Originally from December 2016

It’s Wednesday morning in the second week of advent.  I’m meal planning for the remainder of the week, well at least that’s the goal.  I tap, tap, tap my fingertips to the iTunes app and select the perfect Christmas album to be serenaded by as I figure out what on earth to make for dinner.  It’s new to me, this album, and I have twenty minutes to listen to it and make a list before it’s time to set off for Fred Meyer and Central Market.

An hour later, here I am, basically ugly crying in the middle of my kitchen.  Alice Currah’s Savory Sweet Life cookbook is open but ignored on the cluttered counter top.   I have always been slightly melancholic and land on the introspective side of things but I wasn’t expecting this.  I am positively wrecked by the album’s stirring instrumentals and its lyrics of great hope.  For they tell the tale of beauty born of pain and suffering in a time when nothing made sense.  The album is on repeat and I’m keenly aware that Jesus’s birth story is warming in my heart the desire to write once again.  But to write is to create, and in order to create there has to be an emptying of sorts.  The process is raw and overwhelming yet holy.

It’s been a year of hurts, some big, some small.  It’s been a year of newness too.  A new beginning came in the form of full-day kindergarten for Lauren.  Steven migrated to second grade and overnight it seems that Emily has morphed into a strong and splendid beauty of a fourth-grader.  Then there’s church.  We left a church we loved as our family’s faith journey took a different direction and we said hello to something new, a church less than 3 miles from home.  Each time we’ve had to leave behind what was glorious and good before we could move forward to the next adventure, which has also been glorious and good.  It’s been exciting and scary and every single feeling along the way.

We encountered grief this year as a family.  My grandmother died in January.  She was my mom’s mother, and her death is complicated for me.  We bid farewell to the older gentleman who lived in the white house three doors from us.  We didn’t know him very well but his life mattered and we miss his presence in our neighborhood.

It’s been a year of setbacks and a year of great rejoicing.  I hardly know where to start.  Steven lost vision over the summer, you see.  It was truly alarming.  Our little boy had to do an extremely hard thing for a little boy to do.  He wore an eyepatch for six hours a day over his strong eye, mostly during elementary school hours.  It was a small setback, compared to how far he has come vision-wise.  And his suffering pales in comparison to the story of a young lady at our school who will go blind after complications from a kidney transplant.   But heartache is heartache.  Patching for six hours is quite the ordeal for a little kid acutely aware that he is different from his peers, though we promise he’s loved all the same.  I gathered Steven in my arms several times during the summer and into fall, all seven plus years of him.  Over and over and over again, I declared one of God’s promises.  The promise that Steven is deeply loved and not alone when he does the hard work of patching.  And then, about a month ago we learned that Steven’s hard work paid off.  He has regained sight, thank God, and patching was reduced to three hours a day outside of school.  We breathed a sigh of relief and offered up trembling hands in praise and thanksgiving.

As for Lauren, I think we’re a little shell-shocked from her story.   It knocks the wind out of me, even now.  I wrote last year about waiting for February for the follow-up with the pediatric ENT and audiologist to learn more about her hearing loss.  How we prayed in the months between visits, many of you prayed, too.  I could almost taste the good news that we hoped to get at the upcoming visit to Children’s Hospital.  After all, a few years ago Lauren had lost hearing in her other ear and it was fully restored.  And we knew from Lauren’s pediatrician that her eardrum had been spared.

Lauren’s story, however, ended up being a story with a twist.  We didn’t get the answer we wanted when we wanted it.  Something was wrong with the Tiniest Tiny.  Lauren had lost more of her hearing.  In the darkness of night we had to abandon our victory dance and learn instead to simply cling to God.  We had to learn to let him hold us as he whispered that he is good, always good, that he’s never going to let us down, the whole time feeling that he is.  And then we did receive the news we dared to hope for.  At another follow-up at Children’s, a specialist assured us that Lauren’s ear could indeed repair itself over time, as ears sometimes do after trauma.  When summer came to an end, the same specialist broke the news that hearing in Lauren’s left ear, the one that was lost and lost again, was practically normal, with the potential for more healing to come.

I could have saved time and just skipped to the good news about Steven and Lauren.  Or I could have ignored it all together and just wrote the typical family Christmas letter.  It’s what normal people do and would have been kinder to my sensitive heart.  I most definitely should have included more details about Em.  She’s an absolute doll, and she’s thriving by the way.  But it’s kind of hard to truly rejoice with us unless you know where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through.  Because for us, and many of you, it’s been a year of camping out in the middle of the story, with all the uncertainty that comes when victory is out of sight and the days are long and hard.

 

Yet hope and uncertainty go hand-in-hand, with hope winning out every time.  I desperately want to shout this message to the world, or at least write about it more.  I’m sensing in my bones and in the deepest part of my soul that now is the time to write.

Today marks the third Sunday of Advent and the Tiniest Tiny is on the verge of losing her first tooth.  I’m feeling all the feels.  Before long, a dairy-free version of Alice’s Spicy Sausage Kale Bean Soup is reheated on the stove top burner.  Leftover Thai food is thrown into the microwave and two-thirds of our children refuse to eat it.  Our family of five gathers around the oak dining room table to light the Joy candle.  As the flame of the little pink candle flickers and comes to life, we set our eyes on whatever is lovely and good, to the dawn of about to get better.  This is the song of old, the story rising in me.

Greg, Nicole, Emily, Steven, Lauren and our little dog, Chloe