“God is making us spell out our own souls.” –Oswald Chambers

I’ve been in the hospital three times with my son: the first, when pre-term contractions forced me into a thirty-six hour stay, and I lay confined to a bed with a fetal monitor attached to me. His heartbeat punctuated each moment as I willed him to stay in there and keep growing. Then there was his birth, and the extra-long stay provided by my C-section, marked by our introduction and sleeplessness and awkward feedings.

Last week our family spent three nights on the neurology floor, and once again I held my child in a hospital bed.

When we arrived at the Day Surgery Center on Wednesday, our first sight was our Karl-Barth-reading pastor, and I immediately burst into tears at the kindness and surprise of his presence. When they took The Kid back and I burst into tears again, our pastor walked down to the cafeteria with The Husband and me. We talked about the surgery and recovery as I ached to get back to our room and wait for the phone call update from the OR. Our pastor mentioned, lightly, how difficult times like these could be on a marriage. He prayed with us. Then TH and I told him goodbye and waited for doctor appearances and a returned son.

The surgery went exactly as it should have, we were told. The recovery nurse called and said they were taking TK to his room, that we could meet him there. When I heard the bed being wheeled down the hallway, I took a deep breath. He would be different, groggy and confused and weighed down by seven pounds of metal and plastic, pins and vest. I feared my own reaction–that I would be overcome with sadness at his appearance.

But they brought him in, and it didn’t matter. He was just ours. Seven pounds of healing equipment, and our baby.

Nothing we’ve done so far has worked, which has landed us here, in this device and with this recovery, because the problem was the bone. The whole time, the issue lay deeper than muscle and further than therapy or Botox could reach. And so all our searching and trying and failing has led to what I once considered the worst-case scenario.

But is it? Is it ever, if all is grace?

There were the moments in the bed, hours full of them, and the feel of a tiny hand on my back as I drifted off to sleep, coupled with the sound of TH’s breathing on the pull-out bed feet away. There was the silent meeting of eyes in the near-darkness, TK watching me, knowing the who but not the why. There was our return home, when I placed him on the floor in the only position he could maintain–lying on his back–and watched as he pulled himself to sitting, then bent over and pushed himself to standing, then grasped TH’s finger with his hand and began to walk. A miracle unfurling before my doubting eyes, victorious laughter and beauty in metal and stitches. There have been the tiny kindnesses between TH and me, the ways we have looked out for each other and been for each other when it’s so much easier for me to be against, when the mundane monotony of life so easily makes me forget that we’re on the same team but this–what can understandably break a couple down to weariness and resentment–has been knitting us together. There have been the dinners delivered and petitions prayed on our behalf, endless support lifting me above the difficulty and keeping me vigilant to the redemption happening right in front of us. I have felt it all and know it to be true:

This halo is healing TK, but it’s also healing me.

Because what could have been a period to endure has proven to be an advent of gifts, one of top of the other so that they all come crashing down in a stunning display of mercy. All the ways I’m being loved out of myself and into grace. The forced slowing down and letting go, the letting-the-dishes-wait because he needs my finger to grab and my eyes to watch. The cries in the middle of the night and the returned stares, eye meeting eye, and I know that he knows too: that this is real love, this faithful being-there. My greatest fear, the sleepless echo of the newborn days, and how does it play out? With these nighttime visits and midnight smiles like a secret between the two of us. What we will always share. What changes us. It feels, sometimes, like a do-over of the first few months of his life, when all I felt was exhausted and inept and at the end of myself. Now I know that’s exactly where I am–at the end of myself–and it’s a gift because this is where grace begins. And how gloriously appropriate that it feels like a second chance, because that’s exactly what redemption is.

It’s what redemption is, and what grace does–brings me to the thing I feared most and leaves me saying thank you. Thank you, thank you. 

I sit beside TK in the sunroom, the place where he relearned to walk and I’m relearning to love, and the brightness of the mid-morning sun strikes us both. He squints his eyes and keeps playing. Not long ago, I would have shielded my face, searched for shade. But today I sit there right in its searing glow and keep playing too.