On a walk the other day, I passed a couple walking a small dog. Their pet was wearing a jacket that read, simply, NERVOUS. Clothing with an ID meant to warn others to take care–and I thought to myself, I need a jacket like that.
I run to the song above, its chords sounding through my headphones as I pass by our corner of the Pacific Ocean and its harbours, and in this I feel seen too: musical strains that put notes to my particular form of…whatever you want to call it. Brokenness. Flaws. Challenges. Shortcomings.
Or maybe, as I told the boys this morning on the way to their basketball camp: design? Since, as we happen to believe, God doesn’t make mistakes.
This was harder to believe when I was younger. I walked around the world out of place. Like my “papers weren’t in order,” Dani Shapiro writes in the book recommended to me by my own co-author. “Wherever I went I felt like a foreign correspondent on the sidelines of my own life.” This feeling marked my own wanderings and, against others’ better judgment but not my own, drove me northeast until I hit Manhattan, where everything began to fall into place, or into the place those particular pieces–faith, friends, husband–were meant to be.
While there, and when only the corner pieces of that puzzle had been assembled, I moaned over my singleness and listened to a lot of music from the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack.
Maybe it didn’t hit me while I was traversing those streets on repeat, but at some point, because of New York and the feeling of otherness that drove me there–the being an observer in my own life, my differences relegating me to another corner of the country than the only one I knew–I realised that, within the hand of grace, what’s wrong with you becomes what’s right with you.
Now, instead of the world spinning madly on while I watch from a window, I find, like Shapiro, “a day that holds me, connects me to the spinning world.” Days that start with ocean views and end with bodies piled on a couch, a dog at our feet, and in the middle of these days are all the tears and triumphs that come with working our ways honestly through ourselves: the brokenness, the flaws, the challenges, the shortcomings. The designs.