I’m pretty sure Trever and I are on the verge of snapping. We are STILL not moved. Yes it’s a tragedy, but we decided that it makes more sense to bite the bullet and get our kitchen done before Colette arrives. You know dust and chaos and hammers aren’t always conducive to newborn life. Because of this we are waiting until the demo is done before we move which means we’re still a week out which means we will be living amongst boxes for another week. Another weeeeek. Also our loft complex is currently painting the outside of our place so there are large plastic sheets covering all of our windows adding a dungeon/meth-lab effect to boxes and half painted walls. It’s very pleasant. I told Trever I feel home sick, like I’m traveling but I’m not.
Yesterday I had to let a guy into our place to look at the fire sprinklers and he kind of creeped me out so I left the front door open. After he left I went upstairs and noticed our cat Grey was not in her usual place of sloth and I started looking for her. I slowly started panicking as I checked all the usual fluffly comfort spots she’s drawn to for hours of hibernation and she was nowhere to be found. The panic got worse and I thought, well this is it, this is what breaks us, our fat cat runs away and we snap.
I opened the front door and she was eating a plant outside. She can’t resist eating no matter what it is. She gags down these long pieces of grass and they cannot taste good, but she’s committed so at least there’s that. So we haven’t snapped. Our fat Grey cat is happy and sleeping and we’re marching along.
We currently have two chairs in our living room. They are kind of in the middle of the room next to the pile of boxes and they’re facing each other like a therapist’s office, if therapists met in meth labs. Trever and I sat down and looked at each other after a meal of frozen burritos and finally had a second to catch up.
I’m reading a book called The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher and it’s messing with me. He’s essentially making the argument that the society that caused St. Benedict to create a new Monastic order is very similar to the cultural space we are in now. He’s not saying we should all be monks, but rather that there comes a time when culture is so in contrast with a Christian way of life that to live fully into our religious convictions there is an element of removal that must happen. He says, “we will hardly be normal, but we should never have tried to be.”
Trever and I were talking about this book, about how we want to live our lives, about choosing now what matters and how we want to be as a family. I was saying how the most depraved part of myself wants Trever to be successful for his sake and for mine, so we can travel the world together and spend the summers in Paris and have all these cultural experiences. That’s what I really want, I want to be rich and pretty and in Paris.
But then of course life throws a few curve balls and we start figuring out what matters in life. We are forced to remember why we’re here and what give us hope. Suddenly we are becoming conscious about every choice, rather than letting our life float along to an undecided future. For the first time we’re starting at our destination and working backwards.
We never want to miss God’s blessings revealed in goodness. Things like the cardiologist now saying Colette's heart is more of a suspicion and less a diagnosis so surgery may not be necessary, or that her omphalacele is a bit smaller than previously thought, hallelujah times a million for every tiny miracle along the way. And yet we never want to forget his blessing through pain. His presence in difficult seasons is a blessing unfathomable, something that changes us and gives us a faith we are otherwise incapable of. Trever and I sat in our chaotic dark living room like we were in a bizarre therapeutic session and cried. We cried because, well partly because we’re stressed, but really because we could have missed it. We could have just summered in Paris and missed the whole point. It would have been fun, and yet I wonder if we would have eventually come to regret not actually living for something bigger.
God saved us from ourselves I suppose. What a bizarre gift, something good sprouted in us from a pile of rubble. The blessing is in the miracles and yet it’s in the pain just the same, it’s the grace of God to remind us who we are. So that's where we're at, we're remembering what's written into our DNA, we're connecting with the very breath that gives us life, we're becoming conscious again. Turns out I don't want to slip back into the mindlessness of pleasure, I really want us to stay awake.
