Day One of unemployment began with a spin class and a nice long cup of coffee. And now, I sit staring at my to-do list and battling the urge to justify my time off by accomplishing great things in the world, or at least small things like making eye appointments for me and The Husband, or baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies, or updating my CPR certification.

So, instead, I do the thing that is the antidote to my self-driven sense of urgency, the panacea for my hereditary state of anxiety. I grab my heaviest book  and that coffee and a steaming bowl of grits and head to the sunroom. I read, and I listen, and I battle other urges, like the urge to waste time on people.com and Gawker, and I try to be still instead. And sidle up close to that thin veil between earth and eternity, between my perception and what’s Real.

I’ve always wanted time off, and in some ways my move to New York was a form of escape that answered the stirrings within my heart for more than school and my backyard. I never backpacked in Europe or herded cattle out West, and while I know that makes me like just about every other non-independently wealthy person on earth, I did feel the years of school and studying pile upon my shoulders, and my entry into the Real World of working began two short weeks after I received my final educational certificate. I spent so many years educating myself that I never had the luxury of Finding Myself, and twenty-eight years devoid of self-awareness and any sense of irony testify to that. Then New York happened, and TH happened, and old jobs were replaced with new ones, and I landed in a new life in a new city with the old drill in my hand.

Now, the drill and the open-mouthed kids are on an unplanned hiatus, and as my fingers find keys instead of cavities, I am learning to see (once again) the gift of the unplanned. The upside of unemployment. The way prayers are answered with a sense of humor on the side–I thought you always wanted a break?–and how silly it looks to search frantically for ways to replace what may have been removed purposely, by grace. And, at the end of all that, to still admit that the bottom line is always this: my best guess of what Now is supposed to look like is more similar to a child’s stick-figure, crayon-rendered self-portrait than anything da Vinci ever achieved.

And that leaves me with prayer.

TH and I taped and scrubbed walls yesterday, and then he spent the afternoon turning lavender walls blue, and when I ventured upstairs in brief visits with my shirt over my nose, I was amazed at the transformation he was rendering with his roller. Amazed and humbled. And this morning, after the coffee was drained and the reading was done, I felt the urge to return to that room now called Nursery and do something my old schedule wouldn’t have permitted: sit on the floor and be still, and cover The Kid’s room with prayers. From my perch on the floor, at the height of a child, I looked around at the plastic and paint cans and brushes, at the work space that will be a living space; I marveled at the promises that fill it, promises already kept and new promises that wait to be made. Endings that become beginnings and paths that open up to new roads. The most honest and elaborate prayer I can offer is, as always, thank you. For unplanned holes in time that can suddenly seem so full; for Woeful Uncertainty renamed Beautiful Mystery; for partially-finished, debris-strewn rooms becoming temples.

It hit me while I was lying in bed this week, trying to go to sleep. (That’s the time, after all, when my emotions usually become fodder for target practice.) My relief at leaving a negative job situation was giving way to a much more familiar and persistent feeling.

Guilt.

Being one of two sisters, splitting things in half has been my way of life. My parents have been dealt hands of inequity over the years from people who should have known (and done) better, so they have always emphasized equal parts and treatment to the two of us, and it has been with that perspective that I have approached the world: do your part and get your share. And that’s what hit me this week in bed: with house payments and car payments and (my substantial) loan repayments showing up monthly, and me jobless for the foreseeable future, I am not doing my part. Which means The Husband is, on a purely mathematical level, doing more than his. And I have a problem with this that translates into guilt.

This is a marriage, and I’m not punching a clock. So what’s really going on here?

Having operated out of need most of my life, whether it was as a child needing protection or as a should-already-be-an adult dealing in emotional insecurity and needing affirmation, I reached a point of virtual self-sufficience once I finished school and moved across the country. I had to. And though the finances were dicey and sparse the entire five years I set up camp in Manhattan, I managed to get my ducks in a row and wave my flag of independence. As my budget took on order, my emotional life (after a few years of rampant upheaval) went through some cleanup too, and I began to cut back on the childish choices and eventually reached a tenuous peace with what I couldn’t control: no more scratching and clawing my way around a ladder that only led down. I found the guy, got the job, started the joint new life: vows, agreements, plans, budgets.

Promises are one thing. Plans are another. Promises we make to each other and are responsible for their outcome. Plans? We think we carve those painstakingly into stone when we’re actually writing in a child’s hand with crayon on flyaway paper. The world doesn’t owe us our plan. The world doesn’t deal in equity.

Life has a way of exposing our need just when we’ve gone to all the trouble of removing it. And if I can’t stand neediness when it comes from other people, there’s one thing I hate even more: my own neediness bare to the world. Even to TH, who is so much better than I at building upon a foundation of love than equity, of grace rather than fairness. Reminds me of Someone else.

I learned early that the world didn’t play fair, but I took refuge in my idea that God did. It turned out that he is less concerned with my idea of Fair and Just and Equitable, not least because I have a stunted view of what these things actually look like, but also because grace goes beyond what fair ever could. Grace shows mercy, and sometimes mercy can look like broken bones and slammed doors if they keep me from a path of destruction. Or pure selfishness.

Sometimes people lose their security even though it’s not fair. Sometimes that’s the only way those people can learn what it means to be loved beyond what’s fair.

Due to RC’s powerful work connections with the taco-laden and financially astute, along with college friendships that survived binge-drinking and bad fashion, The Husband and I were invited to attend the Paul Simon concert on Saturday night with two of our favorite couples. We all met at Canoe, a fancy restaurant on the Chattahoochee River, for dinner beforehand, then headed in bumper-to-bumper traffic to Chastain Park Ampitheater. Our prime seats, located on ground-level in row 7 of the table-filled area near the stage, placed us in the middle of hundreds of fans whose diversity was represented more by age range than ethnicity. We pulled out our snacks–coolers of beer, bag of jelly bellies, zip-loc of beef jerky–and turned our chairs toward Paul as he strummed and sang. Surrounded as we were by tables of wine and gourmet platters, JB tried to class up the joint with a wedge of brie, only to see it mauled with beer cans once the sun went down.

We’ve known each other way too long to start acting classy now.

With Paul belting out favorites like “The Only Living Boy in New York,” “Sound of Silence,” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” and strawberry cheesecake flavor sticking to my teeth, I practiced my gratitude (easy to do with free concert tickets and good music, but still): a table full of friends who haven’t given up on me for fifteen years, a husband who drops seamlessly into those age-old relationships and embraces them alongside me. It almost made up for Paul’s omission of “Graceland,” “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” and “You Can Call Me Al.” (Hope began to run out when, at 9:45 pm, Paul announced that it was getting late.)

And tonight, following that weekend reminder of time-tested friendship and astronomical comfort levels, TH and I will board a plane and reverse-route the trip we took this time last year as we headed south to our new life. We will be revisiting what is now the old one, landing at LaGuardia (ostensibly for my work meeting, but let’s be honest–there will be more play than work, more cupcakes than conferences). We will visit burger joints and rooftop bars, Alta and Rare and Stanton Social and the Standard Grill. We will be greeted by faces we’ve missed, hear voices that helped narrate a most important part of our story. We’ll cover by foot and nausea-inducing cabs the terrain that made up multiple years. We will eat and drink and spend way too much money. We’ll be reminded of how blessed we are to have multiple places deserving of the name home.

And I, with each pavement-pounding step, will have a moment to express profound gratitude for a plan beyond what I ever imagined.

Last Sunday, May 15th, marked the one-year anniversary of the day The Husband (then fiance) and I watched the skyline of Manhattan slip away from the window of our plane as we flew south to Atlanta. A lot has happened in a year.

I’ve become a wife, an aunt, an independent contractor (ooh! fancy! or just another word for being paid less?), an Anglophile and whatever the opposite of a Francophile is (two weeks in England and France justify this), and a homeowner. Oh, and a blogger endorsed by one of my favorite authors (HAVE I MENTIONED THAT LATELY?), whom The Husband and I had the pleasure of re-meeting, a year after our initial encounter (when I told her he was my Ethan and she signed my wedding shoes and HAVE I MENTIONED THAT LATELY?). I dragged him to a screening of Something Borrowed (my third, his first) and wouldn’t you know, despite all his good-natured complaining, that his laughter was the loudest? Love that guy. And love that he stuck around with me afterward and posed for a rather girly picture. (And love, since we’re on a roll, that EG now feels like an old friend. Rather than a stalking victim. Score.)

One of the songs played at our wedding in August was the hymn “Come Thou Fount,” which we chose after we heard Sufjan Stevens’ version on the Friday Night Lights soundtrack. A month before the big day, we walked into the Alpharetta Community Center and a worship service that was being kicked off with our song, and we looked at each other and knew we were right where we were supposed to be, church-wise. And life-wise. And I have to admit that on that day, as on the day we said our vows, I let the words here I raise my Ebenezer roll on by without knowing their meaning. Until yesterday, when an article from Relevant popped up in my Facebook newsfeed and left me enlightened. And inspired.

I think about all the changes that define this past year–those mentioned above, along with the day-to-day transformation from a New York existence to a suburban one: deciding whether to hire yard help and have children, planning our Target list according to the week’s non-delivery menu, adjusting to vehicular rather than human traffic. And I find myself, in an echo of the Israelites two thousand years ago, humbled by the countless deliverances that have occurred to get me here. Deliverances from wrong relationships, moments of weakness, bad choices. My constant betrayals of grace that were met not with similar faithlessness but with unwavering devotion. And I want to mark these triumphs of love over imperfection that occur in spite of me more often than with my cooperation. I want to honor these “streams of mercy never ceasing.”

And so I thank.

And I write.

And I try to remember to live this life I’ve been given rather than let it roll on past me without uncovering its ubiquitous enlightenment and inspiration.

And in the thanking and writing and living, I feel my soul begin to cooperate with what it was made for, with who designed it. And so the stones are raised.

This time last year, I was rushing from my apartment in Murray Hill to a boutique in Soho, silently urging my cabbie to step on it as the back of my knees drenched his vinyl seats with sweat. I was headed to a book signing to meet one of my favorite storytellers, Emily Giffin, and The Husband (then fiance) was meeting me there so we could head straight to a benefit afterward, then to the wine bar with friends. (Just typing that sentence from our new home in the suburbs, where a wild night means TWO episodes of Tosh.0 and a vodka tonic, makes me tired. Big tree fall hard.) P.S.–note my red face and chest in the above picture. I was ridiculously nervous (as opposed to my baseline nervous, which is not to be shrugged at), but EG could not have been more gracious in the face of my borderline stalking. She signed my copy of Something Blue along with the “something blue” for my wedding–my shoes–while TH sat patiently nearby, taking pictures and not rolling his eyes.

So it’s rather fitting that this past weekend, exactly a year later, I took my seat in the theater for the movie adaptation of one of Giffin’s books, Something Borrowed. Twice. The Sis and I were booked to see it Sunday afternoon, but with a work-free Friday, I just couldn’t wait. I previewed the movie solo, then confessed this transgression on our way into the theater Sunday. The Sis gasped at my betrayal, then recovered and asked if it was good. And for the next two hours, we passed popcorn and M&Ms back and forth as we watched one of our favorite stories play out on the screen (with minor alterations), gleefully roaring at and repeating to each other the same parts as only our matching personalities can: lines everyone else missed, like “I did” and “That doesn’t sound right.”

In the aftermath of viewing that tale of a happy ending that only came after heartache, The Sis and I went to dinner last night with one of our longtime besties. She had a sparkler on her finger and a wedding in her future, and this cause for celebration was sweetly gratifying for me since we had navigated the treacherous terrains of college and the Manhattan dating scene together. For two years, we shared a shoebox fourth-floor walkup and hungover Saturdays, crazy nights out and greasy diner deliveries, laughter and broken hearts. We had coexisted among the high highs and low lows that only New York can bestow upon and hurl at a Type A, late-twenties girl who is having fun but sure wouldn’t mind losing the losers and finding The One any time now, thank you.

As I watched the movie, and listened to my friend tell her engagement story, I was faced once again with the reality of hard-won happy endings. Of complications along the way, what I used to see as pitfalls and obstacles that stood in between me and happiness–and how I secretly believed that they were red flags warning me that the joyful resolution paired with a catchy song didn’t exist. Not for me. Like Rachel, I had “no real faith in my own happiness.”

And to think, now, that without all of those trenches, I never would have gotten here. And never would have had the heart to truly love, to know The Real Thing when it found me. To feel the profound gratitude I do now, every day. I used to want to be one of those people who skated through life without difficulty or conflict, a person for whom everything came easy. There were plenty of them around me, and they seemed so carefree! My own parents, perhaps like yours, met in college and married at twenty-two, and I thought I would inherit their story like I did their DNA.  Then years went by and my singleness remained–and I realized that my bitterness quotient was about to explode if I didn’t tend to the life I was actually living rather than the one I had planned. As I set about doing just that, I began to see that none of us ever make it through this world without scars, even high school sweethearts. But now I know that there are no good stories without the messy parts. Tales without complications are rarely retold. Pain is one of grace’s greatest disguises, and how thankful I am for the transformation that always comes along with it. (And for the fact that I didn’t marry the guy I was dating at twenty-two or become a mother shortly thereafter…yikes. And amen.)

The Husband and I were looking at prints (or as he would call them, paintings–he calls all wall-hung artwork paintings; I love that guy) online the other day, trying to find a photograph of the New York City skyline for our family room. He asked me to choose between two, both of lower Manhattan: one with the World Trade towers present, and one with the double-light memorial instead. “The lights,” I told him, and he agreed. “That’s our New York.”

I never visited the city before 9/11/01, but I was there six months after to stare at the gaping holes that hatred had left in the ground. I will never know the searing grief felt by family members of the lost, but I have shed my own tears over the destruction. We are, none of us, an island.

When I saw the photographs taken in my home state yesterday–in particular a man holding his injured toddler son in his arms and sobbing–I felt the (in this world, all too familiar) shadow of sadness, of Why?, upon my heart. And there are too few answers for our taste at a time like this, when people are literally picking up the pieces of their lives. And these are the lucky ones. But then I looked at the background of the shots: of rescue workers, neighbors pitching in. Of the same toddler being carried by a different man, likely the father’s friend or relative, because, again: none of us is an island. And sometimes community is brought about in the most tragic of ways, but its beauty cannot be denied. Whenever love and goodwill are exposed, whenever they rise to the surface and push hate out, there is cause for thanksgiving.

My New York skyline was absent two towers, and for those who had been there during and before that great tragedy, they must have looked like gaping holes. But once every year, those holes are filled with light. I don’t know the answer to Why?, and I may not even understand the answer if it were given. Yet. But what I do know–and this I can say from experience–is that there is never rubble without redemption.