when you don't have the easy answer.
It is easier to be funny than it is to be honest. To laugh and draw others in so that they smile beside you rather than look you directly in the eyes and ask, sincerely, how you are doing.
The last few weeks haven’t been “fine”, even if that was my rote response to the question as it was asked. I wasn’t fine and things weren’t fine. Things were hard and complicated. I felt young again. Not in the way that we all aspire to be, but in the way that leaves you at a loss. What comes next?
I am so rarely at a loss.
I am a person that can fill a room with their words, that can describe exactly how I am feeling and often, where I am heading. All of this is true. But last week, I wasn’t fine. I sat on the phone with my mom, trying to catch my breath and wondered how this broken thing would be fixed again. I cried, for what was happening now and for what happened when I was 16. I cried a gasping, heaving sort of cry. My mom hasn’t heard me cry like that in years.
Sometimes though, even in the darkest of moments, there is a grace that sneaks in. It shows up in the places where we least expect to find it and loosens, ever so gently, the grip of the thing that’s causing us pain. These moments of grace are a small reminder that there is light at the end of this. That wounds, the ones we inflict and the ones inflicted upon us, do eventually heal. And there’s this: the prayer that in spite of how flawed we all are, something bigger is at work.
