The Kid was scheduled to be baptized last year on Mother’s Day. Instead, the story went differently: a night in the ER, a catheter in the wang, and a sluggish Sunday afterward. This year, our Sunday was spent celebrating, while the back of our minds held onto the knowledge that in twenty-four hours, we would be meeting with a neurosurgeon to discuss future possibilities for TK’s spine.

We’re only prepared for the plan that we write, and insufficiently at that. We’re never really prepared for the reality that exists outside of our expectations.

Last night, The Husband and I bathed TK and my gaze fell down the stairs and out our front-door window, where the fading sunlight cast its beam on a lily growing beside our porch. We can only have the view we’re afforded from our particular vantage point, and waiting rooms and hospitals have dominated this family’s perspective over the past seventeen months. That’s just the way this story has gone so far. But as I watched that lone lily dance in the breeze, and the light cover it wherever it went, I knew. That I am clothed. I am covered. The beams of love, in both their soft light and ferocious intensity, will not let me go. I turned to the boys beside me, felt the water splashing from the tub. Will not let US go.

And this morning, as I pumped a stationary bike and hurled silent curses at the instructor who yelled out insane resistance levels, I knew then, too. It is written, I heard, because that’s what my heart has been told lately. As someone who deals and trades in words, who examines them like shiny objects and places them like puzzle pieces, the beauty that our stories are written is not lost on me. I cling to it, rejoice in it, in the gorgeous finality of it, that what happens is exactly what is meant to. That my eyes, TK’s neck, Merrill’s swing, these are not meaningless mishaps that must be fought against and apologized for–no, they are there by design, to make us the people we are meant to be. When I accept and embrace these apparent interruptions to plan, when I trust that they are there because love told them to be, when I know that grace will redeem every last second and each tear–this is when I come to life. This is when the slog of life becomes romance.

But that’s all hokey sentiment when you’re sitting in the neurosurgeon’s office waiting on a verdict, right?

Not so much. Because grace transforms even your hearing, so that you can listen to the M.D.’s interpretations and secretly smile, because he is only translating a divine language into vernacular–and what does he know that the Author doesn’t already have written on His hands?

This is why I praise, why I believe: not because the report was good, but because whatever the report was, it was written already. Out of a love that my black-and-white, good-and-bad, need-for-answers heart is only beginning to understand.

But why do I rejoice? I rejoice because the report was good, y’all.

The vertebral anomaly isn’t severe enough to require spinal surgery. And it’s stable. The other stuff, we’ll follow up on with an MRI in six months. He can do physical therapy. He may never play football. I can live with that. I’m already anticipating the arguments we’ll have with him over it, and I’m giving thanks for every damn one, because it will give us the opportunity to talk about what else he is meant for. (Remind me of this when I’m banging my head against the wall over my beautiful, sullen teenage boy.) We’ll be regular visitors to more waiting rooms over the years, will know the neurosurgeon’s office well. He may always have a bit of a tilt, the surgeon said. “That’s just part of him. It’s who he’s going to be.”

Divine to vernacular.

I’ve nearly filled my current journal, and the last page holds a list of prayer requests I had for my son while I was still pregnant. “Head tilt” and “C1 vertebral anomaly” are nowhere to be found on the list. Plans in pencil, indeed. I remember a visit to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in my twenties, when I was lonely and angry because the story I was living was not matching up to the plans I had made, and the words fell on me then, too, as if they had been spoken in my ear: Your heart is bigger than you know and stronger than you think. I had no idea how this promise would be proven true. How I was made to be this man’s wife, and this boy’s mother. My daydreams then were about Prince Charming and a white horse/nice car; now they’re about a hot bath and hearing “mama” for the first time. My vantage point changes, but the story doesn’t.

It is written. It is being written. And every word of it is grace.