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I’m convinced that some (some) of my anxiety comes from a simple failure to recognise patterns. For example, right now I sit twisted in figurative knots as I await a move in forty-eight hours, prior to which packers will be arriving (tomorrow) and after which will begin a lengthy unpacking and settling-in period. We’ve done this already–four times in the past three-and-a-half years, to be exact–and we’ve made it through, every time. But I’ll still sleep erratically for the next two nights and will be powered by cortisol for the next two days. After which I’ll find something else to be anxious about.

Having moved out of, and into, so many houses over the past few years, I can honestly say that this one brings the most excitement because it feels like ours. (The hefty money transfer occurring would testify to that as fact.) When we fill drawers and decorate walls, we will be doing it knowing that (as far as we are aware), we won’t be undoing this all in a year or less. We will be truly settling in. This is terrifying, and wonderful. But, especially given that we can’t even go to the US right now, it feels right. It feels like it’s time. Soon, I will be releasing a three-point-five-years-held breath.

But I’ll still be anxious. I’ll be unnerved by all the boxes, overwhelmed by all the choices, and looking towards the next stage of our lives with questions: are we here forever? What should we do about high schools? And was that post I just read about the prominence of leeches here in damp yards meant to prepare me for something?

So many questions. Which feels only appropriate, as my life thus far has taken the shape of one mass and constant exodus away from the certainty of all I know and into grace and all its mysteries.

This plays out in strange ways on the ground. Because sometimes, having the Red Sea parted for you looks like finding out your kid’s brain works differently because this is the only path that will get you all to where you need to be and to the people who will be with you there. Sometimes, being rescued looks like the opposite of it–say, like getting swallowed by a whale or, in less dramatic examples, like inching away from the philosophies you grew up hearing until your new moral ground looks decidedly more diverse, less predictable, and much like getting called a socialist by those who knew you back then. And sometimes, being shifted into the current of grace looks like buying a house in a foreign country to which you protested moving because now, that country is home.

For some reason, foreign words keep finding me, and this week’s is the Welsh word hiraeth: a homesickness for a home to which one cannot return, or a home which never was. I feel both parts of this definition, deeply. I know that I have moved past the comforts of much of what I was taught, from the clear lines that were drawn that separated us and them, from the lack of nuance and complexity into a world where grey figures in prominently and people are more than one thing. I cannot go back there. I have seen too much, and the etchings of time and pain and love and grace have done their awful and wonderful work. I am profoundly grateful.

I also know that I long for a home I haven’t experienced yet, one where justice–true and sweeping and sufficient justice–has made all things right, where love has made all things new, and where all that is sad has, finally, become untrue. I await this home having never seen it but trusting it is real both because I believe it is and because it just has to be. Because its future reality and its present promises are unveiled more and more to me by grace, by the unremitting love that is grace–the love that will not leave me to comfort when it can be with me in the more.

I’ve caught up with several friends this week, a couple of whom I haven’t seen face to face in over a year each, and even with my anxiety over these reunions (will I say the right thing? Will I know how to behave in a social setting when it’s been so long?), they have been like mini-homecomings. At the end of one of them, my friend said, “I think of you often,” and I told her the same as a woman nearby glanced up at us quizzically, surely wondering what our deal was, and as I thought about it on the way home, I realised that this is our deal–my deal: that without grace intervening and making this particular story our story, I wouldn’t ever hear things like that, truths spoken in person and over email that are often taken for granted: I’m thankful for you. I’m so glad you’re here. I miss you. I think of you often.

This is what being in the flow of grace is: floating along peacefully one minute, thrashing about the next, each moment unpredictable and beyond my ability to control it. And knowing, for all the moments, that I am held and heading home.