We sat in the gym-turned-church yesterday, our band of three on the back bleachers doing our thing: bottle for the baby, burping, mopping spit-up, and all the while and in between, the praying and singing and the trying to be be present. One eye on him and one on God, or so it feels, though it hit me that when we’re watching what we’re meant to be watching, our eyes are on Him. We are worshiping when we are living the story He is telling.

I couldn’t believe it as I watched The Kid, how much he has changed in months and weeks and even days, how he sat on The Husband’s knee and looked all around, surveying the room before settling face-forward, where the people and the voices were, eyes wide and head erect, more alert than I have the energy to be. I pretended that he understood it all, that his bobbing head was actually a nodding one, even as I looked forward to the day when he will and it will be. When he will know where all his yeses and amens reside. There was a time when we couldn’t even get it together to show up on a Sunday morning (there are still those days), and there was a time when we got here and he slept through it all. And there was yesterday, when we placed him back in his stroller and he looked ahead, hands clasped across his own lap in unintentional reverence. I bowed my own head, felt my war-torn and bulging heart leap in my chest as the fullness of the moment hit me, the words sung and the love felt, and I remembered what it means to worship. In a gym. Atop bleachers. Underneath a basketball goal.

Or in an auditorium in New York City. Or on a walk with TK on a sunny Saturday, the air heavy with the fragrance of spring, and I’m talking to him nonsensically and he’s loving it, smiling even as he starts to drift off. I think to myself that if I were Oprah, I’d be multitasking right now, and I should be praying because the day is full and when will I have time to sit still and do that? And I realize that I already am, that the gazing upon this combination-TH-and-me face and telling him he is loved, that the smelling of the air and giving thanks, that simply smiling through the weariness, that this is prayer. Not a check on my to-do list, but an all-encompassing, constant acknowledgment that credit is due and not to me. And this acknowledgment lifts the weight of duty from my shoulders as I push the stroller forward into the day.

Later, B calls and we start off typically, quoting lines of 30 Rock to each other and analyzing recent trends in pop culture. Then the worship begins, again where I hadn’t planned it: expressions of appreciation for an unlikely friendship that strains the bounds of geography and other worldly limitations; a delving beyond witty repartee into deeper subjects, the Deepest in fact, and I am humbled by my one of my funniest, most well-dressed and connected of friends who deigns to hold me close enough to talk for the better past of an hour about everything from White Girl Problems to the cross. He at a luxury hotel and I with one eye on the monitor, both of us worshiping.

And yesterday afternoon, we decide to take a family field trip to the hammock, and the three of us lie in the sun and wind. TH is more optimistic than I, carrying an e-reader as I wonder whether to bring my phone in case of 911 calls, both of us personality-driven and perfectly balancing the weight lying between us, the eyes that still dart to and fro to take it all in. I think of all the hammocks in all the places that we have inhabited as two, the pictures of feet propped up in relaxation, and now there are three pairs, the third covered with sneaker socks as we lie not on a beach but in our own backyard. The moment lasts about twenty minutes–five times as long as I expected–but doesn’t it really last as long as I let it?

I took the bread and cup yesterday, took it personally for the first time in months, and as I heard my name, heard the blessing given for my family, the words rang in my ear: given on your behalf. And I realized that this moment at the table is enough for the week ahead or however long it is before I return here; this mid-morning supper is what sustains every second; this sacrament making all else sacred.

I drove to an interview yesterday, a thirty-minute distance scheduled when I was meant to be attached to a machine, percolating into bottles for The Kid’s later consumption. So I brought my gear with me, hooked myself up, and pumped on the highway as I drove. I doubted I was the first woman to have ever done it, and yet the semi-joking thought entered my mind: Is there ANYTHING I won’t do for my child?

And then I remembered Good Friday.

Throughout this turbulent week, this Holy Week, I have been focused on what it has taken to just get by, to survive the emotional onslaught of the letting go process. And all the while, the story of redemption waited for me to remember its greatest scene. To remember and be still, to remember and be alive, to remember and be changed.

Oswald Chambers says on that Friday, this is what happened: “He made redemption the basis of human life.” Redemption. Not effort, or success, or perfection. Redemption–which assures, by its very definition, that there will be mistakes and faults and failures. And that they won’t be the last act.

Letting go of a son. Is there anything he hasn’t done for me?

***PEEPS. I’m now sharing some space with my high school BFF, Kathryn, over at A Bold Grace. Check it out. I’m not saying it’ll get you to the front of the heaven line, but it won’t hurt either.

I walked into the office yesterday, my least favorite day of the week, and had to admit that things had not gotten off to a good start. Two hurried trips up and down the stairs at home to retrieve forgotten items, cursing under my breath, yelling frustration at myself. But it’s always what’s underneath the anger that undoes us, that leads us to break down or cover up, toward confession or hiding. I steeled myself against the rest of the day until I got the text from The Husband: don’t worry…His timing…out of your hands. And just like that, I was undone. In the best way. Reminded how known I am, how found. And by not just him. I released my grip.

Because the thing that is underneath the blustering anger is always fear. And the more I walk with Him, the more I am confronted with the ugly fears that I somehow never completely stopped believing, that still haunt me when my faith takes a nosedive and I forget His record, my story. The fear that I am irretrievably broken; that I will pay in punishment for my past indiscretions (and dear God, isn’t that a cleaned-up way to refer to that mess); that the bottom will shortly be falling out from under me. Life in all its imperfection has a way of revealing the holes in my faith, of pointing out all the places where I still don’t believe He’s good. Of making me think that I’ve figured something out in those moments, rather than the truth that my heart still makes hidden deals with the enemy.

Disappointment, hurt, brokenness–these will remain battlegrounds all my life.

And then I remember what I heard and read, that it’s not the strength of my faith but the strength of its object. The limb doesn’t assess my record when I grab onto it because it already assessed His–and it held. It will always hold, and that has absolutely nothing to do with how I feel at any given moment. My heart has been known to lie to me before. I will cast my eyes on something bigger, truer. More faithful.

I forced TH to go on a walk with me last night and he went, even though he thinks it’s kind of girly to walk (it is), because he loves me so well. And this loop around the neighborhood that I had designed in an effort to give us time to talk, to de-stress, to just be with each other–I began to make it anything but that. I pulled his hand, saying, “Let’s go faster! Get our heart rates up!” I set my eyes on the hill ahead and plotted our course. Then, the overwhelming smell of honeysuckle and flowers and cut grass–life growing. And TH’s slowed step, his look around at the green by which we were surrounded, his quiet beholding. And I remembered another course I had plotted, and it hadn’t included any of this. In all my planning, I hadn’t conceived this beauty. I stopped pulling, and I beheld.

By grace I am reminded of bridges I have crossed, of how they have held. I read, and know it is true because it is my story, that “trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks.” And what of the connection between thanks and trust, the holding of it all together? I know who supplied those nails.

I am being asked always to consider the possibility of paradox, the idea that things are not what they seem–that they are more. And I open my heart to the thought that what looks like disappointment to me could be Him keeping a promise. And this, this daily walk with Him, I have been trying to direct it my whole life, pulling Him in all directions. Slow down, hurry up. And now I stop pulling and I behold. The hand that covers mine is callused and rough where mine is soft. It is scarred where mine is whole.

I stop pulling, and I walk beside Him.

His darkness, my light. His wounds, my healing. His death, my life.

O all ye who pass by, behold and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me.

George Herbert, “The Sacrifice”