It’s a Saturday morning, and I’m sweating by 6 am.

The Kid, usually bouncing out of bed at the first sign of his brother’s coos and my feet stumbling to the nursery, required prodding this morning–socks yanked onto unwilling feet, toothbrush forced into fighting mouth, eyes squinting against the unwelcome light. You and me both, buddy, I think, maybe say, as The Husband carries Little Brother down the stairs behind us and our family unit populates the kitchen before the sun has risen.

I had woken over an hour earlier, my body having become a reliable timepiece lately, especially before big events that keep me waking throughout the night until I finally give up, wave the white flag from my bed, and admit that my day has started. I had crept down the stairs and into the dark family room, flipped on the coffee maker and had my breakfast then so that I could at least appear to go without it in solidarity with TK once he was up. I had poured myself onto the couch, cracked open the book, and looked for promises. Assurances that everything would be okay, maybe even a bit more specific fortune-telling. I had prayed, familiar requests for safety and recovery and direction to arise from the forthcoming images, magnetic fields and radio waves circling his still-small but ever-growing body for the third (or was it fourth?!) time in his three years. I had prayed, and I had remembered what I wrote to her–the one who doesn’t just say she’ll pray for you, but does it right there in her emailed reply in a way I just haven’t mastered (or given in to?) the vulnerability to do yet–how I had written that I don’t have to be anxious and worried and scared, but…is there a but to that? Because I feel like I’m living in the but more than in the yes lately.

So the biggest guy and the smallest guy in our house see us off, and TK and I back out of the driveway into the inky blackness of what, I hope, is the darkest before the dawn. We catch every light on the way as words swirl around inside my head, Easter-edition-style: He who did not spare his own son. Plans I have for you. All things work for good. Words ingrained over years of sermons, endless Sunday school classes, that had never graduated from my head to my heart–the downward yet upward trajectory of such matters–until I needed more than a needlepoint-friendly interpretation to get through the days. Days of rebellion and failure, days of confusion and pain, days of wounds I brought upon myself and scars from just living in this world. He who did not spare his own son. I had never known the weight of that, not until three years ago. My own son sings from the backseat.

We arrive at the hospital and make the rounds through registration to radiology, the darkness outside still lingering through the windows. They put the pulse ox on him, take his blood pressure, place the IV. He fights, I hold. He cries, I cry. He sweats, I sweat. My grip remains.

They let me place him on the table and kiss him before walking away, the part where I can let the tears flow because my back is turned to them. I head back to “our” room, one of too many we’ve had over the years (my personal opinion). I sit down in the vinyl chair, look around and wonder if this could feel less prison, more sanctuary. I sit still on a Saturday morning for the first time in a long time. I put on the fuzzy socks I thoughtfully packed for myself. I eat a lukewarm biscuit from the cafeteria. I read this, and laugh at grace’s sense of humor, giving me this still time to read up on what it really means to rest.

This is my vigil.

I think about how my life, I, won’t be marked by rest if I don’t get rest. About how there is rest for me, often in the same places where there is joy, but…I never have time for it? That but again. I think about the vigils I keep, the waiting and watching I do that is more about control than rest. I think about he who did not spare his own son. About how there is one who keeps a vigil for me, always, and how that one is about love–like the one I’m keeping now. I think about how it is only grace that can make my watching, my waiting, my vigils, restful. About how I so often want a fortune-teller and what I have is a truth-teller: grace whispering in my ear, making promises I could never earn that it will never break. Not promises about a specific outcome, but promises that transcend every outcome. Promises of a beauty that includes what the world calls not beautiful; promises of never being left alone in this, even in a room where I appear to be just that.

A nurse walks by my open door, carrying a swaddled newborn into the MRI chamber where they’re finishing up with TK. “There’s always someone worse off, isn’t there?” she says with a pained smile.

They wheel him back in.

We leave a half hour later, after he has proven he can keep food down by shoveling Goldfish into his piehole at breakneck speed, and I pull him behind me in a wagon–the same kind of wagon that carried him and his halo and his IV a year ago. We wheel across the floor together, headed home, and through the windows I can see that while we were back there the sun came up, is shining brilliantly. I see it now, but…I already knew.