Here’s a small confession : I’m writing something, and it will be published in paper and ink.

Here’s a bigger confession : I’m writing about faith, and all the forms it has taken in my life. The fullness of joy, the hollowing lack, the cries in the darkness and the tears in its light, the worrying gray somewhere in between.

I confess this now because it’s happening and I’m terrified and I want to prepare you, my faithful readers who have believed in me when I can’t quite believe in myself.

I have to put words to this.

In some measure, I have already been doing this. I have talked about faith in myriad ways here on this blog, in this nearly three years when my journey has taken the wild roller coaster ride through grief and goodbyes and grace. Most of the time, I try not to spell it out too overtly because I respect your space in my space and I want to make room for you. This blog is not a roadmap for me and my journey; it is a wandering pathway that I hope to walk with you.

More to the direct, specific point : language, especially when it relates to world views and religion, is weighty. The last thing I want is to be heavy-handed. When we talk about faith, we are talking about deeply personal and often deeply painful things. The more room we give ourselves in our words, the more common ground we will find.

Sometimes, this desire leads me into timidity, and I don’t have the courage to say plainly what it is I think and feel. Sometimes, it leads me into truth, where your story and my story meet, no matter how different we are.

And now, I’ve been given this opportunity to be really specific, really honest about this.

And I am wrestling.

I want you to know that I am wrestling with some of the hardest questions of my life. I wrote about 3,000 words of an 8,000 word assignment, and instead of finishing the piece, the rest of my thoughts came tumbling out in questions and tears and God, I am so freaking angry right now. I don’t understand. I have no more words for this. I don’t even know what I believe.

The piece will find its ending, and I think today I understand that this doesn’t necessarily mean that I will find my answers.

Yesterday, that thought worried me, that maybe I was being lazy or anti-intellectual or too timid to confront my bad theology.

Today, this thought gives me relief. Today this thought tells me that this – this rambling post about faith and writing – is what writing out my faith looks like, because it is hope in things unseen. Because I don’t have the answers, but I’m going to take the step forward anyway.

The words don’t exist on my page yet, but my faith and my story are real. They are coming into existence. It is all possible, even when I can barely utter the words – book, faith, grace, God.

I have only to be faithful to it.

My car wouldn’t start this week. In the subzero temperatures blowing through our Windy City, my car battery decided it had lost the will to live. First time it happened, I was secretly happy to be stranded. Second time it happened, it meant missing my therapy appointment and spending money I didn’t have on car repairs. The engine clacked emptily, as I wrenched the key into start.

Nothing.

I pressed my head against the steering wheel, hands white-knuckling it, and cried bitterly, like a petulant child.

—

I’m home now, in Michigan. I made the long, quiet drive between snow banks and trees after dark, slipping quietly into the house after midnight and between the sheets of the spare bed.

The thing is, I’m no mechanic. I stick my head under the hood of the car and stare blankly at all the foreign parts, a complicated mess that all seems broken and beyond repair.

My brother and father are the motorheads. They’ve taught me over the years to handle some things for myself – how to determine when I need an oil change, how to jump my car, how to put air in my tires, how to read the service engine codes, how to stand my ground against the sleezy sales guy at Autozone. But when the fixing needs doing, I go to them.

I woke up this morning and my brother had already replaced my battery.

—

I got a text from a friend yesterday. We don’t see each other often or even know one another that well, but she’s the kind of person that constantly casts light from her corner of the world, her corner of the internet in which, there, we keep tabs on each other.

The conversation was short, but piece by piece, she helped me break down some hurt and confusion I was struggling with. It’s clear where her gifts lie, and where her particular wisdom fuzes understanding for those outside of her education and experience. Her words were a spark by which I better understand my own gifts.

And this now, I know :

My hands don’t belong in the belly of an engine or in the muck of every messy paradigm, but resting on the keys of storytelling, where the tension we live meets the truth of grace, healing the cold mechanics of the human heart.

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“He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.” – Ephesians 4:15-16

I bought him a Hohner Harmonica in G for his birthday with a harp-holder so that he could play it as he strums his guitar, just like Neil Young. He was thrilled with the gift, and I know this because the thing has barely left his lips since he got it. A few days ago I found him standing over the sink doing dishes and practicing “Heart of Gold” at the same time.

It dawns on me, even as I sneak off to the bathroom to escape the shrill tones of a song I can’t recognize, how lucky I am to be married to someone who is so unabashedly passionate about his art.

I am so often self-conscious about my work, afraid of revealing any underdeveloped idea, that I forget that the best way to really learn something is to play it till you know it in your bones, and take joy in the practice of creating.

The new year began in two ways : one with the ball drop and celebration and champagne, and the other in the box of belongings and memory of a morning one year ago when her breath slipped away and life as I knew it was over.

The symbolism isn’t lost on me – this beginning and ending so close together, this cycle of saying goodbye and starting anew. Life and death and life.

—

On my morning commute I called my grandmother, just like I have each weekday morning since last January. We talked about all the everyday things – the chicken casserole she had made for dinner the night before, an update on how my aunt is feeling since her surgery in July, news from far flung family, a funny memory or two, and then, mom. We don’t talk about it every day, but it’s always there. When we do say it out loud, it’s a gift. Time slows down for me in that moment – I know it took a lot for her to say it, this precious, painful, oft unspoken piece of her life story.

She is the mother of my mother, I am the daughter of her daughter. She is a mother to me and I am a daughter to her in a strange, tight, eternal bond that both of us cling to with ineffable gratitude.

Just before we hung up and went about our days she said something, and I can’t forget it.

“It’s like… we’ve come full circle to another year, and we’ve survived all these firsts and we’re tired. But the circle doesn’t end, it starts over again. I just can’t believe it. It’s hard… but it’s good, you know.”

—

I got a tattoo on the anniversary of mom’s death, the words of our favorite hymn scrawled like a bracelet around my arm, a circle of sorts. A reminder as I run my finger along the cracked skin of this scar as it heals :

Great is Thy Faithfulness. I am changed. Great is Thy Faithfulness.

—

I have to tell my story this year, in more ways than one, and with more words than the sum of all those I have poured out before. Some of my words will land in ink and paper, some in different corners of the internet, some on the cutting room floor.

Today, all of it feels fragmented and unfinished. I hesitate to plunge back into the memories again, to the death and the hurt and the pain. And I hesitate in this beginning of a new – another – year. I hesitate to watch the calendar and the seasons turn, toward every anniversary of the whole experience.

Maybe it’s because I worry sometimes that this is the only story I have to tell – sadness and loss. Grief. Is that all there is for me?

But I see in the circle that every end is its own beginning, and that’s His faithfulness in this story.

I can plunge into the depths, knowing that life will come from it. From telling my story comes life for someone else’s story. Grace abounds. The cup overflows. I find blessing in that. Great is Thy Faithfulness.

It is a surprise to me, even now, that I can say that of grief and mean it.