It’s a sunny morning and my heart is up with the songbirds. The windows have been flung open and my husband and I are sitting side by side as the work day begins.
These last couple weeks have felt tenuous, like something held on a string.
Some days, I’m telling the world, “I’m ready!” and by this, I mean, ready to let them in— to pull back the curtains, to say, “some days I don’t know how to do any of this, I don’t know how to exist within my own body, or how to carry it out into the world. There is a grief I know by name…”
Still, I hesitate in my secret distrust, my habitual protection of my heart.
Some days, I pull my heart back with a screeching halt and say, “when was it that I deemed people beyond saving? When was it that I stopped believing in the saving grace of a smile? It’s still there, you know, it’s always a possibility, always a hope, a responsibility of ours— to not give up.”
Some days, community feels effortless. I was made to love, I know this, and I say “yes” more, I open our doors. I can view the world with grace, unfazed by the weight of sin and sadness because I know my Redeemer lives. I don’t expect the worst, I don’t prepare for pain, I look around a room and long to bring the light in.
Some days, I have no words left inside of me. I cannot write, I can only repeat words I’ve heard other people say, but they aren’t my own. What I have to say is buried beneath expectations I’ve placed on myself, on the false belief that our hearts are alienated from each other, instead of intrinsically bound in the aches and pains that make us human.
Some days, I wrestle within an inch of my life with the lies I’ve come to know. At these times, I feel like a fighter wearily picking up my boxing gloves. I crawl away at the end of every match, I cling to truths I do not feel, but know to be true. In those moments, I feel as though I’m the only person on a planet spinning away from any other forms of life.
Today, I’m on the other side of the boxing ring.
I’m peering at the sunlight filtering into our living room and I’m offering up empty, bleeding hands as the only worship I know— I see it. I see You. Thank you.
I’m standing up in a body that often feels like betrayal, and I’m whispering the beginnings of a song that looks a lot like anticipation. I stand in amazement at where this journey has taken me and how I’ve had to break apart, to lose my ability to stand on my own two feet, only so I could learn to tightly grip His hands as He teaches me a new dance.
My heart is heavy with the gravity of hope.
Today, with my shaking hands and my weary heart, I take a seat with gratitude and peer at its dogged, resilient face. There’s no weakness in its gaze. It lifts up my chin, it says, “take a look at what you’ve been given,” and there it is— hope.
I’m uncovering treasures in the morning, on the other side of the dusk where my courage fell.
That’s the thing of it, isn’t it? Because where my strength has failed me, I found God’s light rising from the floorboards, the ordinary.
I found it in the unfurling shimmer of a lake’s surface, in a bouquet of flowers, the chatter of seagulls, a letter from a friend— wherever I looked for it. I found it in words like these: “I was walking deep in the woods, and I saw how the sunlight reached down between the trees to touch the tiny plants. We are loved more than we will ever know.”
All I know is this: the journey we take is crooked and never linear. We fall and we rise. We break and we heal, sometimes in the space of one day, sometimes a month, sometimes years. Moments are shadowed with pain, even in their beauty, and we hold this dichotomy and try to make peace with it. The days of boxing rings are remnants and echoes of the fallen world; not the whole, but a part of the story being written.
Here, in the midst of our crooked days, we keep showing up, for every page. We pick up our weary hearts and feel the cold beneath our toes at the first reach onto the floorboards. We plead and worship with the only words we sometimes hold: “please” and “thank you”.
We linger over a cup of coffee, a good book: the business of attention. We sit with our bruises, but never make them our home. We seek suffering’s purpose instead of its pain. We don’t rest in the honey’ed or broken past, or in the glow of a future unknown.
(all of these, a call for my heart to become)
Choosing to see the little things,
To take it one day at a time;
To hold the hand of gratitude and ground ourselves in hope,
Is the bravest thing I know.
Today, I choose bravery, and allow the sunlight to slip through my fingers, weightless and tenuous. I choose to feel its warmth long after the day has given way to darkness.
It’s in this very thing, the winding day to day, that redemption is at work.
