We step carefully over the puddle and turn toward each other, shielding our faces from the bite of the wind.

“I can’t tell if my feelings and decisions are a reaction of fear,” she tells me.

A reaction to the phone calls we’ve had in months past, conversations that shatter the surface of people we thought we knew so well.

People we once loved become people we can hardly bear to meet for a coffee.

And I always thought I knew how to handle it. I thought I had figured it out when I was still an age where my biggest concern was convincing my parents to let me stay up past bedtime.

The worst-case scenario system.

If you work through the worst thing that could happen, you will never be disappointed. 

If the word ‘no’ kept me from late nights, I could read under the safety of my covers.

If my boyfriend broke up with me, I could throw myself into writing.

If I didn’t get a job…

If he died before I was 25…

“Does anything faze you?” She asks. And I realize my system has worked.

But she asks me how I got through the last big disappointment and I don’t know what to tell her. Because it’s a flawed system. It’s a child’s way of coping.

“Time,” I say, surprised by my own answer.

And before that?

Time.

Because time has a way of putting distance between heartache.

And if you ride the train of time long enough, it has a way of bringing you into a break in the clouds.

And a break in the clouds has a way of showing the goodness of God.

Because it’s always present–just not visible until you’ve left the fog of disappointment.

If you work back through the worst-case events of the past, you can see that God is good.

And if you haven’t yet, you will.

I text him back: Yes. I’ll take a new risk, even though it might end with disappointment.

Not because I have a disaster plan.

But because I have a track record of the goodness of God.

And it’s a 100% positive guarantee.

“Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war arise against me, yet I will be confident…I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living!” Psalm 27:3;13