Milton Martin, better known as Milty to everybody who knows him, was looking at a picture of himself as a child and not liking what he saw. His mother loved it because to her it was a reminder of that brief period of time when Milty had been a child. The little boy bouncing up and down if you even hinted at a trip to go get ice cream. The little boy with the gap-toothed grin always waiting on a visit from the tooth fairy. Those two themes sort of came together in the picture because it was a picture of a 7-year-old Milty standing in the backyard of their home on a summer afternoon, face lathered in Marsh Mud ice cream with a huge gaping smile. It wasn’t quite as bad as the naked baby in the bathtub pictures most parents harbor in their homes, but for Milty, who was now 22 years old, it might as well have been.
It was Saturday night. If he were back in Richmond, where he was going to college at VCU, he would be out with friends or playing games on his roommate’s new X Box or having some great philosophical discussion over questions like, “What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about?” Instead he was back home in Mattaponi, waiting for his mother to return from a dinner, wondering what Tara Tucker was up to, and staring at the mantelpiece over the fireplace. That’s where the embarrassing picture was.
That’s also where his mother kept his 8th grade basketball trophy and a funny little ceramic statue she had once made. It was fairly roughly done and all in an interesting shade of green, but you could make out two figures in it—one a man with a stethoscope around his neck, the other a small child which the man was holding aloft. Milty had never understood the statue, but it had been there his whole life.
Now all of the stuff on the mantel just reminded him of how hard it was to come back home. The transition to college hadn’t been easy. He’d had to work his way there through community college and lots of odd jobs. Once he got there, the course work didn’t come easily, even though he was a good student. But through it all there had been an excitement that he hadn’t known before. He was challenged, but he could feel himself growing, could feel his whole world stretching and expanding, could feel like he was finally discovering what it was like to be him, on his own, making his own decisions, charting his own future.
Coming home was like going back in time now. He liked Mattaponi. He had enjoyed growing up here. He still got along pretty well with his mom. But he didn’t want to go back to the snaggle-tooth days, didn’t want to be reminded of the times when he was dependent on other people for everything; didn’t want to be a child anymore. And as well-meaning as everybody in his hometown was, they had a hard time believing that their little Milty was all grown up. They weren’t quite ready to let him be the adult he knew he was becoming. And that included his mom.
Milty checked his phone for texts. None. Then he stared back at the mantel, bored. That’s when his mom came in the house. “Milty,” she said, “anything moving on that mantel?”
“I wish there were something moving. It’s a pretty slow night around here. How was your dinner? I didn’t hear any bagpipes.”
Magdalena, after fifteen years as a single parent, had finally been out on a date. Angus McPherson had invited her out to the annual Tartan Day celebration at the firehouse. It was a wonderful occasion when all the folks who had or imagined they had Scottish blood running in their veins would get together to play bagpipes, wear kilts, sing “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean,” and, of course, to eat haggis, that Scottish delicacy that looks like an oblong balloon and is made out of…well, it’s best I not mention what it’s made of, but let’s just say that someone once described it as a sheep turned inside out, and that’s not far from the truth. At any rate, that’s where Magdalena and Angus had been, although the tradition was relatively new in Mattaponi and the celebrations tended to be less than authentic.
“Oh, Milty,” his mom said. “The bagpiper came, but I wish he hadn’t. He had some minor surgery yesterday and the anesthesia hadn’t fully worn off, so when he played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ it sounded like a goat trapped in barbed wire fence. You know, Milty, there is no more beautiful sound in the world than the sound of a bagpipe…hitting the accordion at the bottom of the trashcan.”
“Sounds like a painful experience, Mom.”
“And that’s not even the worst of it, Milty! T.P. Tolliver was supposed to fix the haggis, but he forgot to get to the butcher’s yesterday and, you know, it’s the centerpiece of the dinner. Well, at the last minute he substituted an old football. Not that I really wanted to eat any anyway, but still…”
“So the date was a bust?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Magdalena had a twinkle in her eye. “Angus promised me dinner again next week, this time with no sporting goods or wounded goats. But what about you? You came all the way home for the weekend and I waltzed out on you. I hope you haven’t been too bored.”
“Well…” Milty’s voice trailed off.
“Why did you come home this weekend, Milty? Not that I’m complaining.”
“I’m not sure myself, Mom. I guess I wanted to tell you about a big decision I’ve made, even though I’m not too comfortable with it myself yet.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know I’ve been trying to sort out my major and all. I don’t know how in the world we’ll ever pay for it, but, Mom, I think I want to go pre-med. I think I’m going to be a doctor.”
Magdalena’s eyes lit up and she smiled a smile that seemed to say, “I knew it!” But she didn’t say that. What she said was “What brought this on?”
“I can’t say for sure. It wasn’t like I sat down and wrote down all the pros and cons. It wasn’t even that I’m doing super well in my biology and chem classes. I just have this sense that it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I’ve been fighting it. I don’t really want to go to school for the next ten years. I know I don’t want to do all the extra jobs to get me through and take on a lifetime of debt. I just kept thinking about Grace and Isaiah Gilmore. They went to med school and they did something really wonderful with it, going off to Bolivia as medical missionaries. I want to do something to help children, too, like I’m doing with that child care center in Richmond volunteering. But more than that, too.”
“Sounds like you’ve gotten a call,” Maggie said.
“A call? What are you talking about, Mom?”
“You know, like a prophet or a disciple in the Bible. You got a call from God.”
“This is hard enough as it is, Mom. Don’t make it into a mission from God.”
“But, of course, it’s a mission from God, Milty. This didn’t just appear out of the blue. You didn’t just decide to do this. You’ve been meant for this.”
“What do you mean I didn’t just decide to do this? I just decided this week, Mom. That’s why I came home.”
“Milty, you didn’t look at that mantelpiece long enough. Go pick up that statue and bring it to me.”
Milty was totally confused and a little irritated that his mother was talking to him like he didn’t know what he was saying and now ordering him around. But he went to the mantel and got the weird green statue and brought it to his mother.
“I never told you this, Milty, but I made this while I was pregnant with you. All the time I was pregnant I had the most incredible dreams and I decided I needed to get them out somehow, so I took some pottery lessons and made a few little figures like this. Most of them were pretty sad looking. Some of them broke. But I always liked this one. After you were born, I took a marker and I wrote on the bottom of it.” She carefully turned the statue over. “It’s kind of worn out over 22 years, but you can still make it out. See what I wrote there?”
Milty looked at the pale black lettering on the base of the figure and made out the letters: M-I-L-T-O-N, his name. His name was on the bottom of the figure of the doctor and the child. He looked up at Magdelana. “But which one am I?”
“Well, I always thought you were the child, Milty. I never understood the doctor part. It was just part of my dream. But all of a sudden, I’m beginning to think you’re the one with the stethoscope. Milty, I think you have been on this course for a long time.”
Milty didn’t know what to say. He was speechless and then he was angry. “No. No way, Mom. That’s a great story and it kind of gives me goose bumps, but I’m not going to let you take away the work I’ve done to get to this point. I mean, all that struggle has to mean something. You can’t tell me that my future has been sitting on this shelf all along, gathering dust, waiting for me to wake up and smell the Betadine. What kind of call is that if it ignores everything that’s happened to me for 22 years? Do you think God just determines everything for us? No, I want to believe I had something to do with this!”
Magdalena looked at her son who now towered over her. Behind him she saw the photo of the chocolate ice cream mask on the beautiful child, but in front of her was someone no less special, but no longer a child. She put her finger gently to his lips. She shook her head. “Milty, when you were born, you couldn’t talk. You cried and I often wondered what you were trying to say. When you got older you started to copy me. You’d toddle around the house saying, ‘What’s the story here?’ just because you heard me saying it. When you learned to speak on your own, you still used my words, but suddenly they were yours. You found your voice--your own, unique voice—and suddenly my words had a whole new meaning because of what you put into them.
“Just because I had a dream doesn’t mean your struggle was meaningless, Milty. It just means that now the dream is yours.”
The next day Milty went with his mother to the Mattaponi United Methodist Church. They were having a special service because the church had just bought a new electronic organ and they were baptizing the Tolliver’s new baby girl. The organ was amazing. The church had never had an organ before and this one could do everything. Hazel Jenson, the choir director, could even play through a song and record it so that on Sunday she could press a button on a remote and the organ would play itself while she directed the choir. She had done that for this consecration service and when the time came for the choir to sing she pulled out her remote and pressed a button. Everyone stared at the organ, waiting for it to spring to life. Nothing happened. Hazel pressed the button again. Still nothing. But this time T.P. Tolliver, who was sitting by the window, called out, “Hazel, I think you’ve got the wrong remote. I just saw the trunk door fly open on your Buick.” Hazel turned bright red, but she found the right remote and this time the organ impressed everybody.
A little later, Rev, Eleazar Filbert was standing by the baptismal font holding little Constance Tolliver. He looked out at the congregation and said, “This is a crazy thing we’re doing here today. We’re going to take this water and place it on this child’s head and what we’re saying is, ‘Constance, God loves you and God accepts you just as you are.’ Now that’s a daring thing to say to a baby that can’t even turn herself over yet. Who knows what she’ll turn out to be?
“And how will she feel that she has been marked in this way? Before she could choose it for herself? Before she gets a chance to exercise her free will?
“But you know what? She’s going to have free will because God has claimed her. She’s going to be able to choose life because God has chosen her. She’s going to be free to be who she was meant to be because God has known this child since before she was born, and God is not going to let her go. When she gets older, because all of you are going to help her remember this day, she’ll be able to claim God’s love for herself. But today, before she even has a chance to prove herself, we’re going to baptize her, because even today she is God’s own child. And so are you.”
When he said those last words, Rev. Filbert seemed to be looking right at Milty. This kind of took him back for a minute. He looked over at Magdalena who had noticed it, too. She just smiled. And Milton Martin left that service a little more confused than he had been before he arrived. He drove back to Richmond that afternoon thinking about his mother’s dream and his preacher’s glance and he still felt a little angry that no one could accept that he was making decisions on his own now. He was an adult now and didn’t like to think he was in the same position as Constance Tolliver, even though the preacher made it sound like he might be.
But he wasn’t as angry as he had been. And he had to admit that there was something comforting about trusting that God had marked him from the moment of his birth to be something special. He felt just a little more assured that underneath all the hard decisions he had to make and all the struggles he was going through there was an intention, a goal. He began to think that maybe he was able to speak now in words that were as ancient as God’s own word of creation, and yet which now were his. And he began to believe that whoever he became he would always be God’s.
When he unpacked his overnight bag in the dorm room he found that his mother had placed a box in it. He knew what it was before he even opened it. Sure enough, inside, underneath the bubble wrap, was a roughly done green statue of two figures. He put it on his desk next to his computer monitor. He stared at it for a few moments and for the first time realized that both the doctor and the child were smiling.
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I set you apart.” Those were God’s words to the prophet Jeremiah and they are God’s words to you and me. We can be many things, but the thing we are meant to be is God’s own. Thanks be to God.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
The word of the Lord came to me saying:
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you
And before you were born I made you holy;
As a prophet to the nations I appointed you.”
I said, “Ah, Adonai Yahweh, look, I don’t know how to speak because I am just a youth.”
But Yahweh said to me:
“Don’t say, ‘I am just a youth;’
because you will go to all to whom I send you
and you will speak all that I command you.
Don’t be afraid of them,
because I am with you to deliver you, says Yahweh.”
Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth. Yahweh said to me:
“Now, I have put my words in your mouth.
See, this day I have set you over nations and kingdoms
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”
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