A couple of weeks ago, I returned from a trip to Target with TK and realized one of his shoes was missing. “I can’t go back,” I moaned to The Husband, as if I had just returned from a tour in Afghanistan, and he was the one upon whom it fell to do the Daniel-Day Lewis finding this time. He returned a few minutes later with the missing shoe, and order was restored to our universe.

I’m no stranger to the incongruous; after all, I believe history changed when God showed up in a feeding trough. And while I appreciate the fact that grace keeps me on my toes with its upside-down kingdom-ness, its renaming of “wise” as “foolish”, and “death” as “life”, there will always be a part of me that craves predictability. A part that needs things to be symmetrical, balanced, logical. Which is why, when a recent discussion of The Kid’s health with his pediatrician occurred over the phone as I pushed him in circles in front of the Gap, I craved the stability and congruity of a medical setting. But grace dons its sneakers and shows up just anywhere, often looking like something quite other than what I expected.

I knew I was in trouble when the blogging network I joined a couple of years ago emailed me with the notification that they were switching me from their “life” to “parenting” headline group. Noooooo!!! I screamed silently at the screen. I’m still me! TK was a relatively unknown entity renting space inside my body at that point, and I had vowed not to become solely the “Mommy” type–and had the diaper bag to prove it. Then, a couple of months later, he landed on the scene via my arms and all hell broke loose. When the dust settled, I looked at his face and knew all my plans were screwed. This is a love that redefines life.

The pediatrician explained the results of the CT scan to me: that they had found an anomaly on the C1 verebra, an outgrowth of bone that could explain TK’s neck tilt but required further imaging. These words that she spoke, I spent years studying them, my own neck and back hunched over books in libraries preparing for tests I was scheduled to take. The tests I knew were coming. And here, in the land of what I never knew was coming, those same words sounded like a different language. Because they were describing my son. This love, these tests, are not scheduled.

When TK and I had left for the mall, our next-door neighbor–the one who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s in October–was working in his yard, and we had a brief conversation. He was still there when we returned, TK grinning in the backseat and I, shell-shocked and shaken. My instinct, per usual, was to run into the house and hole up inside the familiar. Then I remembered a moment from my New York life, when I was in the audience as another TK gave a lecture on how Tolkien’s faith influenced The Lord of the Rings and I wanted to ask a question. The microphone was being handed to one person after another who stood up to address the speaker, and I wondered–not for the first time–what the hell I was doing in a city full of such boldness. Would I be discovered for the fraud I was? There I sat, in a quiet battle against fear and the voice telling me that if I dared raise my hand, I would only end up looking stupid. That was the moment I realized how much damage I could do to myself, had done to myself, with this weapon of self-hatred. And that if there was any time to leave fear behind and find out what lay on the other side of it, it was then, at that moment in that room in New York City.

Now, in the shadows of my garage, I hiked TK up on my hip and made that same step forward. Away from the wrapping of fear around me like a blanket, the sailing of ships of safety until I sank them, and into the bravery of vulnerability. The shining light of community that falls sharply on an introvert’s soul until she sees that a lot of us have the same scars, and they’re all pointing us in one direction. I told our neighbor what we were facing. Asked him, around the lump in my throat and the taunting voice of pride, to pray for us. And the load felt lighter, because someone who knows pain was offering to share mine.

I prefer symmetry; a balanced spine, both shoes in a pair. But when we walked into the CT room with TK last week to capture an image that would reveal his own personal imbalance, the lightness with a call that’s hard to hear whispered above the din of fear and into my heart: This is his story, and yours. Because the weight of loving someone more than yourself is felt in the inability to escape what happens to them as being anything other than what’s happening to you too, but there’s this: if this life is a story written by a hand greater than mine, then there are moments when that weight, or pain, or joy, is so exquisitely deep that it cuts right to the truest part of me and gives me a glimpse of just how much we might be made for. And if that purpose is more than dust-to-dust and trite cliches and fairy tales, then these earth-shattering moments may be for just that: shattering what is familiar and seen so that what is beyond it can be revealed. And there, in the incongruous dim lighting of a hospital imaging room, I saw it:

He’s trying to show me that he’s REAL.

Sometimes love goes and retrieves the shoe, restores the balance. And sometimes it whispers in, knocking everything else off its axis–especially me–to reveal that my questions have answers, whether voiced in a New York auditorium or a hospital waiting room or a worn pathway in front of the Gap. The answer is yes. Yes, I am real. Yes, everything sad will come untrue. Yes, everything left unbalanced will one day be made whole.