Long before I ever intended to write publicly, I carried on unfinished conversations with the Lord. Questions surfaced while folding laundry. Thoughts arrived while driving. Images appeared and then disappeared again as children needed rides, meals needed preparing, and some new course correction redirected the day.
Motherhood has a way of teaching you to live interruptibly.
For years, nothing was written down.
There were no manuscripts.
Only quiet ponderings and countless conversations that rarely reached their conclusion.
Occasionally, a thought would arrive with enough clarity that I would send myself a text message or open the notes app on my laptop and record a sentence or two before the moment disappeared.
I wasn’t trying to write a book.
I was simply trying not to lose the pieces.
Then grief arrived.
In the final weeks of our beloved dog Polli’s life, I found myself awake with her in the middle of the night, helping her outside and watching frailty slowly enter movements that had once seemed impossibly agile. Polli had always moved more like a cat than a dog, springing effortlessly from one place to another.
Toward the end, I found myself asking softly,
“May I carry you in, Polli?”
And instead of bounding back to the house, she would wait to be gathered into my arms.
Looking back, I realize the invitation to write had already begun.
Then came the night I lay beside her on the cold tile bathroom floor, my hand resting on her curled body.
The weight of grief felt almost physical. It seemed to hang in my chest with enough substance to alter my posture. If someone could have measured me in that moment, I think I would have stood several inches shorter beneath the weight of loving something I was preparing to lose.
And somewhere in that quiet, I sensed the Lord’s invitation.
Nothing audible.
No grand announcement.
Only the strange knowing that the love, attention, discipline, and devotion I had poured into Polli would not disappear.
They would be gathered into something new.
Yet even then, I didn’t realize that what I was returning to had begun much earlier.
Whenever John John sat down, I climbed into his lap.
I never asked.
I never wondered if I was interrupting him.
If he sat in his swivel chair watching a Lakers game with microwave popcorn in his lap, I nestled beside him.
If he came in from the garage in his pressed jeans and modest cap, I nestled beside him.
If he sat down to rest, I was with him.
Even in his nineties, I still climbed beside him.
One of the last times I did, he groaned a little as I settled in.
“I’m sorry, John John,” I told him. “I just want to be close to you.”
And though he was a man of few words, he never made me feel that I needed permission.
There was always room.
Years later, I began to understand that perhaps the ease with which I climbed into the Father’s presence had not begun with theology.
Perhaps it began with an old World War II veteran who whistled while he worked and always made room.
I consciously gave my life to Jesus when I was eighteen.
But I have come to believe there was an exchange between us long before that.
I don’t know when.
I only know that even when all hell broke loose, something in me remained oriented toward Him.
As a child, after being abruptly taken from the family I knew and plunged into a world of chaos and instability, I would sit alone on the floor, rock myself, and ask Father God what I had done wrong.
Looking back now, I marvel at the question that never occurred to me then.
Why was I talking to Him at all?
Who taught me that?
I honestly don’t know.
I only know that He has always seemed strangely familiar.
And these days I find myself captivated by Him.
His creativity.
His humor.
His kindness.
His extravagance.
He’s so fun.
He’s so radical that He exceeds the capacity of human words.
And perhaps that’s why children squeal.
Why old men whistle while they work.
Why artists paint.
Why lovers laugh.
Why bakers make pies.
Why poets write.
We’re all trying, in our own ways, to articulate something that exceeds vocabulary.
For years I thought I was searching for identity.
Or belonging.
Or healing.
Now I think the ache beneath the ache was simpler than that.
I think I just wanted Him.
And perhaps this has been the return all along.
Not a return to myself.
Not even a return to who I once was.
A returning to the One who had already made room.
Tags: Remembrance • Identity • Truth • Returning • Jesus