We were absent from church for almost four months. A literal season of our lives without Sunday morning sermons, songs, greet-your-neighbors. The Kid’s surgery dominated our inability to attend, and mixed in with that were morning sickness and exhaustion. But on Palm Sunday–the day commemorating a triumphal entry that occurred on a donkey–we piled into the Honda and finally made it back.

There were two seats next to a couple who had brought us dinner the week before. TK was safely ensconced in the nursery, and it seemed there had been a place reserved for us too.

It was kind of fun playing hooky for a while: no rushing around to get somewhere (sort of) on time; no tears at nursery drop-off; no crowds at the grocery store. But the pull to be back in a community outweighed even our tendencies toward introversion. True to form, I felt the weight of tears threaten to spill over my eyelids for much of the service. Every song, every reminder of truth, every moment of Communion felt like a homecoming.

A dear friend recently sent me a copy of Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, and it’s one of those books you have to put down almost every other sentence to let the earth-shattering simplicity of its truth sink into your deepest places. I find it entering my thoughts throughout the day, like the best books do, and challenging my thinking and living. Nouwen writes about what it means to belong, and how the knowledge of belonging changes the way we live. “Deep friendship is a calling forth of each other’s chosenness and a mutual affirmation of being precious in God’s eyes,” he writes, and the statement both shows me why deep friendship is so rare and how far I have to go in believing in that chosenness myself. With all my traveling along the road of grace in recent years, I still battle–daily–the inclination to interpret how loved I am from the circumstances that surround me.

Another friend said recently, “It’s like I have to learn over and over that things are going to happen the way they’re supposed to–not the way I think they should.” Amen. Over and over and over. TK’s unique pattern of development means that my fingers are nearly pulled off daily as he leads me around, communicating without words, and his frustration is mirrored by my own when we struggle to understand each other. Having a child who is both intelligent and speech-delayed makes communication tricky–and not just between us. I have a feeling I will be “explaining” him to people for a while as I struggle to pave a path of understanding and find the best spots for him–the places where he belongs. I struggle with patience; with wanting this part of his development to hurry up, for the day when “apple” won’t be his word for everything and the finger-pulling abates. Then I slow down and breathe and watch him and know that Today will never happen again; that I am wishing away a piece of the puzzle that will add up to the wholeness of him.

And I know that, for my own part, I have to believe that I am beloved to show him that he is.

There is a crucial element that transformed church from a dirge to a celebration for me; that converts daily life from a monotony into a miracle; that changed me from a rule-keeper to a story-teller. I suspect that this element is what is, steadily, turning me from performer into beloved. I know what that element isn’t, and it isn’t perfection. It isn’t adherence to my agenda. It isn’t absence of difficulty. It is grace.

I watch TK’s days unfold, and there are moments when we laugh together and moments when we don’t. There are moments when I feel like I’m doing okay with this motherhood thing and moments when I feel like I’ve failed at it irreparably. There are moments when I think I’m going to steal away in the dead of night and moments when I guess I could stay awhile. And I realize that every second I spend wanting to have already arrived is another second I take away from the beauty of an exodus, of redemption. Grace means that there is a place for us right where we are even as we are headed to the home it ultimately provides. Grace means that we already, always, belong. All of us.

The donkey story of Palm Sunday–I never knew what it really meant until this year. Then I read this:

In the Ancient Near East, a king entered cities riding on a warhorse in order to convey his military power, particularly when he was entering into newly conquered cities where his rule may have been regarded as illegitimate or met with suspicion or outright rejection. The exception to this custom was when a beloved king entered his own capital city. There he would ride in on a donkey — the benevolent king.

I always thought it was sort of a contrived act of humility–“I’m not too good for a donkey, see?”–and now I see the real message was, “Here I am. I’m back. Back among friends. I choose you.” An act of the beloved toward his beloved, and a reflection of the movement of grace in my life: not conquering, not galloping, but steadily pushing forward, finding the best spots for me–the places where I belong.

When I was pregnant with The Kid, I wrote a novel (installments can be found here!) called The Growing Season. It began as a story about the ambivalence faced by a woman approaching the birth of her first child. Coincidentally. I tackled my own feelings as I wrote: anticipation, fear, excitement, dread. I was concerned with such monumental changes as not going out to dinner every weekend and becoming sleep-deprived. I never once wrote about tilted vertebrae or neurosurgical outcomes.

TK, present day, has appeared to enter a strong recovery phase. He is wearing a therapy collar part-time and tilting his head less in general. He’s happier, and so are we. As I pushed his stroller out to the car today after lunch and a carousel ride with friends at the mall, a thought filled my mind: It feels so good to do normal stuff. To chase him around the food court, to put his shoe back on his foot a dozen times, to share Subway with him, to roll my eyes in unison with my friend at our kids’ behavior.

Then again, what is normal? TK’s MRI could be considered other-than-normal, and yet as the neurosurgeon reviewed it with us yesterday, it was full of good news: the surgery did what it needed to the bone, the areas of concern from the last scan have stayed stable, there’s nothing truly scary going on. There is some developmental stuff in the motor/speech area of the brain that could explain his late-walking and speech delay but which, the doctor reassured us, will not hold him back overall.

I watch my son walk backwards across the room and figure out puzzles and think of all he has overcome to get to where he is and I know the doctor is right. But I still don’t know exactly how this will all play out.

I’ve always thrived on certainties and assurances and predictable, guaranteed outcomes. And this season of our lives, parts of which stretch out and overlap with new seasons and inject unpredictability into the future, has been nothing if not fuzzy, ill-defined, borderless, teeming with questions and lacking in solid answers. And I’m being stretched: asked to bear the full weight of grace, to open instead of sending back the gifts that arrive in their own time and way, to depend upon the Ultimate Answer instead of the hundred tiny answers, to rely second by second on a power greater than predictability. I’m being asked to trust in ways that are new and uncomfortable and that signal the end of life as I knew it.

But the beginning of new life. Because I’m being stretched in other ways, too. So much so that I’ve had to start wearing maternity pants. While working on a new novel.

Do I really want an agenda more than I want grace? After all, I knew the test would be negative this time. All the rest were; it had been a full year. There was a halo and snow on the ground and The Husband stuck hundreds of miles away. And there was that time when it had started as a positive then disappeared.

I had gotten used to hearing no. I forgot that grace has its own agenda.

And the things I had hoped for: relief for TK, a sign of healing, a fourth member of our family–they weren’t nos. But they also weren’t what I thought they would be. They were slowly unfurling in their own time, their own way. The mystery that is TK–this beautiful design that reveals itself in ordinary moments of held fingers and an as-yet trio of spoken words–unfolds daily, calling me not just to a different life but a different way of living. And the funny thing is, after all that’s happened, I have so much less room for fear than I did while I was typing that novel. I’ve learned that there is a goodness at work that exceeds my demands for yes and now and all the other ways I tried to nail down joy before. Joy, it turns out, is not dependent on yes and now but is more fuzzy, ill-defined, borderless, and teeming with questions rather than solid answers. To think that I spent so much time avoiding it.

Stephen Colbert says of his mother, “What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift.” Gifts dressed as pain, deliverance wrapped deep inside delays. All is grace, every bit of it.

Say hello to my little friend.

Sometimes you just have to go along for the ride.
courtesy youtube

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.

I remember my first winter in New York. After the magic of Christmas and the beauty of (freshly-fallen) snow, February brought with it an unexplainable exhaustion and sadness. The days were short, the darkness oppressive, and after a while I finally realized that my depressed state had more to do with the weather than my constant lack of funds. When spring arrived a couple of months later, I felt twenty pounds lighter. Restaurants moved tables outdoors, I packed my down jackets beneath my bed, and the city and I–we came back to life.

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” wrote Shelley, and all it took in the days of my singleness and city-dwelling was that first rise in temperature for me to feel hopeful again, for the darkness to lift. Then again, my biggest concern those days was how to get rid of my hangover so I could watch movies all day on the couch. Oh, and money.

Now I feel the notes of resurrection in spring just as strongly, albeit in a more suburban fashion–blooming dogwoods, growing grass–but I’m also more aware of the price of admission to the season. Gone is the cooperative hair of the cold months. There are more bugs venturing indoors (I just killed an ant on the windowsill. Suck it, PETA). A thick carpet of pollen coats my throat and everything else.

It’s a mixed bag, is what I’m saying. Isn’t it always?

Take The Kid’s neck issues. As with most things, I saw it as a season to endure before we got to the payoff of spring and healing. Now I’m recognizing that the burdens–and gifts–of that season endure far past the days on a calendar. It’s the intermingling of good and bad, difficult and easy, light and dark, that make life what it is: complicated and beautiful.

Because there is a certain kind of beauty that is only revealed when life is allowed to unfold in its own time. When happiness is permitted to be a byproduct rather than a goal. There is a freedom, and peace, that come when I break down the dividing wall between seasons and admit that life can show up in the middle of winter, in the presence of apparent darkness, in the seeming absence of reasons to hope. When I stop demanding that one thing pass before I give thanks or stop crying or start laughing.

Champagne doesn’t need an excuse.

“Sweetie, you shit your pants this year. Maybe you’re done,” Carrie tells Charlotte, who is afraid to run for fear of miscarrying, and it’s an idea I’ve been tempted to cling to when things have gotten just a little too difficult: Surely that’s it, right? We’re done now? But after a year of way more metaphorical pants-shitting than I would have ever deemed appropriate, I know now that’s not how things work. Because grace doesn’t place a limit on the amount of blessings it gives–even when those blessings arrive in packages I wouldn’t have chosen.

And the grave that you refuse to leave

The refuge that you’ve built to flee,

The places you have come to fear the most,

Is the place that you have come to fear the most.

I know that there’s a way to plot escape from the bad news of the world, and that self-protection can become a prison. It’s this knowledge–and the experience of it–that have convinced me of the opposite: that there is a door to freedom within the thickest of trials and the most painful of struggles. Living, truly living, means accepting the coexistence of all that seems contradictory, and watching as a narrative unfolds–in its own time–that makes perfect sense of these unlikely couplings. (And not insisting on consciously uncoupling them.. Oooh. Your move, Goop.)

So there are fewer afternoons now spent lounging at outdoor tables and more cocktail hours spent looking like Ricky Bobby after his ride with the cougar (yes, Talladega Nights was on TBS this weekend.) This is what happens when you have a two-year-old–and say yes to life without demanding a contract in advance. “Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world…and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens,” writes Buechner. New life doesn’t demand perfect lighting or clear certainty to grow…only grace.

When the doorbell rang, I was sitting in front of a screen, typing. I silently hoped it was UPS, that departing footsteps would sound on the porch steps and the ringing would stop. This is why I was such a great New Yorker–there, we have buzzers and doormen as a first line of defense against unwanted intruders.

But the bell rang a second time, and I had to consider, from my position now crouched away from the front door’s windows, that the walls of my personal space had been breached and I had been spotted. Heaving a sigh full of regret over the lack of suburban privacy, I trudged to the door. My neighbor was headed back down the driveway, and I considered letting him continue his path home. But I opened the door.

He turned, a dozen daffodils and some papers in his hand, and I immediately felt guilty. Over the next few minutes, he handed over the flowers and papers–faith-friendly devotionals for people who are struggling. He hugged and encouraged me. And when he left, I no longer felt invaded. I felt crumbled, humbled, the walls a pile of dust. I felt loved in spite of myself. I felt seen–and not in a bad way.

This season of our lives, with The Kid and uncertainty and waiting, has called me out of the nooks and crannies into which I burrow–the comfort zones within myself and around me: quietness, solitude, the couch. I’ve had to let people in–to the door and to our story–because to not, to keep the story hidden, is to deny TK all the love due him. All the prayers and support and caring for which he is meant. And with “apple” and “bubble” being his favorite and near-only words right now, I’m called out of my inner monologue, out of my tendency to shut down, out of my preference for silence, and into a constant narration with and for him. He has to hear words, and I have to speak them. This is a part of my daily calling now. It’s not awful, but it’s not comfortable.

Which is an apt description of much of the best parts of life, I think.

Yesterday, a woman from church brought by some dinners. I dreaded her arrival–during nap time, my time–fearing she would want to do that talking thing, and maybe even…shudder…pray with me. But she left almost as quickly as she arrived, and in her wake was a bag of food and a bottle of wine. My love languages.

I wonder, sometimes, how much of my life has been spent focusing on the effort of saying no and avoiding what waits behind the door of yes. The ill-defined, shrouded-in-shadows terrain of the affirmative–until the door is opened and light pours through and I finally see what’s been waiting for me.

Because if this season of Lent, of our lives, is about anything (other than training TK not to climb out of his bed and to eat something other than crackers)–it is about the stepping out in love done for me so that I can now step out in faith. There is risk and infinite beauty in being called away from being only what I have been and toward everything I’m meant to be.

TK is doing well. He’s continuing to be a two-year-old, a quality that fills me with rage one minute and barely-containable love the next. But these battles of temper are not spasms of pain, and some moments I’m so thankful for that I can’t catch my breath through the tears. He has an MRI scheduled for Saturday and depending on what his doctor says about it, we may be taking a couple of road trips to broaden our neurosurgeon pool. We still don’t have an answer, but it’s hard to deny all that we do have. Especially when I tell him to say bubble and he semi-echoes in return–“buuuuba”–then turns and squints his eyes to make me laugh. And I do, in spite of myself–thank God for all I do in spite of myself–just like I do when, a few minutes later, I catch him in the monitor looking for a way out of his bed, toward the light, so he can open the door.