Where you’re healed is where you’re broken…God knows your native tongue. –David Wilcox

There are a couple of things that happens when a plan goes awry. Like how the truth is exposed that you had a plan in the first place. Then you react to this upending of expectations, typically by either fighting it or letting go.

I’ve seen both happen. I’ve done both, mostly the fighting, whether actively (scrambling to revert back to my plan, clamoring for change from what clearly has got to be a mistake) or passively (carrying anger in my heart like a weapon in my purse, growing resentment as though it’s a flower in a garden). I’ve watched as people who claim to believe in more than this world, in more than us, have their light slowly extinguished and rage against its dying as though all that they can’t see is now, suddenly, the enemy. I wondered if I would be the same until an explosion in midtown Manhattan sent me running down seven flights of stairs with a sense of peace I couldn’t explain. It surprised me more than anything, then comforted me–doubt and proof exposed simultaneously, reality revealed as a coexistence of the two.

But when the unplanned becomes the actual, what happens for someone who believes in the more is ultimately this, that the question must be asked: Did God fail me? And the answer to that question, that question that I seem to default to no matter how many times I’m given the irrefutable answer, is this: No. He freed me.

I think about the plans that went awry when I was single, pre-The Husband, pre-The Kid, pre-Little Brother, and especially the two-year period of pain I went through that led me to New York (and ultimately, all of them). And I have to say that was harder because I was alone for it in so many ways. I felt alone, experiencing the results of my rebellion and my failures staring me in the face as soon as I walked to the mirror every morning.

Now, navigating Holland with TH and TK and LB, I am most assuredly not alone–in life or in the bathroom, car, shower–and this is a balm. What’s inconvenient about it, though, is how my defenses have been knocked down by loving this much. By being, consequently, so vulnerable. It’s just so damn uncomfortable to feel this deeply in a world this broken. In a world with my children in it. I sit here typing this but already I’m on the plane tomorrow, imagining altercations and building arguments and fighting anxiety. Reminding myself to pack the Imodium.

Last week, TH and I went out with some people from church, which is so much better than it may sound, and heard live music–a rarity for us these days. And as the notes pinged against my heart and the words filled empty spaces that I hadn’t realized were begging for truth, for re-membering, I considered that feeling deeply–maybe it can be an asset. Because music, it had never sounded this beautiful before.

Maybe what looks like, what even feels like, our undoing? Maybe it could be for our healing.

A woman just walked by me now with her son, who has Down Syndrome, and I know they’ve seen some windmills up close. And there’s this: the conversations that I know people have had because I think way too much about what other people think (see: above about the plane), how they’ve shaken their heads and sighed relief that our journey isn’t theirs–and I know too because I’ve sighed like that, at the hospital and just here now where I’m sitting. But there’s also the call from a friend who knows our whole story, and unasked, she said this: how much she loves it. And I am re-membered.

So I go outside with TK, though it’s hot and steamy like Holland is this time of year (who knew?), and in the early-morning sun I see the flowers, how they’re just opening, how they know somehow where to turn to get the light. TK turns to me, gives me that look, and there’s a moment when I think it’s gone awry–because who am I, without a map to tell me where to go and sometimes even doubting where the light is myself, trying to get it to bend in my direction? But he points now, and he gives me the sign for more, which is one of the most important words of the language I’m learning, of the language that maybe I’ve spoken all along. So I let go and turn with him to the light where, somehow, we’ll both get all we need. And more.