Community Post: Ready for Spring
Blog / Produced by The High Calling
EDITOR’S NOTE: This week at The High Calling, we’re focusing on transitions in the workplace, home, and community. Here on the Community page, several members of our diverse writing network offer their unique insights on the topic.
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See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. ~ Isaiah 43:8
I was sitting at a table, laptop open (poetry books, hot tea, notebook, and pen spread before me), when I saw it: a vibrant dot of light playing at my feet. Half a lobby away sat my son, laser pointer in hand, chuckling. Minutes later, he’d crossed the lobby, plunked himself into the chair opposite me, and propped up his feet. Obviously staying.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Uh huh,” I laughed, and tried again. “Tell me what’s going through your mind at this very second?”
“Nothing.”
Smirk.
“Absolutely nothing. If my thoughts were water, my whole mind would be a desert.”
I laughed. So did he. But he didn’t move. So I waited. Watching. And the words came. The fear.
“I have big trust issues with God,” he said.
“When did it break?” I asked. “The trust?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you got sick? Or before?”
Tears slipped down his cheeks and he rubbed them away. Silent. He didn’t have to answer. I knew. He’s been here for awhile in this necessary place. Wrestling with God, grieving what was, afraid of what is.
“I don’t think about the future,” he said some time later.
“Ever?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t see myself there.”
And then came the truth.
“I don’t think I’ll make it there.”
Oh…
It’s hard, this space between diagnoses and trying one more medication, test, procedure, surgery, hoping one more time that things will change, that he’ll get well, heal, feel good again.
My son’s situation is different from mine, but our journeys are similar. And somewhere along this rocky, twisting, unexpected rollercoaster ride comes a hill, a place of wrestling--with God, with self, with letting go of what was, and learning to embrace what is.
I’ve stood on that hill. I’ve been where he is. Looking back at what’s been lost, what’s changed, and looking ahead toward a future none of us can predict. And what did I do when I stood on that hill?
I resigned.
Crawled straight into the lap of loss and laid there in a heap.
A few months later, a friend asked me to describe, in words, my heart. My fingers tentatively touched the keys, reluctant to wrestle words from the gray, yet one-by-one they formed and fell to the page in a torrent of tears.
I had resigned. Given up. Lost hope. I was afraid to go on and unable to go back.
Words blurred as I surrendered, opening my hands and my heart, grieving what was, but finally ready to accept what is. Ready to breathe and stretch and rejoin the dance.
My son now stands on that hill between fear and faith, between resignation and acceptance, wrestling with God and with self.
And it’s OK. Because spring will arrive, watered in tears, with hope ready to push through the grief, through those last few, stubborn, dirt-encrusted banks of winter, and burst into new light.
He’s ready, this son of mine, to breathe, long and deep of spring.