When I was younger, and more an adherent to the rules of morality than the freedom of grace, I would refer to God’s sense of humor with a cynical edge. I would wonder, underneath the faux veneer of playfulness…well, basically, how he would screw me over this time. With his “sense of humor.” How he would defiantly refuse to consent to my plan, the one I had painstakingly and wisely crafted from the shallow mine of my own experience and perspective. As if he were the uncooperative child.

It’s no secret, given the title of this blog and the voluminous personal sharing that’s occurred within its margins, that my formerly iron-clad plan has lost some authority. Some integrity. Some weight. Which is to say, it has been gloriously shot to shit by the uncompromising ends of love and grace and redemption. Also in the “no secret” category: my preference for solitude, my penchant for personal space, my personality of introversion. I am an expert boundary-placer, a gold-medal limit-setter. If you aren’t one of the Four who live in our home, there’s an invisible and silent timer that starts the moment you walk in the door, and that’s just fact. Depending on whether you bring chocolate or wine or jokes with you, that timer may be extended, but what I’m saying is that we likes our “us” time, y’all. We need it.

So, back in my “rule-keeping” period, I would have looked upon the parade of therapists who darken our doorway and inhabit, hours per week, our basement with The Kid–I would have looked upon them as an exercise of God’s sense of humor. And, fake smile and moral fortitude intact, I would have secretly viewed them as threat. Or punishment. Or both. Now, I have no choice but to see them as gift. As blessing. As agents of redemption–for all of us.

As, in a strange way, friends.

That’s what I tell TK when one of them is set to arrive: “Your friend so-and-so is on her way!” These “friends” who encourage and drill and test and make demands of him, who set goals and make charts and give me reports. I hear him laughing, vocalizing, whining, crying, jumping, refusing, assenting. I hear him cover a gauntlet of actions and a range of emotions, and then I hear his tiny footsteps on the stairs and I wait for him to cross the threshold and enter my arms. A homecoming–it always ends with that.

Yeah. The metaphor isn’t lost on me either.

I remember going on a summer trip with my youth group when I was in high school, and one of the counselors–a college student, who therefore must know everything because, you know, college and age–said that she had figured it out. How to do the Christian thing. And I was all ears, because that was the kind of information that really got me excited: how to do things. Not how to receive them. But how to do them myself. How to control them. Because it was all about me.

She went on to reveal it, the secret to everything: “Just love God. Just love him! That’s it.” And I thought about how nice that sounded, and also, What the hell? How do you “do” love? How do you just make yourself love someone? What does that even mean? Something about her words bothered me, but I wouldn’t understand why for a dozen years or so. I’m still understanding.

I didn’t understand how much of love is letting go. I don’t think she did, either. How much of love is letting go of the me part.

I’ve realized recently that despite an objective awareness of the dangers of fear and guilt when it comes to parenting, I tend to, by default, parent from exactly those places. I’ve come to see that so much of my frustration with parenting, with mothering, with my kids, has to do with refusing to let go of whatever plan I’m clinging to more tightly than grace at any given moment. How tightly I’m clinging to any love that isn’t the biggest kind. The bigger-than-me kind. The perfect kind, which never–ever ever ever–comes from me. I’m being shown how much of what I see as the burdens of parenting are actually my fears of getting it wrong: of messing them up, of being too present or not present enough, of missing opportunities. My days with them cover a gauntlet of actions and a range of emotions and by the end of it all, I wonder how much of the exhaustion is tired arms and back and legs, and how much is my tendency to make it all harder than it has to be. Of making it all so reliant on me. 

I need a homecoming.

Elisabeth Elliot died this week, but her words live on, and here are a few that a friend posted: “He had promised, ‘When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee, for I am the Lord thy God…Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honorable, and I have loved thee.’ How could we have proved the truth of that promise if there had been no waters? And what rivers could overflow but deep ones? And so, to show us that he meant what he said, to prove to us his love, this was what he sent, this thing which each of us had been sure she could never endure…”

And here, all this time, I thought that I had to teach myself to swim. That I had to fight the currents that were sent to save me.

Loving is letting go. And it’s letting in. It’s opening the door and trusting that what is on the other side is always a gift.

It’s letting them in past my plans, to the deeper part of me that is raw and afraid and will, let’s face it, just get a lot wrong. And it’s muddling through all that together. The waters, the rivers, the fires–they haven’t been, they aren’t, evidence of a twisted sense of humor or discipline techniques. They are love. And all I can do is respond. All I can do is open my hands and say Yes. All I can do is let grace in.

The end of another day arrives, and the sore arms and back with it, and if I’m being honest, I’d rather just stare at my phone. But I head toward them, the man pushing the boy on the swing. There’s an empty one beside them. So I take the seat that I know now was reserved for me–which is, I think, more of what love is than some decision I willfully force myself to make–and I pump my legs too, and after a minute we’re on the same arc at the same time. And it’s been so long since I didn’t ask for directions, since my stomach dropped terrifyingly and wonderfully and I just let myself fly.