The Kid let out a frustrated whine, the puzzle piece lodged between his thumb and forefinger and refusing to fit into its spot. I leaned over and loosened the piece from his grip, turning it upside down. “Sometimes you just have to flip it around and see it from a different angle, remember?” I asked him, and he happily returned the fragment to its rightful home.

Christmas is about looking at the world differently.

TK is scheduled for surgery two weeks after Christmas Day. In two weeks, he will be put to sleep and placed on a table, where surgeon’s knives will attempt to alter into proper alignment the neck he was given. They will place a device called a Halo on his head and shoulders, and he will be returned to us with that device in place for three months, during which time I will be staying at home with him and working on expanding my childcare entertainment repertoire beyond “trips to Target”. And working on expanding my vision beyond “getting past this hard moment”.

On the page of notes I took from the phone call with the orthotic specialist, I wrote his description of what wearing a Halo feels like: imagine you’re walking down a stairway while looking straight ahead, unable to bend your neck and look down. And I consider it, how I’ve always looked ahead to the next thing but that was what made me fixated on the present moment, and moving past it. I consider how this journey of grace teaches, in ways gentle and hard, that now is the gift, even when now is a cry in the night signaling the end of sleep and the beginning of exhaustion; when now is a three-hour wait in a doctor’s office; when now is the placement of a needle or the reading of a result. Life is not found in hurrying past these moments to some lesson but in unwrapping these moments as gifts; in trusting the beauty to come while living with eyes open to the beauty that is now. I always want to get to the part with the answer; but knowing isn’t the gift.

Redemption is happening all the time: on the day and on the eve.

As this two-year search for a solution appears to reach a pinnacle, my eyes open to the possibility that it’s about more than semantics to cease calling it what is happening to us, because we are not victims of an accident but recipients of a gift, and this is what we were meant for, what we were always pointed toward: this tilted head and this tiny bone askew and this boy whose favorite word, Abba, means nothing in English but everything in so many other languages. And maybe that’s the gift: that we’re learning a new language. Maybe that’s the miracle of Christmas, of parenthood, of grace. This boy who proclaims “abba!” and sits at the table during his school’s holiday party only as long as he wants to and then retires to the bookshelf while the other kids decorate cookies. This difference in him that months, weeks ago I may have tried to “correct” but now, I walk over and claim my seat beside him. I get being different. I get not wanting to sit at the table with everyone. I get it when a book makes more sense than a crowd. And this is my boy, in all his glorious different-ness.

The Husband and I take a night off while The Mom and Dad watch TK, and we go out to dinner and sit at a table of our own and talk about surgery when, a few years ago, we talked about movies and parties and more, but somehow less. We go to the symphony hall and the notes swell, and the truth hits me that our acceptance of this story will either be the halfhearted humming of a resigned tune or the offering of an assigned symphony. Clawing or embracing.

The Sis gave TK a drum set for Christmas. “He loves music,” she reasoned, knowing him with her gift. He loves music. We offer the symphony.

On this national day of anticipation, what are we waiting for? What are we looking for? A friend once expressed displeasure over the difficulty of faith in a world without miracles, and I agreed, at the time, that it would be easier to believe if all around us the water was turning to wine and the blind were receiving sight.

Miracles, like love, are misunderstood because we expect them to look a certain way. But grace has put me on the table, and I have witnessed mundane moments become sacred: water to wine. I have beheld blessings that were once shrouded in shadows: the blind receiving sight. And this is the miracle, the space for which grace creates in our stories: the always-more; the recognition of holy in what the world sees as less. The advent of love that magnifies each moment into eternal brilliance, that turns every day into an advent and an eve.