Last Thursday, I drove over to our still-unoccupied but frenetically worked-upon house to meet The Husband and try out new paint samples that did not belong in the Baby Crap family of hues.  I arrived before he did (shocker) and pulled up in the driveway, keeping the car on because that’s how you keep the seat warmers on, and my butt had requested them.  Waiting there in the quiet of the front seat and descending nightfall, I had A Moment.

I thought about this season three years ago, when I was gearing up for a visit from The Mom and Dad and a Christmas-day train ride to Jersey to meet the Yankee fam.  I needed a little help feeling merry that year because I had just taken a risk that seemed to have failed spectacularly; in fact, I was reeling after a kind rejection from the guy I thought could be The One and the paired potential loss of one of my favorite friendships. I had never felt so enmeshed in my single status or so far from the possibility of true love.  I began to think that I would always be the fifth or seventh or ninth wheel at family holiday gatherings, the only unpaired person at the dinner table besides the lovable uncle whose marriage record rivals that of Henry VIII.

And now here I was, staring at the home where I will live with The One, a designation about which I happened to be correct if early.  I marveled at all the Chapter Ones I have mistaken for epilogues, all the wasted hopelessness, and even at how a thirty-year fixed mortgage, assload of debt, and abandonment of the city where I came to life can look like freedom.  Finally.

Pre-NYC, I was unaccustomed to practicing what I preached.  I kept my faith at arm’s-length and my plans buried in a mattress safe from the God I claimed to trust but whose intentions I secretly doubted.  After all, he kept messing around with those plans.  But then I was removed from my home and myself enough to see all I had counted out just because I didn’t understand what love could really look like.  And it clicked that there was a safer place for my treasure, so I packed it up and sent it north.  And so went my heart.

I remember when the venerable Jesse Ventura claimed that religion is a crutch for the weak, and I remember how angry I was at his insolence (and under cover of that anger, frightened that he was right).  I remember when I woke up to the fact that religion could not only be a crutch, but a weapon.  And I remember when it hit me that I was never meant for religion, but for grace–not a crutch, but the very air I need to breathe every moment.  I think of all the time I spent growing up in church, exhaustedly repeating hymns whose words bypassed my heart and flew over my head as I wondered when I could get back to my real life.  And now, what worship looks like: acknowledging that the bottom line is no longer Me but all that has been done on my behalf, acts of grace so huge and eternal that all I can do is humbly accept them and respond with voice and head lifted up; a posture which, uncoincidentally, is when I am most myself.  An act of response, not compulsion, to a love so full that it goes beyond the realms of simple comfort and trite encouragement and feel-good sentimentalism and rounds the corner into transformation.  So far beyond what I ever knew.  Such deep, pure rest. Such everything.

In a few days, our address will no longer have a Line 2.  The furniture we have sat on for the past two years will be relegated to basement-quality.  We are entering a state of permanence unrivaled since I left The Mom and Dad’s place fifteen years ago.  We’ll make a home there even as our ultimate home and treasure lie elsewhere, safely stowed with the only One able to keep it.