We were absent from church for almost four months. A literal season of our lives without Sunday morning sermons, songs, greet-your-neighbors. The Kid’s surgery dominated our inability to attend, and mixed in with that were morning sickness and exhaustion. But on Palm Sunday–the day commemorating a triumphal entry that occurred on a donkey–we piled into the Honda and finally made it back.

There were two seats next to a couple who had brought us dinner the week before. TK was safely ensconced in the nursery, and it seemed there had been a place reserved for us too.

It was kind of fun playing hooky for a while: no rushing around to get somewhere (sort of) on time; no tears at nursery drop-off; no crowds at the grocery store. But the pull to be back in a community outweighed even our tendencies toward introversion. True to form, I felt the weight of tears threaten to spill over my eyelids for much of the service. Every song, every reminder of truth, every moment of Communion felt like a homecoming.

A dear friend recently sent me a copy of Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, and it’s one of those books you have to put down almost every other sentence to let the earth-shattering simplicity of its truth sink into your deepest places. I find it entering my thoughts throughout the day, like the best books do, and challenging my thinking and living. Nouwen writes about what it means to belong, and how the knowledge of belonging changes the way we live. “Deep friendship is a calling forth of each other’s chosenness and a mutual affirmation of being precious in God’s eyes,” he writes, and the statement both shows me why deep friendship is so rare and how far I have to go in believing in that chosenness myself. With all my traveling along the road of grace in recent years, I still battle–daily–the inclination to interpret how loved I am from the circumstances that surround me.

Another friend said recently, “It’s like I have to learn over and over that things are going to happen the way they’re supposed to–not the way I think they should.” Amen. Over and over and over. TK’s unique pattern of development means that my fingers are nearly pulled off daily as he leads me around, communicating without words, and his frustration is mirrored by my own when we struggle to understand each other. Having a child who is both intelligent and speech-delayed makes communication tricky–and not just between us. I have a feeling I will be “explaining” him to people for a while as I struggle to pave a path of understanding and find the best spots for him–the places where he belongs. I struggle with patience; with wanting this part of his development to hurry up, for the day when “apple” won’t be his word for everything and the finger-pulling abates. Then I slow down and breathe and watch him and know that Today will never happen again; that I am wishing away a piece of the puzzle that will add up to the wholeness of him.

And I know that, for my own part, I have to believe that I am beloved to show him that he is.

There is a crucial element that transformed church from a dirge to a celebration for me; that converts daily life from a monotony into a miracle; that changed me from a rule-keeper to a story-teller. I suspect that this element is what is, steadily, turning me from performer into beloved. I know what that element isn’t, and it isn’t perfection. It isn’t adherence to my agenda. It isn’t absence of difficulty. It is grace.

I watch TK’s days unfold, and there are moments when we laugh together and moments when we don’t. There are moments when I feel like I’m doing okay with this motherhood thing and moments when I feel like I’ve failed at it irreparably. There are moments when I think I’m going to steal away in the dead of night and moments when I guess I could stay awhile. And I realize that every second I spend wanting to have already arrived is another second I take away from the beauty of an exodus, of redemption. Grace means that there is a place for us right where we are even as we are headed to the home it ultimately provides. Grace means that we already, always, belong. All of us.

The donkey story of Palm Sunday–I never knew what it really meant until this year. Then I read this:

In the Ancient Near East, a king entered cities riding on a warhorse in order to convey his military power, particularly when he was entering into newly conquered cities where his rule may have been regarded as illegitimate or met with suspicion or outright rejection. The exception to this custom was when a beloved king entered his own capital city. There he would ride in on a donkey — the benevolent king.

I always thought it was sort of a contrived act of humility–“I’m not too good for a donkey, see?”–and now I see the real message was, “Here I am. I’m back. Back among friends. I choose you.” An act of the beloved toward his beloved, and a reflection of the movement of grace in my life: not conquering, not galloping, but steadily pushing forward, finding the best spots for me–the places where I belong.