Sometimes, finding grace can be as simple as opening my eyes. Other times, when life gets especially, as Anne Lamott calls it, life-y, grace-finding looks more like an expedition six miles through the snow uphill both ways. Most of the time it’s somewhere in between, this hunt for the mundane miraculous, some combination of seeking and finding in equal measure, searching and seeing simultaneously.

This week, it’s looked like dusty moments in the garage, pawing through storage boxes of memories, along with sun-drenched jumps from ocean piers, plus a side of reading through old entries here. So…a little of everything.

We’ve filed our online paperwork for Australian citizenship. This is insane to me, as is the fact that we are starting our fifth year of living here, but both things are still true and wonderful. I had to find my birth certificate for the documentation requirements, and this led me to our aforementioned garage and some dusty plastic boxes that house important documents along with…other memories. Memories like old photos and angst-ridden teenage journals, boys’ birth announcements that invoke all the trauma of childbirth and post-partum depression and gratitude over not being in that particular moment anymore.

I got lost in all that for the better part of a half-hour, which is both not long and definitely long enough, and in the end it was The Husband who found what I needed in a different container altogether (insert metaphorical interpretation here). Nostalgia, though, is a hell of a drug, and even though my jaunt through the past didn’t leave me longing for it, just whiffs of it in the dustbin of memory reminded me of how many chapters our story already contains, of how many years we’ve traversed and lands we’ve travelled.

Of how many beaches we’ve seen. Of another summer break, the one before our cross-world move, when Little Brother was a toddler and TK, a just-speaking pre-kindergartener who begged for the kind of repetition that comes with walks through familiar ground, retracing our own footsteps. I found this old post and was transported back to a time when TK’s every sentence didn’t begin with, “Did you know?” followed by a recitation of erudite facts I probably didn’t know, a time when we walked the same paths over and over in near-silence, a time when there were so many more question marks than exclamation points. When I feel inundated by question marks now–the beginning of another school year, the hunt for a potential high school, the quest to teach independence–I try–I will try–to remember those early days, when a diagnosis was fresh and it felt like we were just getting to know each other. A time that predated so many triumphs and understandings. A reminder of the life that can come after the questions. After moments of terror.

Because now? Now we’re not just walking piers, we’re leaping off of them. On Australia Day, we joined friends and every other resident of the country at a local beach, and when some of them journeyed over to the pier for a jump, I had a feeling. A feeling that TH and the boys and I, we could do that. A feeling that LB would take more convincing but that TK–he might just be more than ready.

And he was. He and I jumped together, hands clasped, and then he went on his own, yelling at his friends to wait for him. And one of them, she called back, “I will! I don’t know about them, but I will!” And I thought about how that, really, is all we need: the one voice, the one presence, that promises and stays. And I watched them jump together.

As suspected, it took more to convince LB, including bribery, but what finally drew him in was all that was waiting for him in the water, all the arms prepared to catch him, all the hands to guide him to ground where he could stand. The same faces I prayed for before we landed here, before we could stand ourselves in this life that is now so familiar.

Because sometimes finding grace, it is both combing through the past to see how faithful it has been, and then looking out to see how it’s still waiting to catch you.

IN every object here I see–
Something, O Lord, that leads to Thee;
Firm as the rocks Thy promise stands,
Thy mercies countless as the sands,
Thy love a sea immensely wide,
Thy grace an ever flowing tide.

In every object here I see
Something, my heart, that points at thee;
Hard as the rocks that bound the strand,
Unfruitful as the barren sand,
Deep and deceitful as the ocean,
And, like the tide, in constant motion.

–John Newton, “A Thought on the Sea-Shore”