How to help those helping Ukrainian refugees
Plus: 'A Quiet Place' and being afraid of parenting, some good reads, and Czeslaw Milosz on being a worker in the vineyard
Hey.
Welcome to my first month-that-was email. Somewhere around the end of a month or beginning of a new one, I’ll share all the goodies from the blog over the previous month, as well as other things that catch my eye—articles or music worth checking out, probably a poem or two. Let’s get to it.
Posted notes
Our church provides support for a missionary family living in Romania. Tim and Caroline Bailey work with orphans and foster care organizations. They have four kids, two of them adopted. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the Baileys have been helping to coordinate Youth With A Mission’s (YWAM) support and resources for refugees fleeing to Romania.
More than 600,000 Ukrainians have come to Romania seeking shelter from the war. A refugee is not that much different than a foster child. Both have had their worlds torn apart. Both have been removed from their homes. Both feel the peril and uncertainty of the present—and the future. Both are dealing with physical and emotional traumas. And both need a safe place to lay their heads.
The need is serious and long-term. Even if the war were to end soon, the families (mostly women and children) who have fled their homes in Ukraine have a long journey back to normalcy. It can be easy to think that there’s nothing we can do to help such a massive humanitarian crisis, but individuals giving generously can have a major impact.
In the post, I detail a few ways you can help with YWAM’s relief efforts and some of the projects the Baileys are working on directly.
Do you know what I’m really good at? Offering my takes on cultural artifacts that have long since faded from trendiness or relevancy or coolness or “happening now” status.
Exhibit A: I somewhat recently watched the A Quite Place films. The first one came out in 2018. I blame my kids.
Anyway! I thought that the films offered nerve-wracking insight into the demands and dynamics of parenting. Here's this family, doing everything they possibly can to survive the invasion of alien monsters who only eat things that make noise, have swords for arms, and move like Terry Tate Office Linebacker. Lee and Evelyn Abbott are going to unfathomable lengths to get everything right, and yet…
Sound familiar? Like, if your kid plays with this toy or doesn’t make the traveling soccer team by age 3 or doesn’t properly appreciate piano lessons or if you give them a smartphone before they’re 30, then an untold number of horrors will befall their sad, pathetic lives *and it’s all your fault.*
We are wrecked with this notion that anything less than undaunted diligence will therefore result in the demise of our kids and everything we’re trying to create with our families.
If orphanhood and adoption are at the heart of ultimate reality, then we will see these themes everywhere we look. In movies, literature, poetry, sports. We’ll also likely find ourselves being called to be present with those who are looking for a forever home—who are acutely feeling the sorrow or orphanhood.
There’s a girl in our neighborhood that comes over a few times a week to play with our kiddos. She has come to our kids’ birthday parties. We love being her neighbors. Partly because there is an intrinsic connection, a mutual—if unspoken—understanding of our respective stories.
Our neighbor girl is in a kinship situation—meaning, she is living with and being cared for by her Nana and not her biological parents. Not long ago, she showed up on our front porch just as we were finishing breakfast one day. She was sobbing. Lindsey stepped outside, hugged her, listened to her. She said she missed her grandma, the grandma she used to live with. She said she wanted to live with her again. She didn’t want to live where she lived now. As she was telling Lindsey why she was so sad, her Nana drove up and walked up to our front porch. The three of them talked for another minute or so before our friend was ready to go back home. Lindsey hugged her Nana and told her that we know how hard it is. They got in the car and drove off.
Good reads: “Does My Son Know You?”
Jonathan Tjarks is a writer for The Ringer. He writes about basketball. He also writes about being a father and being diagnosed with an incredibly rare (and deadly) form of sarcoma. His piece back in mid-March is titled, “Does My Son Know You?” because he talks about how his own dad died when he was young and how all of his dad’s friends stopped coming around even before his death.
So now Tjarks’s son is facing the same reality: a life without his father. The essay is an extended, existential gut-punch. It’s clear-eyed about what matters in life and how important real, genuine community is. Here’s a bit of an excerpt, but please do make the time to read the whole thing.
There’s a Bible passage from Jesus’s brother that comes to mind: “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 4:13-16)
So where does that leave us, the little mists?
There are some things from the Bible that I have been leaning on over the past year:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this. To look after orphans and widows in their distress.” —James 1:27
“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” —Isaiah 1:17
“You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.” —Exodus 22:22
There are hundreds of verses like that. I have already told some of my friends: When I see you in heaven, there’s only one thing I’m going to ask—Were you good to my son and my wife? Were you there for them? Does my son know you?
I don’t want Jackson to have the same childhood that I did. I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.
Poet’s Corner
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz survived the Nazi invasion and the Soviety occupation. He has something to say to us in these times of sarcomas and war and pilgrimages. Here is his poem “Late Ripeness.” I hope it feeds you with hope.
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.