I used to daydream about meeting The One. Now that I’ve got him, and our son, I daydream about meeting the world’s best neurosurgeon.

The Kid is receiving Botox treatment tomorrow in his neck. This is the stage of Neckgate that we hope will prove an alternative to surgery: it will freeze the neck muscle that pulls his head into a tilt and, hopefully, allow him to straighten up, so to speak. Either that, or it will show us that his needs are surgical. Spinal surgery, the words that loom like a black cloud in the back of my mind.

But there is one who looms larger, in the back of my mind and over the past, in the future and in the here and now. Especially in the here and now.

I’ve returned throughout my life to the words of Isaiah, one of my favorite guys in one of my favorite books, a prophet and a poet. His twenty-fifth chapter has been a resting place for me. Even if you’re not a fan of the Divine, you have to appreciate the imagery Isaiah invokes; I mean, hello, wine figures in prominently.

I returned there, to Chapter Twenty-Five, this past weekend, after a week full of world- and work-weariness. As a part-timer I realize the thin ice upon which I skate when I complain about my job, but seriously: no, I cannot come out to your car to do an exam on your child who refuses to enter the office. And if I hear the question “Why we gotta fix those teeth if they gonna fall out anyway?” one more time…

And it was immediate post-vacation, which is always a drag because in my mind I’m imagining what I was doing a week ago. And it nearly always involved a drink in one hand and a beach in front of me, so it’s hard for real life to compare. A car cut me off in a parking lot and stole the space I was eyeing and I actually growled. So here we are, with real life catching up to us and another medical visit for The Kid, and I read Isaiah to prepare.

I read about shelter and shade and refuge, and I wish they were showing up in different ways than they are. I wish they were showing up as answers and resolution and everything just being fixed. I wish God would be an umbrella on a soft sandy beach or a big cuddly teddy bear even though a Jewish proverb reminds me that he’s an earthquake, not a kindly old uncle. Sometimes I want the kindly old uncle. Sometimes I want whatever is different from now.

Then I reach a phrase that catches my eye: on this mountain. On THIS mountain. And Isaiah mentions feasts and banquets and meats and wines (holla), and then he gets really into it and there’s some talk of destroying shrouds and swallowing up death and I’m like, “Hell’s yeah. I can get on board with that menu. Let’s do this.” But I keep coming back to on this mountain. And I feel like maybe my kindly old uncle is being an earthquake again.

This is our mountain. Neckgate, and TK and everything he’s gone through, and all the days-before-appointments, the not-knowing and the trying-to-figure-it-out. I realize that sometimes a new answer means more to me than what I already know, and this should not be. Because this mountain, this one, is where the set-up will take place and where the caterers have been directed to arrive and where the party will occur. This is where Redemption lives: in the now. Not in an alternate pathway, but in the one we are already walking.

I read another favorite author: “The mind would rather fret about the future or pine over the past–so the mind can cling to its own illusion of control. But the current moment? It can’t be controlled. And what the mind can’t control, it tends to discount. Brush past…over…What if I didn’t discount this moment but counted it for what it is–God here?” I consider the ways I’ve tackled life as a to-do list, waiting to get past this, strategizing my way out of mystery, looking for a meal other than manna. Other than bread and wine. And she continues, “Now could be an altar.”

I look around at what Now offers and see it with new eyes: The Husband busily decorating the house for Halloween; TK, with head all tilted, babbling and laughing at me when I blow my nose; autumn drifting to earth on golden leaves; banana bread in the oven. Now is where they are. Now is where He is. Now is a gift I will not keep forgetting to unwrap.