It’s Monday afternoon, and I’m crying beside a stable.

Conveniently, I’m wearing sunglasses to hide this humiliating public display of emotion. If only I had been wearing some yesterday in the multipurpose room of the high school where our church gathers and the people sang: Holy, holy, holy. Merciful and mighty. I didn’t expect the tears at that moment, though I’ve grown used to them on Sunday mornings ever since finding churches that preach grace and letting that grace take hold of my heart. Even more so since having kids and finding all the feelings so much closer to the surface, unprotected by years-formed layers of defensiveness because those layers were stripped away by the exfoliating work of grace. By the conversion from a heart of stone to one of flesh, which is so annoying because those hurt a lot more. The tears flowed during the song–the same song that caused tears ten years ago in a sanctuary in Birmingham where I sat alone–as I was overwhelmed once again by what the words mean; by how holy is beautiful and awful and everything, but most of all for me lately, and in this moment, it is real. In this moment when all the worries and fears and highs and lows of the week rise together and bow down to what is bigger. In this moment when I am so uncomfortably and gorgeously confronted with how much I am loved and held.

A couple of days later, I’m waiting in the same jury room I waited in not two years before, and–status updates aside–I’m finding that I’m not quite as angry as I was then, not as curled up into myself and my own bitterness. And this is progress! I think–because I have three hours to do nothing but that–about all the revisitations I’ve been allotted in life. About how, when I was growing up, I prayed the never-ending prayer for others’ conversions, especially my dad’s, because that was when I thought there was one way to get saved and it went like this: NOW. By ME. I reduced the work of grace to bent knees in the family room, immediate church attendance, and a falling in line with what everyone else’s family did. I wanted salvation more for myself, from the inconveniences I felt, than for anyone else, but it sure sounded better when I put another name than mine in the prayer. And what I didn’t see, what I refused to see, was how heavily engaged I was in the business of trying to control people, of trying to turn them–with good intentions, mind you, which is often just the molten asphalt they pour on the path to the pit–into someone other than who they were. As if salvation were not my narrative to live but my job to enact.

I remember all this, and I think of The Kid, and I pray not for the saving of him from being the person he’s meant to be but from my efforts to change any of that. From my best intentions, which I easily confuse with the best plan. Because I am not meant to save him from any path as much as I was made to walk with him on this one. I pray to appreciate him for all he is instead of trying to turn him into someone else. To not reduce my dad to one sinner’s prayer or my son to one problem to be solved, but to see it all as a mystery to be lived.

Because there are times when we’d all rather be somewhere else, I think, as I visit my pregnant friend in the hospital, where she has held her breath for six weeks on the high-risk floor without knowing what will happen next. I think about my friends who would kill to be here themselves, because then it would mean that the needles and pills and disappointments were over and that it had all worked. I think about how grace nearly always threads beauty and struggle together so tightly that any time I’ve attempted to extricate one I’ve just ended up with one big tangle–how they must come together. I think about how many times I’ve tried to tease apart the different strands that make up TK, identify causes and diagnoses and answers, only to remain mystified–and then look up and see his incomparable grin and resolve to stop missing it.

We saw the neurologist last week, and he waved me over to the computer while TK lined cars up on the floor, holding up the tractor so I’d name it, and the doctor pointed to the MRI and read it to me. Named it while keeping the mystery intact. He ordered blood tests and, in his thick Italian accent, said it: You have a complicated kid. I’d smiled, saying, “Fuckin’ A, man”–in my head, of course, where most of my conversations take place–and thought about how the last time I’d heard an Italian accent that thick it was in Italy and I wonder how quickly I could get on a flight to Rome? Then TK held up a guitar and grinned at me and I thought about how much an “anywhere but here” mentality misses the point. Misses the grace. Misses the ride.

I’ve been in the business of measuring when I’m being asked to count: laps around the horse ring, laughs from the belly, blessings in my lap. The horse ambles back with TK astride it, grinning when he sees me wave. He didn’t cry at all this week, while I did, in between breaths of thank you. THANK YOU. As I wait for him to return to me, I think about how this isn’t the first stable to be the site of a miracle, how this moment is another revisitation, how they all are when grace is at play. I think again about what PW said, how it grabbed my heart and turned a light on, that it’s been the key this whole time: to relax and enjoy the ride.