“Anxiety is the result of a collapsing false god.” –Tim Keller

“He sure is active,” I hear from a lot of people regarding The Kid. Depending on the tone of delivery, I either want to react with a knowing smile or say, “No shit. He’s TWO.” But I typically have time for neither as I chase him to his next toddler-decreed destination.

In one week, that toddler will be lying on an OR table, motionless. I already ache for the moment they bring him back to me.

But then the real fun begins, as he’ll be decked out in a halo that renders his head immobile, pins and metal uprights decreeing his movements for the next three months, and this just as he was getting his sea legs: running from here to there and everywhere, dancing to the beat of his own drummer, climbing stairs like a boss (if a boss were to have his parents’ hands gripping his wrists during the ascent). The orthotic specialist told me that if he needs help getting around, we can be provided with a walker. And a picture of someone kicking a puppy, if the idea of the walker wasn’t enough to make us cry.

Lately I’ve been naming my fears at night in bed, after the lights have gone out and the praying begins. I’ve found that when I speak the fear, it’s like a slow undressing under a spotlight: first comes the overt source of my anxiety, then what’s underneath it, then what’s underneath that–and I’ve learned that fear is a complicated, multi-layered thing. But deep within the panic over rejection and abandonment and everything that fear is really about? There is always love. Love waiting to answer every layer and be bigger than what I’m facing, what I’m afraid of.

Because here’s how it goes: I’m afraid of TK not waking up. I’m afraid of not being enough. I’m afraid of being abandoned. I’m afraid…because I love. And I can stop being afraid because I am loved.

That’s what these heart-wrenching, life-altering struggles are really about. The deep-seated, rarely-spoken fear that love will leave. Why can’t we talk about this? Why do we cloak our fears with stabs at perfection?

There is a love that never leaves. I think I’m just now starting to believe that. And I know it’s the struggles that have told me it’s true.

I am not strong enough for this. But I am held by a love that is.

Everything is watery these days. My heart has been marinated in a mixture of parenthood, struggle, and grace, and I am not the same. The world has less black and white in it, less us and them, less good and bad. I’m often looking at everything through the blurry lens of emotion, and caring is gloriously uncomfortable work. The teenager who plopped down beside me halfway through the service on Sunday, he pulled a travel-sized Bible out of his pocket when the sermon began, and the ever-ready judgments that typically accompany my appraisal of my fellow man vanished as I saw that Bible: worn, scratched, beaten-up. It was a book belonging to someone for whom perfection is not an ideal but brokenness is a reality. I love that Bible. I am that Bible. I am closer to my brokenness these days than I ever have been. Yesterday morning, all it took was the day surgery administrator asking me to confirm the spelling of TK’s name for the tears to spring to my eyes. I dropped TK off at school and told his teachers that this is his last week, and we all broke down together.

This is love. There is more love in raw brokenness–in ruined makeup, drop-everything hugs, ugly crying sessions–than a thousand shiny veneers.

For the second year in a row, we spend New Year’s Eve in the quiet of home, preparing for another surgery on our child. This time, the hospital’s party favor not a soft collar but a rigid device. And yet it’s the stillness that lends itself to healing. It’s the immobility that is the prescription for redemption, even though chaos surrounds. “Be still and know…“

And though I don’t particularly like the mode of delivery, it is on this pathway that we are being blessed. I am being loved out of my defensiveness, out of my inclination toward shutting down and turning inward, because if there’s a story worth hearing, it is TK’s. And every other fear-prefaced struggle that turned out to be a direct pathway to grace and love. Stories of strength from weakness, victory from defeat, crowns of twisted thorns and metal halos.