  Was it relief – and guilt?  Was it exhaustion?

It was right to cry.

We're several years on now, but the pain of my spare room hasn't gone away.

It’s still spare now – because of the kids who didn’t stay.  Kids who I longed for and poured myself into, but who moved on.  Some I still have contact with, and some have disappeared out of my life with little trace. 

When every child arrives, I put their name onto their bedroom door.  I write it out, letter by letter, on little wooden slices and tie them together with string and hang the whole thing onto the door.  Their eyes light up when they see it. 

When they leave, I take the first letter of their name and add it to my collection.  They’re stuck along a bookcase upstairs, where visitors don’t see them.  They’re for me.  My eyes linger on each one as I remember.  Usually my prayer at that point has no words, but God sees them too.   He knows.

 He knows all the spare-room pain we carry.  The pain of relationships that once were, and are no more.  The pain of waiting for a prodigal who has not yet returned.  The pain of not knowing, the pain of the story that isn’t written.  The pain of the child who didn’t come.  The pain of relationships that didn’t work out.  The pain of miscarriage.  The pain of the gap where there should be a hug, of the silence where we long for a conversation.  The pain of loss.

God knows, because he bears it too.  He has enough rooms for everyone who will believe, and he longs for all to turn towards him – but he never forces us.  If we choose to, he lets us walk away from the room that has our name on the door.

And more than this, he chose to go through the pain of the spare room himself.  His most precious room, the room of his only-begotten son, stood empty one morning in heaven.  Can you imagine?  How the angels must have stood in shock as Jesus left home, and dwelled among us instead.  And then as he bore our sin, and the Father, in unfathomable grief, cut the connection between them entirely. 

Heaven knows the agony of the spare room.

He knows that we can’t bear it alone.  And he doesn’t ask us to.

That first spare-room night I cried – really cried.  And I’ve cried there many times since.  I’ve kept the door shut because I couldn’t bear to see the space where the young person was meant to be – the space where they had been, just hours or days or weeks earlier.  I’ve packed up the items left behind through gritted teeth, and shut the lid on the tears that fell among the books and clothes.  And in all of those moments, God has been with me, weeping with me, holding me, letting me shout or eat chocolate or go on a long run or flop, all emptied out, on the sofa.

He is with you too.  You can bring your spare rooms to him.  Even if no one else understands – even if you don’t understand – he does.  For he has walked through this pain himself, and he walks with you now.

 My morning-after-the-phone-call writing didn’t end with the tears.  Don’t get me wrong, I cried again, many times, as I worked through it all – but it wasn’t all grief.  This is the rest of what I wrote:

And today it is right to worship.  To say to our amazing God, you fight my battles.  You are sovereign.  You write the best stories.  You called me in my self pity and sadness and emptiness and told me to look up… and I did.  And I love you and I yield to you and I know you are making all things new – including me – and I will gaze on you, for you are beautiful and majestic and in control and full of joy and bubbling over with laughter.  I will gaze on you for you are good and the source of all good things.  I will gaze on you for you gazed on me first and in your eyes are such depths of love and joy and grace and commitment and strength and pain and power that I am overwhelmed.  I gaze on you because you called me – you called me once and you called me again today, you called me as I needed to hear and you called me in grace and in gentleness.  You called me because you wouldn’t let me struggle apart from you any longer.

You have their story in your hands. 

You have my story in your hands.

I bring my spare room, my exhaustion, my creativity, my dreams, my willingness, my fear, my preparation, my life, my self to you.  I am in your hands, and there is nowhere I would rather be.