A prayer before a court hearing

Court hearings in the child welfare and foster care system are wild. Heavy. Intense, a time-and-matter condensing event. Plus: it's fall, so it's time to travel to the mountains

I sat outside the second-floor courtroom in the Larimer County Justice Center unsure, exactly, what I was doing there. But uncertainty was the name of the game in the 48 hours following the county’s invitation to being a long-term placement for our girls’ half-brother. By the time I arrived outside that courtroom, I was mostly sure that he wasn’t going to be placed with us that week. After my conversation with the senior case worker, a definitive uncertainty would remain. The county was placing the boy with kin, and if things went south, they’d call us.

Nearly four months later, we haven’t heard anything from the county. Our assumption is that the boy’s current placement is stable enough. We don’t know how the mom is doing. Only the Lord knows what will happen here.

But being back in the courtroom brought back a tidal wave of memories and emotions from our adoption adventures with our three kids. Our first year with James, especially, felt like one unending court hearing. So I was a little surprised (to say the least) to find myself outside yet another courtroom all these years later, at a hearing for a little boy whom we had never met but wanted to.

Child welfare / foster care court hearings are wild, dude. Even when they’re not, they are. Even if the hearing is the standard check-in type of hearing and not the major decision-making ones. All the parties (formal or informal) are there. You’re interacting with the biological parents in a particularly vulnerable moment when they (and sometimes even yourself) have to give an account of how they’re doing. Time and matter get slow and heavy, like that one planet Matthew McConaughey and Ann Hathaway found themselves on in Interstellar. So, a 15-minute hearing can feel like an hour; the sobriety of the moment compresses all other events on the space-time continuum. You can come out of a hearing wondering how many months or years it took off your life.

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And I attribute most of this wild weightiness to being in the presence of a judge. It can be a terrifying thing to stand before a judge. All of the everything of this situation rests in the judgment of one person. There’s a lot I could say here but won’t for now. Though I will say this: I have never been more nervous than when I’ve addressed a judge on my child’s behalf.

So you take all that, throw in all of the emotional and spiritual dynamics of being a foster parent, and court hearings transmogrify into this bizarre ordeal. A court hearing duplicates all of your emotions, all of your hopes, all of the stresses that come with this calling. And sometimes all you hear as the button of justice gets pushed is “boink.”

What do you do with that boink? Well, you can pray. But sometimes the words don’t do so good in these moments. How do you pray for all of that?

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Mountains + fall = yes

Our family is hiding away in the West Elk Mountains this week. We’ll be gazing at changing leaves in designated Wilderness Areas. The cell service will be scant at best. And it will be glorious. And we’ll be listening to The Oh Hellos.

I’m writing this on Sunday, and at breakfast, I read Frodo’s quote about traveling in the fall:

“When autumn came, he knew that part at least of his heart would think more kindly of journeying, as it always did at that season.”

So who are we to argue with Frodo?

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Poets’ corner: Douglas McKelvey on leaving for a holiday

Douglas McKelvey is the only living poet I’ve ever met. He wrote Every Moment Holy, a wide-ranging collection of prayers-as-poems that are beautiful, moving, soaring. It’s an indelible piece of work that has blessed our family many times over.

In the collection, McKelvey has a wonderful prayer called “A Liturgy for Leaving on Holiday.” Praying it with our family this morning—as we read the line—“Bless our pilgrim quest for restoration” I think realized for the first time that the word “rest” is embedded within the word “restoration.” To restore something is in some way to give it rest. And our vacations and travels can help bring that about in our lives. As McKelvey writes near the end of the prayer:

You are our rest, Jesus.
May this vacation serve your holy purposes.

Amen and amen.

Thanks for reading.