Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces. George MacDonald

courtesy now-here-this.timeout.com

The Husband and I, we like to make plans. He does Excel and I do lists, and we stare off into the future and organize it into virtual Container Store files. But as you may have gathered, this season of our lives is not allowing for many plans beyond “pee sometime in the next hour” and “shower with a two-year old watching”.

Before The Kid’s surgery, though–before the halo and the muscle spasms and the vomiting and the victories and the defeats and the way-too-much-Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, we went to our local frame shop, TK in tow, and purchased a 27×40 inch frame with the intent of fashioning a collage that would contain his experience. This chapter in his story, which we blissfully and ignorantly hoped would be closed come halo removal day.

The frame sits propped up against the breakfast room wall, same as the day we bought it.

I’ve gazed upon it with hope that soured to fear; pleasure turned to bitterness. I’ve glanced at it as we’ve brought him home from appointment after appointment, as we’ve crossed that threshold with snow sticking to our feet and bubbles to our clothes. It sits there, wrapped in plastic, and nearby sits a stack of cards and printed comments that will one day cover its white space with a story. But it feels too soon to get to work just yet. Because the problem is, the story continues.

Or is that a problem?

There are days–most of them, actually–when I’ve felt like Carrie with her Wall O’ Brody, first trying to the connect the dots of who, then where, he is, with my version more a why this tilt and when can we fix it? Neurosurgeon A goes here, Neurosurgeon B here, physical therapist over here next to orthopedic surgeon and now find a spot for the craniofacial and orthotics guys…and let’s find the connection. The answer. The solution.

But it’s always about more than just a singular answer. Why do I keep forgetting, keep trying to reduce our lives down to something other than story?

Because after all that TK has been through, and us with him, here is what I know: we have not been left, and this is not over. And all the beauty in the world (and beyond it) lies in that truth.

Nine years ago, I felt my heart stretch until it nearly ripped in a U-Haul across eighteen hundred miles as I, unknowingly and with tears in my eyes, headed toward a new faith, new friendships, and TH. And now, nearly a decade later? The same pain amplified by the power of unconditional love as grace has tempered my pleading why into so much more: what new, great thing will be brought out of this? 

It’s not just about me anymore. Which makes it harder, the stakes greater, and the story so much richer.

And I feel it, how everything that doesn’t belong within me is being shaken out, burned away, painfully and somehow beautifully.

From a cross-country U-Haul to a suburban SUV on a Saturday afternoon spent with The Sis and Niece and TK, blowing bubbles in the yard. He cried the whole way there, tears of discomfort or toddlerhood–it’s anybody’s guess some days. But on the way home, I hear a giggle in the backseat, and I turn to see him looking at some patch of light or source of mirth that only he can see. (There’s so much that only he can see.) And I reach back, grab his foot for a tickle, and his laughter reaches a fever pitch as his eyes meet mine, and when the light turns green I barely see it through tears. Tears of joy in the midst of this long road, this story that refuses to not be told, and the sweetness of them, of his laugh, is unmistakable and would have been unknowable without everything he’s been through. They just wouldn’t have mattered as much. A thought fills my heart until I think I may burst with the unquenchable glory of it all:

The deeper the pain, the greater the beauty. 

Could it be true?

Now this is something to hope for. This is better than an upright head, more than a singular answer. This is everything.

I think about Carrie’s wall, about our collage, and I know that the difference between them is that the story the collage tells, whenever it ends up being made, can never be torn down in a fit of frustration or undone by the ways of the world. In it, everything will be connected and nothing will be wasted.

The narrative of grace–the longing stretched across time, the wounded who stayed with us, who stays with us, the now-but-not-yet–this is the only narrative in which his story makes sense. In which our story makes sense.

The frame waits, and so do we, even as everything that will be told by it can never be contained inside its edges.