But let us be thankful for every little glimpse of the truth that we can recognize and trust that there is always more to see–always.             Henri Nouwen

This past weekend, The Husband and I fled town for the second weekend in a row, this time to attend the wedding of a friend. The ceremony marked the culmination of the pairing-off of a core group of us girls who stuck together in New York City over half a decade: eating, drinking, praying, dating, laughing together as the days turned into weeks and the months into years. We watched each other make mistakes and try to fix them; we crossed the Atlantic and made scenes in another country; we sat beside each other on a floating bar on the Hudson while one of us, who had finally found her One, listened as the other expressed her fear that she never would.

On Sunday, all of us sat in the shade of a tree whose branches swayed in the light breeze and watched as it turned out differently.

It was the end of something and the beginning, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of a story taking shape, questions being answered after years of wondering and waiting, promises fulfilled and more made. Two of us sat with rounded middles, expecting her first and my second days apart, and I felt tears well up at the faithfulness of a storyteller who transcends dead ends and broken hopes and surgical interventions and even works through them to relate the best version possible, despite our insistence that we know the way it should go.

I should be clear: it’s not the best version possible because we got the One or the stick was positive or the operation worked or Carrie ended up with Big; that’s not what makes the author good, either. It’s the best–and he is good–because it went the way it was written by the only one who knows how to write it.

A few days later, my parental vacations finally put to a stop, I sat in a friend’s kitchen as the three kids between us ate their lunch and we talked. “Little blessings,” we muttered, laughing, as the boys covered themselves with orange cheese dust and the girl shouted from her highchair. We made the comparison–again—to sharing lunch with a trio of drunks as we shoved food in our own mouths and attempted conversation in between attempts to modulate the chaos. We both marveled over how far The Kid has come in the last few weeks, and I watched as he accepted a toy from his “friend” (the title we bestow upon other children by sheer coincidence of their parents being friends of ours) and played happily, babbling away. I have to admit, it does get lost on me sometimes, this blessing of uneventful days, of slow-but-steady improvement as I watch him develop at his own pace; but then I get a glimpse of just how miraculous it is that we are sitting here eating lunch with friends and I know:

Because of grace, our stories are always headed towards these endings and beginnings, these sacred moments at altars and dinner tables. All leads to the holy when love is the writer.

And there is either a comfort or great resentment to be found in this–that the story will be told, that things will happen, the way they are meant to, whether we beat our fists against it and demand a different, or timelier, outcome, or whether we rest in the path we are on. The difference lies in who or what we believe is at the center of it all. And the difference becomes the gulf between bitterness and freedom, fighting and sailing, and I’ve known both.

Every time I fear for TK and worry about how what he’s been through may hold him back, when he’ll use a word other than apple, or a hundred other things, the glimpse sneaks in. The sailing begins. He runs from me, laughing, and we collapse in a heap on the floor. He tries out a new sound. He reaches out a hand and accepts a toy. He eats a new food. The sacred shows up in the ordinary, and I wonder why I spend so much time afraid when the story is unfolding all around me.

I read it this morning, about watering and settling, softening and blessing–words that would have passed right by me if not for the storms I’ve known. The ways love showed up in the form of a torrential downpour, and how strange it is now that there are moments in the sunlight when I sometimes miss the gray shades that only show up in the rain, the intimacy and clarity that accompany the difficulty. I wonder, when I’m not in that season–when I’m past the searching of NYC or the recovery after surgery or the waiting for the stick to be positive–if, though things are easier, I am somehow less. And I see it in the poetry before me: that the storms bring the shifting and force the softening, but after them is when the settling happens, when the softness gives way to new life and we finally begin to take the shape we were meant for, the shape of what’s holding us.