He's sitting at my feet watching a western on our day off. From the couch I can spot two bottles of water - an empty one that's crunched up to save space in the bin and one still three quarters full, because to get up and so often use the restroom has become a real interruption for me these days, a time-sucker. A couple mugs of tea with turmeric and ginger, and just a sip of iced coffee left to help with the headaches. Something's in the air because growing up, my dad always celebrated his September birthday with swollen, itchy eyes and this same time of year has started doing me that way exactly with the ragweed. We're back and forth between busted lips at night and a scratchy throat by morning, trying to stay ahead of the achy limbs and a week in bed.

Our dog shares in a similar suffering apparently. We spent the afternoon coddling him on the kitchen floor, squirting water into his clenched up teeth and just holding him while he coughed and heaved and swallowed back up the dry mucus. Before I knew it I was at the bottom of an internet rabbit hole, searching for existing links between sleep apnea and Texas allergies, specifically but not limited to Jack Russell Terriers. I'll probably end up cancelling the vet appointment that I scheduled earlier, but overarchingly and to catch me candid, it seems as though the irrationalities (which bleed into more of my areas than I'd like to admit) have a mountain of work to do before the thought of human children, and the responsibility of one, is a livable option. It's a hefty and permanent sort of thing with no real way out if I wanted one.

. . . 

Ryan and I flew to San Diego two weeks ago to ring in our first anniversary. It was the next vacation in line after our honeymoon, so a whole year of meetings and dishes and work and normal things had gone by before we had the guts to go again off the grid as newlyweds. We had toyed around with New York or someplace up north because the prices of a plane ticket matched, but we finally settled on a city and its coast that would let us sleep in and not feel worried or hurried while doing so.

The state of California continues to surprise me, and I should know better by now. I've seen Los Angeles and Santa Monica, but this was altogether different save its place by the water. I suppose it's as jarring of an experience as when out-of-towners judge Texas based on their subsequent times in Austin, Amarillo, and Galveston. San Diego is about the same as Dallas in terms of density, but the traffic to anywhere is nothing. Our longest time on the highway was a twenty-two minute stretch during rush hour, and we traveled in our rental everywhere from North Park to Roseville, to Coronado, Ocean Beach, and the cliffs at La Jolla. We stayed tucked away in a yellow guest house in Del Cerro, which I was glad about because the noise was low and it felt like we truly "came home" after a full day of exploring.

There wasn't a corner excused from a homeless man and his immediate belongings. One of them laid in the sixty-five degree shade, awoke from a nap to lick the underside of his tennis shoe, and started down the street with two, to-go bags of wine: one red, one white. Ryan noticed on the third day that the displaced population here clashed with our standing idea of the one back home. In all of our walking and wandering, not once were we approached about spare change or a ticket for the bus. I saw one cardboard sign held up in front of the donut shop on Sunday, but it suggested something about smiling to make someone's day and nothing regarding his current situation on the sidewalk. Maybe there's a more nagging sense of urgency where we're from to get them back on their feet or maybe we carry a louder, more bickering perception. Maybe it's just the weather. In any case, they seemed happy to be living - figuratively - perhaps not literally.

People in San Diego are cordial but not friendly by its latest definition. They aren't overtly harsh or disagreeable like some would be up in Boston but some form of tunnel vision keeps them in their separate lanes pretty good. We weren't granted automatic and obvious permission to pet their dogs on a leash, and we thought what's the point of having a dog then, so that was at least an adjustment for us. We didn't mess around with the zoo or traps like it this time, so we mostly depended on recommendations from local livers, who turned out actually to be quite helpful. We would start out early at coffee and then be sent over here for the rooftop at sunset and then we'd be confidently sent in the other direction for the best focaccia bread we'll ever eat.

It was almost our last day, and we were sharing for lunch an otherworldly, wood-fired pizza with cauliflower and green olives - chef's special with ingredients picked up that week. Our waiter, Matt, seemed like he could have Asperger's. High enough functioning to twirl dough up in the air and probably manage the store himself but hard with eye contact and two-sided conversation. He sat with us for too long and told us about a street taco place that's inefficient but the best in the business for forty plus years. He told us which line to stand in once we made it there and to only bother with the corn tortillas. He said that they don't sell chips but that all the hipster f*cks keep them busy and running without it.

We went at night and parked in what looked like a gas station lot with a hispanic man there to confirm we found a proper spot. Marijuana filled up our car before we opened the doors to get out. We peeked inside, and it was just as he had warned us. Three lines that all eventually converged towards the door, mostly teenagers and hardly any english. The first four items on the menu said: BEEF HEAD, PORK STOMACH, BEEF TONGUE, AND BEEF GUTS. In all fairness, the orders being delivered looked excellent and fresh and authentic as a taco can be, but we squeezed each other's hands at the same time which mutually signaled that our brief encounter had been good enough for us. As we mapped out Plan B on our phones, it came to our attention that (of course!) we had been only about a six minute drive from crossing over the Tijuana border. Authentic was right.

. . .

He and I did all of the regular things that we would have done on a week off at home, only there's something unspeakably restful about sharing in the discovery of a place for the first time. There's little to explain or articulate or even misunderstand because you've felt it together and without context and at the same times. Marriage has been a bit like this. Counselors and textbooks and those that are for and against the construct of marriage all know that the first year is the hardest, generally speaking. I had gathered armor for the worst but left it hanging for the best, and turns out that neither has been true. Hardness exists inside or outside of marriage, but the first year surely wasn't the trigger that brought it about, and although good and pleasant and right, I'm not under the impression that this year will have been our easiest one either. 

When I hear people tell others what they ought to expect when a certain time comes, it seems hasty, verging on reckless. Like holding a cone to a kid's mouth on their first ever bite of ice cream. You could offer that it might feel cold against their teeth or - depending on the characteristics of the ingredients - they might experience a texture that crunches. But it's irresponsible to posit that this bite will be the best or the worst compared to the bites that follow. 

The day before our anniversary, we had a big fight. It lasted half the day and lingered, and we've hardly fought like that since dating. Patterns of hurt had conveniently resurfaced, there was no place to go except for opposite sides of the room, and I felt taunted the minute our fairly easy marriage reached the year mark and decided to make us fools who were told this might happen. Tomorrow, we would celebrate three hundred and sixty-five days living in human, covenant relationship, and I couldn't even meet my husband in the eyes without mourning a year of firsts and preparing for a lifetime of whatever this was.

Something that I heard The Lord convicting me of in a moment of head down, arms crossed, wishing I was somewhere far, far away: Maybe so much of your time is spent glorifying firsts that the promise of eternity seems disappointing. And goodness, how true for me that is, I've come to know. 

My compulsion to lay things out "exactly as they should be" means that many of my firsts are manufactured and felt as I want to feel them. There's a twinge of grief that comes as a first is seen all the way through, knowing that seconds and thirds and fourths might come but that there will never be another like this one. And then the first year goes and forever suddenly feels underwhelming and like a long time to wait. And what is sacred and guaranteed and entirely a manifestation of imago Dei instead feels like a hefty and permanent sort of thing with no real way out if I wanted one. 

I wonder if He saw something that didn't really belong to him and He let it die that day. Just twenty-four hours shy of seeing our first year through and startled as He completely unraveled my doing and let us try again. Because his kingdom wasn't built on firsts and to grant them such authority is to rob his people of a coming redemption. And unlike any place or person or idea I've known, there's something unspeakably restful about sharing in the discovery of Christ again and again and again - no first or final times - just one degree of glory to the next until His likeness becomes our own.

This week’s been a bit tough. You know the kind – a proverbial freight train. You clean up street trash from the barreling boxcar with a six-ton elephant on your back and you’ll wonder if anyone on God’s green earth might come to you and say, “enough.” An appropriately timed Advent has me longing for these inside out bruises to be gone for good. Of course, none of which compare to those that plague my single friend at Christmastime or a dear relative that’s been locked away as her mind and her memory betray her, and especially not to the wife whose womb won’t stay full.

I’m immediately convicted as I finish that sentence and am reminded of a million ones like it as of late – ranking in order the greatest and the worst sufferers so that I might have some excuse to keep quiet about my own regular, layman’s grief. Prop it up to matter against the rest or let it go and die. Those are your choices. We all know of the blatant jealousy in comparing our good with someone else’s better. The bitter fruit of discontent. But I’m realizing this season that the seemingly humble (and often unconscious) undermining of our pain in the scope of a neighboring humanity’s is as nasty a disease as any. Taking the enemy in small and large doses, judging his best, most harmful work. You and I will pray for the souls who have it harder and resign to our place in the shadows of less and little suffering. That’s a sneaky version of pride, and we should call it when we see it.

For years I did this, and I do it still now when a stranger offers up their story and asks in exchange for mine. Bumbling around for key phrases that act as a match for brokenness, as if to relate or be helpful, I’d have to be a leper. Perhaps I’ve grown tired of contorting my testimony so that only badness shows through or maybe I’m learning about the gospel as just listening and sitting shiva with a brother. But in any case, my healing looks different than the leper’s, and is healing any less powerful for the normal, old sinner? The pastor’s daughter and product of a saved marriage. A year-old wife who makes coffee to pay the bills. And an anxious one who – without the work of the spirit – is prescribed an entire life of violent mood swings which, on a good day, calm to apathy.

At the beginning of the year, the Lord began unwinding in front of me this concept of faithfulness. You should know that I’m historically leery of these loaded words – the type filed next to Authenticity and the Evangelical Christian. I’ve been let down by them before and I’m not under the impression that I won’t be another time. These words are sweeping and are of the nature to be twined and twisted, overused or misused. Once whole and full, now soiled and stripped bare. Taken out of context and beaten to a pulp. As a lover of words and keeper of them, I feel the heavy weight – a dwindling glow – that comes from a falsified meaning, one intended to be good. Faithfulness. Be more specific.

So, he said, go to the corners where you’ve been faithful and find me there.

It wasn’t until a slew of disappointments had incurred an unpayable debt that I would know clearly what that had meant and would see what then remained. And it happens that way, doesn’t it? Wounded by one and knocked down by another and kicked by the next and at last left alone to survey, does anything still stand above this wreck?

I was sweeping my tiny kitchen in the moments before supper, my dog at my feet and a thousand small graces leaping toward me at once. I had arrived from work just hours before. Four and some years I’ve come home from this place. My eyes met my husband doing chores in the room over, a man that I’ve loved for five. My phone lit up with a message from my best friend, and I wondered how long a stretch of those would measure. Miles of messages, twelve year’s worth. Tomorrow, Ryan and I would attend the same service at our same church. The one that held me and grew me and taught me to serve and welcomed me back, and on the eighteenth year is holding me still.

Here’s what I’m learning through a gracious unwinding:

As we are faithful, he is doubly so. He caught me in the middle of preparing a meal in my home that was to be enjoyed by a two-person family - a task so menial and regularly small - and laid before me a feast having to do with forty years of his faithfulness. I’m headed into my twenty-fourth year here, and in the corners where I’ve been faithful, he’s gone and doubled them. It’s kingdom math that I don’t understand nor do I feel right in accepting, but we’ve never had much choice in the matter. He gives to his children freely and lavishly and without reason.

Faithfulness is only faithfulness. A cynic searches the word and will not find in it some ulterior motive or unhappy connotation. It will always be properly construed. Faithfulness, in its simplest form, is the same and is the same. Steadfast. Pillars left standing above the wreck. Not overused or misused or taken out of context by the world. We either are or we aren’t, but you and I cannot be faithful too many or too little times. What good news for a post-Eden people failing to hit their quotas.

Being faithful does not allot us the time, thank goodness, to go around justifying a good or a bad week, scrutinizing the weeks and the lives handed to those near us. But it does generously give us each our mornings, our families, our health and our homes. Our small grievances, our losses, and our suffering should it come. Tending to these is our holiest work.

Richard Wilbur, in his poem, Love Call Us to the Things of This World, says this – “Let there be nothing on earth but laundry, nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam and clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

This has been my prayer ever since. The sanctity of Christ maturing me, making His likeness my own is no small thing; yet, we find him in the corner, in the collection of small things taking us there. Meetings and due dates, clean dishes and pruned fingers, ordinary and every single day. I said this last month, that it’s the driving of my feet to the ground and my hand to the plow that reminds me about the humble man who lived to sow seeds for no easy reason other than following in the way of his master. Clear dances done in the sight of heaven. Let there be nothing else on earth but this.