Our dog's name is Rascal, and he's hardly a dog at all. He's three years old, sleeps twenty-one hours of every day, has trouble eating anything bigger than the size of a dime, and breathes and grunts and snorts like he has asthma. I call him a cat because he's quiet and content and walks on the upper edge of our couch like he can just do that. He's a wire-haired Jack Russell Terrier - he has old man eyebrows, really friendly eyes, a stringy, matted beard after lapping up from the water bowl, and a mohawk when his coarse fur needs to be shaken out. He wags his tail and his entire backside moves side to side, and it's the most important greeting when I walk through the door. He doesn't play fetch and he'd rather skydive than be near the bathtub. His face looks mostly sweet and embarrassed, something I don't have in me to say no to. A few people have mentioned his talent in being 'so ugly that he's cute', but that's rubbish. He's just plain cute.

We found out recently that his favorite (and only) game around the apartment is hide-and-seek. I'll wait with him in the bedroom while Ryan blends in with some piece of furniture and as soon as I yell GET HIM he's already leapt across the length of the living room, scanning up and down and underneath spaces Ryan would never fit. He looks over at me, like, You wanna give me a hint or what? I stay still because in just a moment he'll hear the same, sneaky hiss or a pat on the carpet and he'll find himself in a frenzy as he meets Ryan at eye level nestled in his nook. His entire body wriggles with pride, he's completely out of breath like a pig, and I swear it's just as fun for us as it is for him.

Rascal was Ryan's dog before we were married or even engaged. He lived and ran free in my parents' backyard for a while, and when we finally got settled in our apartment, we had to make sure he was registered with the city and had his shots updated and pay a chunk of cash before we could take him in. For a few months, it was just my husband and me, leaving together and coming home together. I'd have newly-married friends tell me about their wrestlings with loneliness and this awareness of a big, scary void when left tending to their own thoughts in a quiet and empty house. In those months, I rarely shared in this struggle because - for the most part - his schedule would mirror mine and any time to myself would give me room to write, and I think the Lord just left me to struggle with other things.

And then he gave me this dog.

About a month ago, we had dropped him off at Mom and Dad's place to be with the other dogs for the day and then realized as we pulled into the complex that we had forgotten to pick him up on the way back. It was late, and we knew that he was fine there until tomorrow night when we'd be over there again. The morning rolled around, Ryan had left for work and I was left at the house with no one to take care of. I poured some coffee and the refrigerator was louder than normal. I noticed his near-empty bowl and remembered it didn't need to be filled today. I distracted myself with TV and the space on our couch grew smaller until it was only me. This sounds funny and dramatic. For Christ's sake, he hadn't died, it had been several hours, and - no offense - he's an animal. But it was the first day that I had become discernibly conscious of this pattern of fear in my life. The presence of this dog had taken me from fiercely independent with my time to alarmingly lonely without him there. How could a gift of something good create this gulf that hadn't existed before? One that alludes to abandonment and the part where the Lord decides to take things.

It might have something to do with watching my parents go through the loss of a child. Experiencing two years of God giving and then the rest of the years watching them grieve the act of Him taking. What's the point in giving at all.

. . .

Ryan and I had just gotten married and we were going to the theater to see a movie that we had been waiting to see. John Krasinski and Anna Kendrick and Margo Martindale - it's almost hard to mess that up. The film is called The Hollars and it's about some siblings returning home after hearing the news about their mother falling ill. She's about to undergo a brain operation that will hopefully fix her but no promises, as usual. It's a hilarious family drama but poignant in all the right parts.

*Spoiler* - She makes it through her surgery but not much longer after that, and we watch the reaction of her best friend who was also her husband and her two grown boys. Before she passed, she had written a letter to her husband that would be delivered to him should that day ever come - she knew he'd blame himself and sleep in an empty bed and make his own breakfast and mourn until there wasn't reason for him to stay here either. In the note, she tells him to just shut up and to throw her an awesome funeral and to keep thinking about her so that she doesn't have to be gone. She reminds him of some of the hard days and tells stories of their years together and assures him that he had given her a great life.

My eyes fluttered tears to the side and the band around my finger came into focus and the guy holding my hand looked over at me because he knew I wasn't doing well. I felt heavy with sweat and the movie was almost over but the crying definitely wasn't. My stomach hurt - not because of the scene or the score - but because last month I didn't have a husband to lose and now I did and I don't think I signed up for the right thing. I let my head hit his shoulder and the room was spinning and I told him how scared I felt. Mr. Moment-Maker squeezed my fingers together and made me find his eyes and he said, Hey, I'm gonna give you a really good life and that's all we can do. 

My family always said that the reason we lose hard is because we love really hard, and I guess that's true. I've spent years shying away from getting close or trusting too much or saying everything as I exactly mean it because investing all the way has the capacity now to let you down all the way, and that's one of my most valid but worldly nightmares. I get so caught up in what's mine and what might not be mine one day, and I often forget that the one who has dominion over it all wants abundance for our every minute and that it's silly to waste our vapor on worry.

"[He] makes everything come out right...He knows us inside and out, keeps in mind that we're made of mud. Men and women don't live very long; like wildflowers they spring up and blossom, but a storm snuffs them out just as quickly, leaving nothing to show they were here. God's love, though, is ever and always, eternally present to all who fear him." Psalms 103:6 (MSG)

Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I will return there. God (rich in mercy) claims Earth and everything on it. A sweet, humbling, drop-to-my-knees comparison between what us and Him have to show for ourselves.

Maybe He gives, not so that we'd experience pain in the absence but that we might relish in the goodness of its being here. Maybe He takes, not so that we'd resent his power but that we might recognize our mud and his sovereignty and spend our time giving each other great lives. Let's do more of that and let Christ make everything come out right.

It's late into the night, I've had a couple of beers, a brownie, and I'm feeling just a tad emotional - but let that not invalidate my pressing to talk about something, or rather to gather a few, whirling thoughts and let them spill out into a more coherent and helpful narrative. I want to talk about La La Land and a certain scene that touched some intrinsic parts of me which I deem necessary to share. Before you assume, you should know that this isn't a review of the film nor is it a plot-heavy regurgitation of every critic that's ever seen it and typed out their two cents. It's not me convincing you to go or not to go (although you should definitely go). But, I'll say that to get to my point, there may be a few spoilers and everyone resents a spoiler, so do what you need to do to save our relationship.

First of all, this movie was - no doubt - a piece of art, as is anything else created, shared, and up for interpretation, but more than that, it was a risk and it freaking stuck the landing. We could talk about the cast or follow the lines of symbolism or praise the Chazelle/Hurwitz duo or argue the ending or applaud the original score. The internet is swarming with those things if you need it, but when I asked the Lord to make me mindful this year, it's like he's constantly subverting what I've given myself to on earth and he's saying, 'How can we make this about me'. And now I'm learning about the character of Jesus through the science of brewing coffee and I'm being sanctified through musicals and everything seems weird but also exactly as it should have been all along.

For quick context, Mia is a barista and an only-aspiring actress living in Los Angeles. She attends parties and auditions and is waiting for her big break but still breaking under the weightiness of competition and rejection and just waiting. Sebastian is a musician with a passion for jazz, the nuance of its history and culture. He's sort of a messy dead-beat who desperately wants to reignite a respect and a reverence for this lost-on-everyone art form within the city. They have separate dreams of taking the stage and owning a club but in the meantime they'll be scolded at work and sleep under unpaid bills and eventually fall in love, and it's this beautiful, ethereal tension that keeps us until the end.

The two experience a crucial transition, something that I've done the splits over as a writer, and if you're a dreamer at all, you have or will. It's the stuck between going for it (I mean, really going for it) and being realistic (in this order: realizing that sleeping, eating and making money are still important, exercising the mundane muscles of existing, letting someone else go for it, and finally - keeping a safe and steady job that allows you to think silly of your young and trampled dream). Seb finds stardom in a pseudo-jazz band but loses his heart behind why he started, and Mia decides to write a one-woman play. She buys out the theater and performs So Long, Boulder City - a view of the world from her bedroom and a nod to her childhood home in Nevada.

To sum it up, no one comes. Okay, maybe eight people come. Sebastian gets caught at a work gig he had forgotten about. The show ends with a golf clap. Mia overhears dismissive comments about not quitting her day job, and it confirms everything she'd ever gone out on a limb for and felt scared in doing so. And this scene...this is the scene that keeps drawing me back, and I held my breath as I watched a second time, and I still think about it a lot because how many times has this been you and me.

She immediately packs her things and heads to the car, where she'll sop up clumpy tears that are some sad but mostly mad because she had known better. Seb stops her and asks where she's going and she says home and he says, "This is home." "Not anymore," she says. And the irony, as the signs for an empty So Long, Boulder City become ants in her rearview and she drives straight to the place that had fueled her but was no longer meant for dreaming.

. . .

I wasn't much of a recess girl. I liked doing my work in the classroom, and just as I'm a homebody today, I wondered why anyone would need to venture outside the safe walls of learning. One time, in lower grade school, we had been sent out to play or do whatever you do with thirty other cooped-up children in a field. I didn't like just standing by myself but I also cringed at the thought of fitting in to pass the time. In some God-forsaken moment of courage, I made my way over to the monkey bars, which - no - of course, I had never done before. I get about three swings in and I'm sweaty as all get-out and the next time I blink, I'm on my back in the dirt making a sound that an animal makes. Later, I'd come to find out that I'd had the wind knocked out of me and I was unable to speak for a few seconds that had felt like a day. It wasn't until I was able to simultaneously touch my hands to the bars and my feet sturdy on the ground that I gave the monkey bars a second, un-failable shot, and going for it and falling and getting your breath gutted from your insides and making your way back to a safe place seems like how Mia must have felt.

We curdle and we go to the house in front of the library and Mom cooks for us and we lay our belongings in the same room that we became a dreaming woman and our bedspread's the same and our soccer trophies on the shelf look dustier than we remember. It feels like settling but at least the arrows have stopped coming after you. And while you lick your wounds and the world practices its told-you-so voice, there's someone waiting outside and he's the last one we want to see. How'd you find me here. But he's listened and he's known and he says that he's not leaving until we start making some goddamn sense.

We tell him thanks a lot for breathing this dead dream into me and that maybe I'm not good enough. Yes, you are. Maybe I'm not. You are. Maybe I'm not, and maybe it just hurts a little too much. Maybe I'm done being embarrassed and talked over and laughed at and it's about time I start exchanging creativity for success - so that I can be worth something someday. He tells us about an opportunity to come again with him in the morning and his persistence and excitement to watch us win reinvigorates us. But we're still tired. We go anyway. And we find an entire life of freedom in trying again. 

Here's to the dreamers and triers and doers. Bring on the rebels, the ripples from pebbles, the painters and poets and plays. May we hang our hats in Boulder City - thanking the library house for its service and safeness. May we hear a Voice louder than the echo of golf claps and know that in the hearing there is holiness. May we never confuse our work with the squandering of time, because it is good work, faithful work. His You are will fill up every gaping hole and let you start again.